He's the One

“You never thought I was annoying,” he said with the silky and aggravating confidence of a man who, unfortunately, women did not find annoying. Ever.

“Remember the time you said you were going to the library and I gave you my books to return and you didn’t?”

“I wasn’t really going to the library,” he said.

“Whatever. Annoying. Six dollars in fines.”

“Your only brush with the law?”

She ignored him. “And how about the time you showed up at my door with a kitten two minutes before I was supposed to be leaving for band camp?”

“You loved that kitten,” he said, with a grin.

She had. The gift had melted her.

“That’s not the point. The point is that I was late for band camp, and so I didn’t get the instrument I wanted, and I had to play the tuba for a whole week and it was your fault.”

“Band camp is for nerds.”

“My point exactly,” she said, triumphantly. “You are annoying! Supremely! You will have to try and keep that in check as we conduct our—” She couldn’t bring herself to say romance. “—arrangement.”

“Do you still play the tuba?” he asked sweetly. “Didn’t you send me a recording? When I was in basic?”

Sophie could feel her face getting very hot. “I didn’t!”

“Uh-huh. A tuba solo. A love song.”

“It wasn’t a tuba,” she said petulantly. “Clarinet. My instrument of choice.”

He raised a wicked, wicked eyebrow at her.

How could he do this? Instrument was not a dirty word!

“Never mind,” Sophie said. “I just realized how rash it was to agree to this. I’m not sure I’m desperate enough to have you for my beau, even temporarily.”

“Aw, shucks,” he said. “Just when I was starting to think it might be fun. Like porcu-pine-wrestling in my birthday suit.”

He had inserted that reference deliberately to see if he could make her blush again.

And damn him, he could.

“Are you backing out?” she demanded.

“No, I think you are.”

“I’m not!”

“Ha,” Dr. Sheridan muttered, “I’d be interested to see if the all-important Brand Sheridan, secret agent, would do anything as selfless as help an old neighbor so she could hold her head up high again. Trust me, Sophie, it’s not in my son’s nature to do the decent thing.”

Sophie felt shocked at the doctor’s bitter tone, and she saw Brand flinch as if he’d been struck.

She had found the bantering back and forth between her and Brand edgy, but playful, dan-gerously invigorating.

Now the tension that leapt in the air between him and his father was painful and tangible.

But again, the young man who would have risen to the bait, defended himself or argued, was not part of who Brand was now. Instead he replied, disciplined patience in his voice, “I’m just a soldier. I do what I’m told, when I’m told. I was on an undercover assignment. I was told I wouldn’t be granted leave. Period.”

“Whatever,” his father said.

“If I could have been here, I would have.”

“Whatever,” his father said again.

“And if Sophie agrees, we’ll do this thing.”

She felt the flutter of her heart. It wasn’t a good idea. To play a charade for the whole town was a stupid, impulsive idea that fell solidly into the category of really dumb things that she always did around him.

But could she walk away from giving Brand a perfect opportunity to redeem himself a tiny bit in his father’s eyes while he was here?

It would help her, it would help him.

Even now, he and his father were eyeing each other balefully.

And she felt compelled to insert herself between them, to ease the tension.

“I’ll do it,” she announced decisively.

“Oh, goody,” her grandmother said.

“Oh, brother,” his father said.

“Oh,” Brand said, then, “great.” Spoken with the macho bravado of a man who had been chosen from many to diffuse a bomb.

“Let’s talk romance,” Sophie suggested brightly. “I’ll come up with a plan. A few highly visible activities: ice cream at Maynard’s, maybe a bike ride or two, an appearance at Blue Rock and then—ta-da—you and I at the engagement party.”

Brand watched her talk, ruefully aware she was trying to ease the tension between him and his father. She’d been like that as a kid, too. Always wanting everything to look like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Sugar Maple Grove lent itself to that.

But now Sophie was not a kid. Not if those lips had spoken the truth about her, and he was pretty sure they had.

He was also ruefully aware that, despite her engagement and the promise of those lips, Sophie still seemed to be a sweet geek in the romance department. A plan? What kind of romance had a plan?

