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

Laughter-filled, devil-may-care Brand Sheridan had always been too everything for sleepy Sugar Maple Grove. He’d been too restless, too driven, too adventure-seeking, too energetic, too fast, too impatient.

His father, the town doctor, had been conventional, Brand had defied convention. And his father’s vision for him.

To Dr. Sheridan’s horror, Brand had defied the white-collar traditions of his family, quit college and joined the military. He had left this town behind without so much as a glance back.

Sophie had rejoiced with his parents when he had returned safely to the United States after a tour of duty abroad.

When had that that been? Five years ago? No, a little longer, because he had been overseas when her parents had died. But, in truth, Brand had never really returned.

He had not come home, and to his mother’s horror, before they had really even finished celebrating his safe return from the clutches of danger, he had been recruited into an elitist international team of warriors known as FREES. For the most part, he lived and trained overseas or on the west coast. He worked in the thrum of constant threat, in the shadows of secrecy.

In those years away, Sophie was aware he had met his parents in California, in London, in Paris. She knew he occasionally showed up for family gatherings at his sister, Marcie’s, house in New York.

It had, over the years, become more than evident Brand Sheridan had left Sugar Maple Grove behind him, and that he was never coming back. He’d been unconvinced of the joys of small-town life that Sophie had once outlined in her national-speech-competition talk, “What Makes a Small Town Tick.”

Still, the whole town had felt the shock of it when Brand had not even returned home for his mother’s funeral. The framed picture of him staring out sternly from under the cap of a United States Marine uniform had disappeared from Dr. Sheridan’s mantel.

“Brandon,” Sophie said, suddenly flustered, aware she had studied him way too long. She used his full name to let him know she was prepared to see him as an adult and that they could leave the endearment, Sweet Pea, behind them.

“I wasn’t expecting you.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She always had a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing around him, as awkward as the Sweet Pea she was anxious to leave behind her.

Of course she wasn’t expecting him! She was in a wedding dress at midnight! If she’d been expecting him, what would she be wearing?

Well, a wedding dress would be nice, a part of her, the hopelessly romantic part of her she’d set out to kill tonight, said dreamily.

She shivered at the thought of Brand Sheridan as a groom. Glanced into the hard planes of that face and tried to imagine them softening with tenderness.

The tenderness she’d heard in his voice when he’d called her after the death of her parents. Aww, Sweet Pea…

That had been sympathy, Sophie reminded herself sternly. It was not to be mistaken for that stupid something she had tossed her life away for!

“Expecting someone else, if not me?” he asked.

He held out his hand to her, and she took it, trying to ignore another jolt of shimmering, stomach-dropping awareness as her hand met the unyielding hardness of his.

He pulled her to her feet with effortless strength, stood there regarding her.

“No, no,” she said. “Just, uh, burning some urgent rubbish.”

“Urgent rubbish,” he said, and a hint of a smile tickled across the hard line of his lips.

She was suddenly aware that she truly, at this moment, was living up to Mrs. Hamilton’s assessment of her as pathetic. A simple touch, her hand enfolded in his, not even a romantic gesture, made her feel things she had not felt through her entire engagement.

And that was before she added in the fact she had not had a decent haircut in months. Or put on a lick of makeup. Of all the people to catch her in her wedding dress, conducting ritualistic ceremonies at midnight, did it have to be him?

Did it have to be Brand Sheridan?

He let go of her hand as soon as she was steady on her feet, and turned away from her. He began to pick up the scattered wedding-dream debris, and shoved stuff back in the box, Sophie saw thankfully, without showing the least bit of interest in what that stuff was.

Sophie could have made her getaway through the hedge, but she found herself unwilling to abandon the box, and even though she knew better, unwilling to walk away. She felt as if she had not had a drink for days and he was clear water.

Days? No, longer. Months. Years.

And so she drank him in, thirstily. Part of her parched with a sense that only he could quench it, even though she despised herself for thinking that.

He was more solid than he had been before, boyish sleekness had given way to the devilishly attractive maturity of a man: broadness of shoulder, deepness of chest. And that was not all that had changed.

His dark hair was very short, his face clean-shaven. His dress was disappointingly conservative, even if the short-sleeved golf shirt did show off the breathtaking muscles of his biceps and forearms.

She felt a sharp sense of missing the boy who had walked away from here and not looked back. That boy of her memory had been a renegade. Back then, he had gone for black leather jackets and motorcycles.

To his mother’s consternation, he had favored jeans with rips in them—sometimes in places that had made Sophie’s adolescent heart beat in double time. His dark hair had been too long, and he’d always let a shadow of stubble darken the impossibly handsome planes of his face.

