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

His laughter nearly called her back to the other side of the hedge, but no, she was making her escape. She was not going to be charmed by him.

Time to get over it! Maybe it was a good thing Brand Sheridan had finally come home.

Maybe a person had to close the door on the past completely before they could have a hope for the future.

Maybe that’s why things had not worked out between her and Gregg.

Ignoring the rich invitation of his laughter, and her desire to see if it could possibly erase whatever haunted his eyes, Sophie scuttled across her own backyard, and through the door of her house, letting it slam behind her.

Brand was aware, as he walked through the darkness back to the front of his father’s home, that he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.

It took him a moment to identify it.

And then he realized that his heart felt light. Sophie Holtzheim, Sweet Pea, was as funny as ever. The fact that it was largely unintentional only made it funnier.

“The goddess in the garden burning urgent rubbish and marrying the night,” he muttered to himself, with a rueful shake of his head.

Still, there was a part that wasn’t funny, Brand thought, searching over the casing of the front door for his father’s hidden house key. Sweet Pea now looked like the goddess she had alluded to.

He wasn’t even quite sure how he’d known it was her, she was so changed. He remembered a freckled face, a shock of reddish hair, always messy, constantly sunburnt and scraped. He remembered glasses, knobby elbows and knees, her hand coming up to cover a wide mouth glittering with silvery braces.

He remembered earnestness, a worried brow, a depth that sometimes took him by surprise and made him feel like the uneasy, superficial boy that he had been.

And no doubt still was.

He also remembered, with a rueful smile, she had been correct. He’d found her intensely irritating.

From the lofty heights of a five-year age difference he had protected his funny little neighbor from bullies, rescued her from scrapes and tolerated, just barely, her crush on him.

For his first year in the military, her letters, the envelopes distinctive in her girlish hand and different colored inks, had followed him. At first just casual, tidbits of town news, a bit of gossip, updates on people they both knew, but eventually she’d been emboldened by the distance, admitting love, promising to wait, pleading for pictures.

He’d felt the kindest thing—and happily also the most convenient—had been to ignore her completely.

He’d been in touch with her only once, in the eight years since he had left here, a call when her parents had been killed in that terrible accident at the train crossing on Miller Street. She’d only been eighteen and he remembered wishing he could be there for her, poor kid.

Sophie had been part of the fabric of his life, someone he had taken for granted, but been fiercely protective of at the same time. He’d always had a thing about protecting Sophie Holtzheim.

He’d been overseas, at a base with one bank of telephones, when his mother had e-mailed him the news within minutes of it happening. He’d waited in line for hours to use one of those phones, needing to say something to Sophie. And instead of wise and comforting words coming out of his mouth, he’d held the phone and heard himself say, across the thousands of miles that separated them, aww, Sweet Pea.

How much he cared about his aggravating, funny nuisance of a neighbor had taken him by surprise, because if asked he probably would have claimed he was indifferent to her. That was certainly how he had acted the majority of the time. But on the phone that night, his heart felt as if it was breaking in two as he helplessly listened to her sob on the other end of the line. Brand felt as if he’d failed her by being a million miles away, instead of there.

Maybe it was always her eyes that had made him feel so attached to his young neighbor, despite the manly pretense of complete indifference.

Her eyes had a worried look that often creased her brow; they were hazel and huge. Even behind those glasses, they had been gorgeous way before the rest of her was. There had been something in them that was faintly unsettling and certainly older than she was: calm, as if she looked at a person and knew secrets about them they had not yet told themselves.

Seeing her tonight, touching her, he realized Sophie had grown into the promise of those eyes. And then some.

Her hair had lost the red and deepened to a shade of auburn that the firelight had licked at the edges of, making a man itch to touch it to see if it was fire or silk or a seductive combination of both.

He was not sure where freckles went when they went away, but there was no hint she had ever been a freckle-face. Her complexion now was creamy and perfect. Not that he had thought about it, but if he had, he would not have envisioned a grown-up Sweet Pea being quite so lovely.

Seeing her as a woman had been slightly unsettling. She had filled out that gown pretty nicely. If he hadn’t realized just in time that it was Sweet Pea, he might have let his eyes drift to where the fabric clung to breasts that had been unfettered with anything as sinful as a bra.

But he was still the guy who had stood between her and her tormentors, and there had been as many who tormented her about her success with “What Makes a Small Town Tick” as there had been those who were happy for her.

She’d never known when to back down, either. That girl had a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

He’d even vetted her rare suitors, doing his best to scare them off, and given her unsolicited advice.

Sweet Pea, all men are swine.

Including you?

Especially me.

Brand had been the older brother she didn’t have but badly needed.

Sweet Pea still lived next door. Didn’t anything in Sugar Maple Grove ever change?

Yes, it did. Because she was not the same Sweet Pea he remembered. And he was not the same guy she thought she knew, either. He didn’t feel like her older brother anymore.

He had not set foot in this town for eight years. Family occasions had long since moved to his sister’s in New York, and his parents had visited him in California.

Brand suddenly remembered his mother’s childlike enjoyment of Disneyland, how she would get off the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and then get right back in line to go again.

Mom.

The light heartedness left him, and another feeling hit. Hard. On this porch where his mother had rocked and waited for him to come home, hours after the curfews he had always chaffed against, careless of her feelings.

He was aware he had managed to outrun his grief and his sense of failure toward his family until the exact moment he drove back into town, under that canopy of huge maples that lined the Main Street, past the tidy redbrick-fronted businesses, their bright awnings rolled up for the night.

The residential streets had been so quiet tonight, the sidewalks between the tree-lined boulevards and large grassy yards with their whitewashed picket fences completely empty.

He could sense people sleeping peacefully under those moss-covered roofs, curtains fluttering out of open, unlocked windows.

It was postcard-pretty small-town America. The place he had sworn his life to protect, and that, ironically, when he was young, he could not wait to get away from.

Now, standing on the porch of the house he had grown up in, searching for a key he knew would still be hidden in the same place, his mother’s sweetness gathered around him.

He could practically taste her strawberry lemonade.

His father had made it clear he would never forgive him for not being at her funeral.

The words deep cover meant nothing to Dr. Sheridan, who did not consider a career chasing the world’s bad guys to be in any way honorable.

There had been no explaining to his father that years of carefully laid work could have been lost if Brand had come home. Lives could have been endangered by breaking the cover.

“I don’t want to hear your excuses,”Dr. Sheridan had said the last time Brand had called.