A fake one, he reminded himself sternly.

Brand was struck by a tingling awareness along the back of his neck. It was his sharply honed instinct. It always warned him when danger was near.

He had done many, many dangerous things.

But he doubted any of them were going to hold a candle to pretending to be Miss Sophie Holtzheim’s beau.

Why had he agreed to this?

Partly because he couldn’t resist protecting Sophie. It seemed that’s what he had been born to do, protect.

It was going to be a long, hot month in Sugar Maple Grove, and a man couldn’t be faulted for finding a way to entertain himself.

His father, with one last look at him, not friendly, shoved back his chair. “I’m going to be late for church.”

“Oh, that time already?” Hilde said in English, and in German, “We’ll leave you two alone, Sophie. Do something romantic, for God’s sake.”

In a flurry of activity his dad and Hilde left and it was suddenly so quiet he could hear birds singing and bees buzzing.

He waited to see if Sophie would do something romantic. Sophie, predictably, did nothing of the sort.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend who’s going to object to this?” she asked. It sounded like an effort—albeit a weak one—to find a way out.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said. “This job busts people up. It’s too hard on the ones left behind. I was undercover for four years. Can you imagine what that would do to a woman?”

“The right one would be okay with it,” she said with an edge of stubbornness. “It’s not just what you do. It’s who you are.”

“Well, who I am can’t just drop everything for the birthday or wedding anniversary. You get in too deep to be pulled out. Sometimes you have to pretend to have a wife or a girlfriend. Another agent plays the role. How does the woman waiting at home handle that?”

“Badly,” she guessed.

“Exactly.”

“I guess that overcomes the girlfriend thing.”

“I guess it does.”

“If we do this right,” she said, “maybe your father won’t be quite so antagonistic toward you.”

On the other hand, Brand thought, if he did more damage than good, he would confirm his father’s worst thoughts about him.

“I don’t understand why he’s not proud of you,” Sophie said.

He didn’t like it that she cut so quickly to his own feelings. Why was it a man never quite got over that longing to be something good in the eyes of his father? To make his family proud?

“There was only one way to make my father proud of me,” he said, “and I didn’t do it. I didn’t go to medical school and become a doctor willing to take over the Sugar Maple Grove General Practice one day.”

“I still remember how shocked your parents were when you quit college and joined the military.”

“My dad can trace eight generations of Sheridans. The men are doctors, professors, writers. And then along came me. I couldn’t fit the mold he made for me.”

“But the marines?”

“A recruiter at college found me on a climbing wall and asked if I’d ever considered making a living doing something like that. He made the whole thing sound irresistibly exciting.”

“And has it been?”

Brand was aware it was so easy to talk to Sophie. “It’s been pretty much what I told your grandmother. Ninety-nine percent tedium, one percent all hell breaking loose.”

Sophie smiled. “And you live for that one percent. Adrenaline junkie.”

“You know, that’s the part my mom and dad never understood. The military is a good place for an adrenaline junkie. I’ve always been attracted to adventure. I’ve always needed the adrenaline rush. Left to my own devices, especially in my younger years, that could have gotten me in a lot of trouble. I needed to balance my love of height and speed with discipline and skill.

“But my dad can’t forgive me my career choice. We were a long way down the road of not seeing eye to eye even before I missed my mom’s funeral.”

“Was there really no way for you to come home, Brand? None?”

He shook his head. “You have to understand how deeply I was in and how long it took me to get there. Word of my mom’s death reached me via a quick and risky meeting with my handler—that’s your contact with the real world. The less you see anybody from that world, the better.

“At that point in the operation, I had to assume everything was suspect, everything was listened to, everything was watched. One wrong step, one wrong breath could have gotten people killed, could have blown nearly four years of work.

“What I said to my dad was true. I’m basically a soldier. I take orders. Even if it had been my call, which it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have jeopardized the team. Couldn’t.

“And I’ll tell you what else I couldn’t have done—risked someone following me back here, knowing anything about this place or the people in it, retribution for what I was about to do raining down on the innocent.”