Now his hair was short, his face completely clean-shaven. There was the hard-edged discipline of a soldier in the way he held himself—an economy of movement that was mouth-dryingly masculine, graceful and powerful.

But, then her eyes had caught on the tiny hole in his ear.

Whoo, boy. Really too easy to imagine him as a pirate, legs braced against a tossing sea, powerful arms folded over the broadness of his chest—naked, she hoped—his head thrown back, welcoming the storms that others cringed from—

Stop, she pleaded with herself. God, she had been a reasonable person for years now! Years. She had almost married the world’s most reasonable man, hadn’t she?

And here he was, Brand Sheridan, wrecking it all. Wrecking her illusions, making her see she was not a reasonable person at all.

And probably never had been.

Chapter Two

“DO you have a pieced ear?” Sophie gasped, despite the fact she had ordered herself not to ask. More of her gift for getting it so wrong. It would have been so much better if she hadn’t noticed, or at least pretended not to have noticed!

Brand frowned, apparently not pleased that she had noticed, either. “I did,” he said, touched the lobe of that ear, let his hand fall away. But his voice invited no more questions, even while his ears invited nibbling…

Ever since she’d been voted “girl least likely to nibble earlobes” in her high-school annual, she’d thought about what it would be like to do just that. Not that she had ever let those raucous boys who had voted for her know that.

Let them think she was prim and stiffly uptight. They would have teased her even more unmercifully if they’d guessed at her secret romantic side.

She’d never had any urges to nibble Gregg’s ears. She’d been pleased that he had brought out her reasonable side. But of course, the something missing had reared its ugly head, and it probably had something to do with the forbidden temptations of earlobe-nibbling.

Especially ones that bore the mark of a piercing!

Sophie reminded herself she did not even know this man who shared the shadows with her at the moment.

He was not the same man who had called her all those years ago, on the worst night of her life, his voice alone penetrating the darkness, husky with pain. Aww Sweet Pea…she needed to remember that.

Brand Sheridan was not the same man who had left here. Really, he’d only been a boy when he left. And she’d been a girl, a carefree one, her biggest trouble trying to leave her nerdy reputation behind her. She’d been blissfully unaware of the tragedies that awaited her, both her parents killed in a terrible accident when she was eighteen.

Brand, apparently oblivious to her fascination with his earlobes, picked up another paper, stuffed it in the box, scanned the yard and then turned back to her.

Now, she could see it was the look in his eyes, not his earlobes, that was the most changed. Sapphire-dark, the firelight winked off that impossible shade of blue, deep and mysterious as the ocean.

Back then, she remembered, there was an ever-present sparkle of mischief in them, laughter never far away, a devil-may-care grin always tickling around the edges of that too-sexy mouth.

Now his eyes were wary. And weary. A shield was up in them that Sophie somehow doubted he ever let down.

And his mouth had a stern line etched around it, as if he no longer smiled, as if the mischievous boy who had caught the neighbor’s snotty Siamese cat and tied a baby bonnet on it before releasing it was banished from him somehow. In the place of that boy was a warrior, ready for things that were foreign to the citizens of this tiny town.

She wanted to touch the firm line of that mouth, as if she would be able to feel the smile that had once been there. She wanted to say, Brand, what’s happened to you?

Thankfully, sensible Sophie took charge before she made a complete fool of herself.

“Thank you, Brandon,” she said, and wrested the box from him. Realizing she sounded stiffly formal, she added, “I’ll remember you in my will.”

Stop it, she pleaded with her inner geek. Please just stop!

But the tiniest of smiles teased the hard line around his mouth, and she found herself surprised and pleased that he remembered the line she always thanked him with when he had come to her defense.

“That’s a line from my past,” he said wryly.

“I did have a gift for getting into scrapes,” she admitted reluctantly.

“I remember. What was the name of that kid who chased you home after the game at Harrison Park?”

“I don’t remember,” she said stiffly, though of course she remembered perfectly.

“Ned?”

“Nelbert,” she offered reluctantly, even though it was an admission she might remember after all.

“Why was he chasing you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Just a sec. I do!”

Please, no.

“You told him he was more stupid than a dog who chased skunks,” Brand recalled, “Right?”

“I thought because I’d learned to say it in Japanese I could get away with it. As it turned out, tone was everything.”

And just when she had thought she was dead, because she had made it all the way home and no one had been there, Nelbert practically breathing down her neck, Brand had stepped out of the shadows off his porch. He had folded his arms across his chest, planted his legs and smiled, only it hadn’t really been a smile.

