He's the One: Winning a Groom in 10 Dates / Molly Cooper's Dream Date / Mr Right There All Along

The girl was like a tightly coiled spring of tension. Even her kiss had said that.

Ah, well, he’d sort through her dusty box for her, then take her out for lunch, coax that funny, lively original side of her to the surface.

With absolutely no kissing. He could be the better man. He could resist the temptation of Sophie…for her own good, of course.

He’d put out the fire he was feeling by giving his attention to the kind of stuff she did. If she’d been wrong that he was bored in Sugar Maple Grove—and she had been—the truth was that nobody was more surprised than him. He’d been here nearly two whole days and wasn’t climbing the walls yet?

But the box she’d given him to sort through promised to change that!

Much as Brand appreciated that she had not been lured by the temptations of a glitzy world, he couldn’t help but think, no wonder Sophie was so ready for a little excitement.

The box of so-called memorabilia contained things someone thought were important to the history of Sugar Maple Grove.

He forced himself to focus. He began to scan scraps of paper and old photos.

There were newspaper cuttings of the high-school basketball team making the state finals in 1972, faded color photos of the work team from Holy Trinity Church that had built an orphanage in Honduras in the eighties. There was a whitish-gray plaster mold of a hand that said Happy Mother’s Day on the front, and on the back, in pen, Terry Wilson. Died Vietnam, 1969.

Brand had been dealing with subtle and not so subtle forms of evil for four years. For some reason, it felt as though this box immersed him in good, in the plain living of people with small-town values and humble ambitions.

To leave the world better.

No wonder Sophie had ended up here, at the Historical Society, documenting what made a small town tick.

There were several random items, including recipes and an old garter, possibly from a wedding.

And then, in the very bottom of the box, he found a packet of letters, tied up with a frayed black velvet ribbon.

Was this the gem of Second World War memorabilia he was supposed to be hunting for? Brand untied the ribbon, and plucked the first fragile letter out of the bundle. The envelope was addressed in a careful masculine hand to Miss Sarah Sorlington, General Delivery, Sugar Maple Grove. The return address was Private Sinclair Horsenell, a censor’s heavy black pen blotting out the rest. But the postmark was February of 1942.

Pay dirt, he thought. Was this how Sophie got her thrills? It was kind of thrilling.

He carefully unfolded the letter from the young private. The paper was fragile along the fold marks, and the ink had begun to fade in places. Still, Brand was able to discern that Sinclair Horsenell had just disembarked in Ireland, part of the U.S. Army V Corps, the first Americans to deploy overseas.

“My dearest Sarah,” he read, “what an extraordinary adventure I find myself on!”

The letter was beautifully descriptive of the lushness of Ireland, describing sights and sounds, camaraderie, funny incidents around the camp.

Despite all the new things I am seeing, and the grave sense of purpose I feel, the rightness of my being here, I miss you so deeply. I think of that last afternoon we spent and the picnic you prepared, the blue of your eyes matching the blue of the sky, and I feel both that I want to be with you, and that I want to be part of protecting the simple pleasures we were able to enjoy that afternoon. My darling, I am prepared to give my life for the protection of all that we hold dear.

I know you wanted to marry before I left, but that is not what I wanted for you. You deserve so much more than a rushed ceremony. I live to see you in a white dress, floating down the aisle toward me, a bouquet of forget-me-nots to match your eyes.

Wait for me, sweet Sarah. Wait.

Yours forever,

Sinclair

The letters had been carefully saved in their chronological order and Brand soon saw that Sinclair wrote faithfully, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes long letters. As the time passed, Brand noticed the excitement waning, giving way to the tedium of military life. Now the letters held occasional complaints about the lack of action, the officers, the terrible food.

The letter made Brand think, sadly, that things didn’t change. Young men went away to war, and left sweethearts behind them.

“Did you find something?”

Things didn’t change, but people did.

Sophie stood in the doorway, watching him, and he put away the letter he was reading.

Why did he feel reluctant to let her know what he had found? Because those letters were making him feel something. Uneasy.

“Just some old letters. They might have value. I haven’t finished reading them yet. Bitsy is probably better qualified than me to decide what has historical value, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess these two items don’t.”

He handed her the recipe for Corn Flakes casserole and the garter.

She laughed, and it was a good sound. Not a girlish giggle, but genuine. He was unaware how he had longed for genuine things until he heard it. It pulled him toward her like a beacon guiding a fisherman lost in a fog.

“Are you ready for lunch?” she asked.

There was something shy in that, his old Sophie, not the girl she had tried to convince him she was when she had kissed him. This Sophie’s laughter was so genuine it made him ache.

Brand glanced at his watch, amazed at how much time had gone by. Somehow the genuineness in her, coupled with the genuineness of the emotion in Sinclair’s letters made him feel bad about playing with Sophie’s world.

He didn’t want to have lunch with her and look at her lips and be the kind of guy who plotted another taste of them.

“You know what?” he said. “You were probably right. Let’s follow your schedule. I’ll see you tomorrow night after supper. We’ll ride our bikes down Main Street, go for ice cream. It will be a highly visible activity that the whole town can see.”

She stared at him. Disappointed? Annoyed?

That was good, he tried to tell himself. If they were going to carry off this courtship thing with no one getting hurt, it would be for the best if she found him disappointing and annoying.

“I’ll take these with me,” he said, gathering up the letters. “And get them back to you when I’m finished going through them.”

Why did he feel that he had to protect her from the letters? They were just sweet letters a young, heartsick man had written home.

For some reason, Brand wanted to make sure they had a happy ending.

As though he needed to protect her if they didn’t.

He had a feeling this desire to protect Sophie was going to do nothing but get him in trouble. Especially since it was now evident this was a more complicated mission than he had first perceived.

He had to protect her from himself and his reaction to her hunger.

“See you tomorrow,” he said breezily. “Are you still a purely vanilla girl?”

“You think I’m really boring,” she said.

Her lips had already told him there was a secret side to her that was anything but boring, but he was determined he wasn’t going there.

He thought of the world he had lived in for four years, where God forbid anybody should ever be bored, and so they had become adept at manufacturing all the excitement money could buy. And become so addicted to it, they were prepared to do anything to keep a lifestyle they had not legitimately earned, were not legitimately entitled to.