Her eyes were wide. “Did you ever tell that to your father?”

“He doesn’t listen long enough.” Brand was surprised by just how much he’d told Sophie. He usually didn’t talk about work. He usually carried his burdens alone.

“Are you in danger now?” she asked, always intuitive.

But he’d said enough, there was no sense scaring her. He sidestepped the question. “My identity will be protected, even in the coming court cases. I’ll be kept pretty low-profile for a long time.”

His father didn’t know about that kind of world, and neither did Sophie Holtzheim. If he told them all the details, if they fully understood the danger, they might feel the kind of helpless fear that tore apart the ones who stayed at home.

Better his father be angry than that.

And her? He could never subject someone as sweet and sensitive as Sophie to what he did for a living. Was this brief tangling of their lives—him entertaining himself at her expense—going to hurt her?

It was going to be just like being undercover. Get the job done, no emotional attachment, keep mental distance. Pretend.

He looked at Sophie, so adorable in her earnestness. Pretense around someone so transparent, so genuine, seemed wrong. Still, it bugged him that she wasn’t able to hold her head high, so he listened without comment as she outlined her plans for a romance.

Ice cream. A bike ride or two. Blue Rock.

Again, he was struck by the innocence of it all. He felt a flicker of trepidation about his ability to play the role she was outlining. But he didn’t let on.

“Sure,” he agreed to all her plans when she finally stopped and looked at him with wide-eyed expectation. He took a big bite of his mar-malade-covered croissant. “That should be fun.”

He remembered, too late, he too hated marmalade.

But just for practice at concealing how he really felt, he chewed thoughtfully and proclaimed it delicious.

Sophie was looking at him as if she didn’t believe him. What if she proved to be the person who could see right through all the masks he’d become so adept at wearing?

For some reason that thought was scarier than the four years he had just spent in a den full of rattlesnakes.

Because it threatened him as he had never once allowed himself to be threatened.

It went to the core he’d kept hidden.

What if Sophie Holtzheim could see his heart?

No worries, he tried to tell himself. He thought of the work he’d done. Four years building friendships. Building trust. He’d worked with those people, partied with them, attended the baptisms of their children and the marriages of the their daughters.

His work had culminated in twenty-three arrests in four different countries. Bad guys, yes, but also people he had come to know on a different level: sons, husbands, fathers.

His own father probably knew the truth about him after all—Brand Sheridan’s heart was as black as the ace of spades.

Early the next morning, Brand was working in his father’s backyard, trying to clear the shambles his mother’s rosebeds had become.

Nobody had to know that this is how he would honor her. Bring back something she had loved that now looked sorry and neglected. Who knew? Maybe with enough work it could be ready for next year’s garden tour.

He was just blotting an angry, bleeding welt from a thorn when he got that hair-rising-on-the-back-of-his-neck feeling.

He turned slightly. The red hat was highly visible through the hedge. He smiled to himself. He was being watched.

“You must come see,” Hilde called in German. “He’s taken off his shirt.”

He had taken off his shirt, even though the morning was cool, because the thorns were ripping it to tatters.

“Grandma!”

But out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sophie could not resist the temptation and had joined her grandmother at the hedge

He flexed a muscle for them, tried not to smile at the grandma’s gasp of appreciation, pretended he had no idea they were there.

“He’s bleeding,” Hilde whispered, still in German. “You should bring him a Band-Aid.”

“Stop it,” Sophie said.

“Go over there,” her grandma hissed.

“No.”

“Ach. You have no idea how to conduct a romance.”

“I do so. I was nearly married.”

“Ha. Being flattered that someone pays attention to you is not the same as being romanced.”

Brand knew it. Sophie hadn’t been in love. She hadn’t even been infatuated. She’d been flattered.

He picked up his shirt, wiped the sweat off with it, wandered over to the hedge, peered through it as if he was surprised to see them there.

“Hey, ladies, nice morning.”

“Oh, Brand,” Sophie said, and squeezed through the little gap in the hedge where she had made her escape the other night.