He hadn’t done anything else, nor had to. Nelbert had stopped dead, and skulked off, not even daring to glare at her. Nelbert had never tried to even the score again, either.

“Japanese,” Brand said, and gave a rueful little shake of his head. “You were always a character.”

A character. Thanks. I’m hoping for my own comic-book series.

“So, what are you doing in my dad’s yard in your—” He studied her intently for a minute. “—is that a nightgown?”

“Oh, you know, just doing what comes naturally. Being a character.”

See? Just when she thought she had nothing to be grateful for, Sophie had been saved from getting married in front of the whole town in a dress that people would say looked like a nightgown, her gift for getting things exactly wrong not as far in her past as she might have hoped.

She continued brightly, “I was just doing a little burning. Some rubbish.” She began to edge her way toward the hole in the hedge. Men like Brand Sheridan were like drugs. He could make her forget what she’d come out here to do—say good-bye to romantic notions.

Not to start believing in them all over again. A man like him could make a woman like her—determined to face the world, strong, realistic, in-dependent—capitulate to a weaker side. A side that leaned toward the fantastic—pirates, earlobe nibbling, or the worst fantasy of all: forever.

“You’re burning rubbish at—” He glanced at his watch, frowned. “—midnight?” He frowned and shot a glance at the house. “Does my dad know you’re out here?”

“He’s away.” She edged closer to the hedge. “Didn’t he know you were coming?”

Dr. Sheridan was busy wooing Sophie’s grandmother, who had come from Germany after Sophie’s parents had died, reading between the lines of Sophie’s proclamations she was just fine, knowing, as only a grandmother knew, that she wasn’t fine, trying to fix it with schnitzel and kaese spechle.

Magic foods that had helped, if not healed. Helped not just her, but Dr. Sheridan after Mrs. Sheridan had died so suddenly.

This weekend her grandmother and Brand’s father were taking in Shakespeare at the Park in Waterville, the next town over. They were staying the night.

Sophie had not enquired about whether their accommodations were single or double. She didn’t want to know, and they were always so sweetly discreet. But it certainly didn’t feel like her place to update Brand on his father’s love life.

“I thought I’d surprise him,” Brand said.

There was something in the way he said that, with a certain flat grimness in his tone, that made her think Brand probably knew his picture had been taken off the family mantel.

She should remember that when his scent was acting like a drug on her resolutions. He was a man who couldn’t even come home for his own mother’s funeral. His father had not said couldn’t, but wouldn’t.

“Your dad will be home tomorrow.” She remembered the lateness of the hour. “Or is that today? I guess it is today, now. Sunday. Yes.”

He’d always had this effect on her. Smart, articulate woman manages to make a fool out of herself every time she opens her mouth.

I’m not fifteen, her inner voice shouted. Out loud, she said pleasantly, “And I’m sure he will be surprised. Well, good—”

The wind picked that moment to sail a wayward wedding picture cartwheeling across the ground in front of him. He stooped, snagged it, straightened and studied it.

Handed it to her silently.

It was a picture of the inside of a stone chapel, with a bride kneeling at the altar alone, her dress spilling down stone stairs.

A bride alone. At the time the picture had seemed blissfully romantic, with a serenity to it, a sacredness. In light of her new circumstances, the bride looked abandoned. She should have been more careful about the pictures she cut out.

Sophie crumpled it and threw it in the box.

“Rubbish,” she reiterated proudly.

He studied her for a long, stripping moment. It occurred to her he might be able to tell she’d been crying. She hoped not!

“That’s not a nightgown, is it, Sweet Pea?” His voice was suddenly soft, impossibly gentle for a man with such hard lines in his face and such a cynical light in his eyes.

Just like that, he was the man who had called her the night her parents had been killed, getting her through the hours that followed, awww, Sweet Pea.

She steeled herself against his pirate charm.

“No,” she said and tilted her chin proudly, “It’s not a nightgown.”

“Are you going to up and get married?” he asked, and his tone had that familiar teasing note in it, a note that did not match the new lines in his face.

Had Brand and his father become that estranged? That Dr. Sheridan didn’t even share the town news with him? The gossip, everyone knowing everyone else’s business, who was having babies and who was getting married—and who was splitting up—was part of what made a small town tick!

Still, there was something refreshing, freeing, about being with the only person in her world who didn’t know her history. Who wasn’t sending her sideways looks, loaded with sympathy now that Gregg had chosen another.

“I’m marrying the mystery of the night,” she told him solemnly. “It’s an ancient ceremony that dates back to the worship of goddesses.”

He contemplated her for a moment, and she had that feeling again. Why did she always feel driven to say foolish things around him?

But then he rewarded her with a smile that, ever so briefly, chased the dark shadow from his eyes.

“Sweet Pea, you were always an original.”

“Yes, I know, an original character.”

“Do you know how rare that is in the world?” The sadness in his eyes had returned.

She didn’t. She wanted to invite him to the fire so he could tell her what a good thing it was. Wanted to chase the shadows from his eyes and make him laugh. And feel his touch again.

He was a weakness in a life she was determined to make about strength and independence. If she really practiced ancient ceremonies, which she didn’t, Brand Sheridan’s sudden arrival would surely be interpreted as a test of her commitment.

“Good night,” she said firmly, and pushed her way, finally, through the gap in the prickly hedge. She felt sick when the dress caught, somewhere high up the back of her rib cage, the snagging sound loud against the quiet of the night.

She froze, then pulled tentatively, but she was caught, and even though she reminded herself she didn’t need this dress anymore, she couldn’t bring herself to risk wrecking it by yanking free.

Now what? Set down the box to free up her hands so she could untangle the dress? Even bending to set down the box was probably going to damage the dress further.

She cast a look over her shoulder, hoping Brand had departed at her firm good-night. But, oh no, he stood there, arms folded over the solidness of his chest, watching her, amusement playing with the stern cast of his features.

Around him, everything always went wrong. Would a dignified departure have been too much to ask for?

Sophie backed up a half step hoping that would release the twig caught in her dress. Instead she heard a brand-new snagging sound at her waist.

How was it she had managed to get through the hedge the first time without incident?

Now she was afraid to move at all in case she tangled the dress further in the twigs. She could throw down the box, but what if its contents scattered again?

It seemed like an hour had passed as she contemplated her options. A gentleman would have figured out she needed help.

But Brand, black sheep of his family, was no gentleman. That was evident when she slid him another look.

He was enjoying her situation. His shoulders were actually shaking with mirth, though he was trying to keep his expression inscrutable.

“Could you give me a hand?” she snapped.

She would have been better off, she realized, too late, to rip the dress or throw down the box. Because she had invited him in way too close.

He shoved through the hedge, oblivious to the prickles and the fact the gap was way too small to accommodate him. He stood at her shoulder, pressed close. For the second time, the scent of him, warmly, seductively masculine, filled her nostrils. Now, she could also feel the warmth of his breath tickling the nape of her neck, touching the delicate lobe of her ear.

She was instantly covered in goose bumps.

Naturally, he noticed!

“Are you cold, Sophie?” he asked, his voice a rough whisper that intensified the goose bumps.

“Frozen,” she managed to mumble, “it’s chilly at this time of night.”

That declaration gave her an excuse to shiver when his hand touched her arm, heated, Brand branding her.

He laughed softly, not fooled, all too certain of his charm around women. And she was absurdly, jealously aware this was not the first time he had handled the intricacies of women’s clothing.

He might have been touching a wounded, frightened bird, his fingers on her tangled gown were so exquisitely gentle.

Experienced, she told herself. Brand Sheridan had been out of her league before he had made a career of being an adventurer. Now, every exotic world he had visited was in his touch.

“There,” he said.

She gritted her teeth. “I think I’m caught in one more place. Left side. Waist.”

His breath moved away from her ear, she felt his hand trace the line of her waist in the darkness.

With a quick flick of his wrist that came both too soon and not nearly soon enough, she felt him free her. She dashed away without saying thank you and without looking back.

But his chuckle followed her. “By the way, Sweet Pea, you can’t marry the night. You promised you were going to wait for me.”

Yes, she had. In one of those rash moments of late-night letter writing shortly after he’d left, full of the drama and angst and emotion a girl feels at fifteen and really never again, Sophie had promised she would love him forever. And had she done that? Thrown away the bird in hand for a complete fantasy she had sold herself when she was a young teen?

“Brand Sheridan,” she called back, grateful for the distance and the darkness that protected her from his all-seeing gaze, “don’t you embarrass me by reminding me of my fifteen-year-old self!”

“I loved your fifteen-year-old self.”

A test. A black, star-filled night, a fire roaring in the background, her in a wedding dress, and Brand Sheridan loving her, even if it was who she used to be. Not that she should kid herself he’d had an inkling who she was, then or now. Or that what he so casually called love should in any way be mistaken for the real thing.

“You did not,” Sophie told him sternly. “You found me aggravating. And annoying. Exceedingly.”

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.