Or, from the annoyed glance back at the bobbing red hat, maybe she’d been pushed through it.

She was dressed for work. She looked as if she worked at a library, but he thought it was probably safe to assume the Historical Society would provide the same dusty-tomes atmosphere.

Her remarkable auburn hair had been pinned up, she was wearing a white shirt with a fine navy pinstripe, a stern, straight-line navy blue skirt and flat shoes.

She had her glasses on, making her reminiscent of the national-speech-contest girl she had once been.

Only now there was a twist.

Sophie was all grown up, and he was stunned to discover he harbored a librarian fantasy. It made his mouth go dry thinking of slipping those glasses off her face, pulling the pins from her hair, flicking open the top button of that primly fastened-to-the-throat blouse.

She intensified his commitment to the fantasy when she stared at him as if she was a sheltered little librarian, who had never seen a half-naked man before. She gulped, looked wildly back at the little hole in the hedge.

She brought out the sinner in him, because he was wickedly delighted in her discomfort. He folded his arms over his chest.

“You’re bleeding,” her grandmother coached, through the hedge, in German.

“You’re, uh, very tanned,” Sophie blurted out uncomfortably.

“I lived on a yacht in Spain.”

“That was your undercover job?”

“Yes.”

So many things she could have said: Was it glamorous? What’s Spain like? Why a yacht? What was it like to live there? Were you pretending to be rich and famous? What did you do every day? Who were you trying to catch?

But she asked none of those.

She said, her eyes suddenly quiet on his face, “Were you afraid?”

Until this very moment, he hadn’t thought so. But now, standing here in the quiet of the garden with her, the birds singing riotously in the trees, the odd bee buzzing by, he felt the complete absence of fear. And he felt a different kind of tension from the kind he had learned to live with, day in and day out, for four long years.

A delightful tension. A man aware of a woman. A woman aware of a man.

“I guess I was afraid,” he admitted slowly. He wondered if he had ever said those words to another human being. It felt as though a vital piece of his armor fell away from him.

Not It must have been exciting. “It must have been unbelievably difficult.”

He scrambled for the piece of fallen armor, grinned at her, flexed a muscle and was satisfied when her little tongue flicked out and gave the corner of her lip a nervous lick.

“Nah,” he said, “just a job.”

But despite the distraction, her eyes on his face were still quiet, knowing.

He hated that. “What happened to your engagement?” he asked, moving her away from the topic of him.

He hoped she wasn’t going to tell him something that would make him have to hunt down her ex and have a little talk with him.

Sophie looked wildly uncomfortable.

“I should know,” he encouraged her. “As your new beau, I should know why the last guy was dumb enough to ditch you.”

“He didn’t ditch me,” she squeaked. “I told him I needed some time to think. While I was thinking, he was hunting. For my replacement.”

Something in Brand whispered softly and entirely against his will, as if you could replace a girl like her! “What did you need to think about?”

Her eyes fastened on his naked bicep, he flexed it for her. She licked her lips.

“I don’t know, exactly. Something was missing.”

“Well, then you’re a smart girl for calling it off.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Really.” Even he was surprised by how much he meant that. “You know, your parents were good, good people. They really loved each other, Sophie. Maybe you felt desperate to have what you had lost.”

She looked stunned. He was a little shocked himself. Where had that observation come from?

“Ah, well,” she said, looking away, finally, “I’m just on my way to work, but I thought I should let you know I’ve formalized the plan.”

She looked faintly relieved that there were actually neat papers in her hand, an escape from the intensity of the moment and the understanding that had just passed between them.

“I was just going to drop them in the mailbox, but since you’re here—

Deliciously flustered, she thrust several sheets of neatly folded paper at him and ducked back through the hedge.

“You didn’t say he was bleeding,” her grandmother scolded in German. “A little first aid!”

“It wasn’t life-threatening,” Sophie said. “I’m late for work.”

“I fear you are hopeless,” her grandmother muttered.

He unfolded the sheets Sophie had handed him and sighed. He feared her grandmother might be right.

Under the boldface heading, Courtship Itinerary, Sophie had typed a neat schedule for their romance. It was obviously an effort to keep their arrangement all business, which a part of him applauded, though a different part became fiendishly more committed to shaking her safe librarian/historian world.

Tuesday: 7:00 p.m., bike to Maynard’s, ice cream.

Friday: 7:30 p.m., movie at the old Tivoli.

Sunday: 3:00 p.m., swim at Blue Rock, weather permitting.

For a man who had taken weekend trips to Monte Carlo to gamble, attended yacht parties on unbelievably outfitted luxury craft, who had been wined and dined in some of the most famous restaurants in the world, her plan should have been laughable. This is what she had come up with for excitement?

This was the courtship of Miss Sophie?

But oddly, Brand didn’t feel like laughing. He felt as if he was choking on something. The choices not made, a sweet way of life left behind.

He shuffled papers. The second sheet, also neatly typed and double-spaced, had the boldface title, Courtship Guidelines. As he scanned it, he realized it really meant Sophie’s rules, starting with no public demonstrations of affection and ending with the request that he not call her Sweet Pea.

“Oh, lady,” he said, crumpling up the rules, needing to regain his equilibrium, “you have so much to learn.”

Or maybe he did. Maybe he was being given a chance to experience a choice not made a long time ago. Maybe it would be kind of fun to pretend to have the life he had walked away from.

Whistling, aware he felt inordinately happy despite the fact he was dancing with danger of a new kind—ah, well, danger had always held an irresistible pull for him—Brand worked a bit longer in the roses and then took the rose clippers to where the sweet peas were running riot along his father’s back fence.

Though his mother had loved roses, Brand had always considered the sweet pea the loveliest flower she grew, in all its abundant and delicate pastel shades, the fragrance coming off those cheery blossoms like a little piece of heaven.

An overlooked flower, he thought, scorned by the serious gardeners who babied their roses and clipped their rhododendron bushes and pulled their dahlias in the fall.

Just like Sophie Holtzheim.

An overlooked flower.

When he’d clipped more sweet peas than he could hold in his arms, he went and filled the kitchen sink with water and dropped them in.

“What are you doing with my flowers?” his father asked grumpily, glancing up from his paper. His father apparently hadn’t noticed there was nothing for breakfast in the house.

“I’m going to start a rumor,” Brand said pleasantly. “And then I’m going to get some groceries. You want to come?”

“To start the rumor?” his father said hopefully.

“No, for the groceries. How come you don’t have any food?”

“Why? You writing a report for your sister?”

“She’s worried about you, Dad. You don’t have to see her as the enemy. That fire rattled her.”

“Rattled her! What do you think it did to me? Oh well, I didn’t like cooking here anyway. Or eating here,” Dr. Sheridan said, proud, reluctant. “It makes me miss your mother.”

“I miss her, too, Dad. I come in this kitchen and think of strawberry lemonade and cookies warm from the oven, the chocolate chips dripping.”

Something in his father’s face softened, and, briefly, it almost felt that they might have a moment, share some fond memories. But his father rattled the paper and dove behind it.

Brand headed for the shower.

Later he went out to the bike shed, and found his mother’s bike, complete with the basket which he filled with sweet peas until it overflowed. Then he rode right down Main Street, enjoying the pretense of being a small-town guy who had never, for the good of his country, done things that ate at his soul.

The thing that astonished him was how easy it was to slip from who he knew himself to be—a hardened warrior, heart of ice—into this role of a young man going to woo his girl.

Had he gotten that adept at playing roles?

At least this one had no grim, dark overtones. It just felt fun. It would be entertaining, fill up some of his time here, to play this game with Sophie. To break her rules, too.

Maybe, if nothing else, before he left here, he could teach Sophie to be spontaneous, though he doubted if he had enough time to tackle that particular challenge.

He parked the bicycle in front of the old two-story redbrick Edwardian building that housed the Historical Society, gathered the sweet peas in his arms, took the steps two at a time and stopped in front of the stern-faced woman at the reception desk in the outer office.