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

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.

“He’s mad at you, anyway,” his sister had told him, always pragmatic, when she had enlisted Brand to make this journey to their childhood home. “There’s no sense his being mad at both of us, is there?”

Marcie had told Brand there had been an incident. A fire in the kitchen. An unattended frying pan.

His sister had some legitimate concerns and questions about whether their dad, seventy-four on his next birthday, who had never cooked for himself or looked after a house, should be starting now.

Brand, what if he’s losing it? Then what?

That’s what Brand was here to find out.

To do the job nobody else had the stomach for. Didn’t that have a familiar ring to it? His whole adult life had been spent stepping up to the plates that wiser men stepped away from.

Finding the key, he went in. Without turning on lights, Brand went up the stairs and into a room with a steeply sloped roof that had once been his.

An open box inside the door was crammed full of Brand’s football trophies and school photos—his grad picture was on the top—the one that had once been on the mantel.

He kicked off his shoes, flopped down, coughing slightly at the cloud of dust that rose out of the unused bedding. He closed his eyes. The whole house had a scorched smell to it that made him miserably aware of his mission.

He opened his eyes again, contemplated the flicker of light on the ceiling and realized the fire was still burning in the yard. He tried to reclaim the lightness he had felt earlier by thinking of his encounter with Sophie.

A thought blasted through his brain, unwelcome and uninvited.

Had Sweet Pea been crying?

He got it suddenly. Ah. She wasn’t marrying the night. She’d just tried to distract him from the real story with her legendary cleverness. She was in his father’s backyard at midnight burning wedding pictures in a wedding dress because somebody had broken her heart.

And it was only a sign of how tired he was, how the world he’d left behind was colliding with the one he’d made for himself, that instead of feeling sad for her, he felt oddly glad.

He didn’t want Sweet Pea marrying anyone without his approval. It was as if eight years of separation didn’t exist at all, and he was stepping back into the role he’d always assumed around her.

Big brother. Protector.

Only now, he thought, thinking of her huge eyes and the swell of her naked breast beneath the film of that sheer dress, he didn’t exactly feel like a big brother. In fact, he could probably add himself to whomever or whatever he was protecting her from.

Chapter Three

“I THINK I’ll call the police,” his father said, eyeing him from the bedroom door. “Break and enter is still against the law.”

Brand turned over, winced at the light pouring into the room, eyed his father and then the clock. From his sister’s reports he had expected his father to look older, frazzled, his white hair sticking up à la Albert Einstein.

Dr. Sheridan, in fact, had already combed his rather luxurious steel-gray hair, and looked quite dapper in dark pants, a crisp white shirt, a suit vest that matched the pants.

“It’s not break and enter if you have a key,” Brand said mildly. “Hi, Dad.” It was nearly noon. Brand had slept for close to twelve hours.

“Humph. I guess you’re the expert on all things criminal. If I called the cops, you’d probably flash your badge at them, wouldn’t you? You’d probably have me arrested. Shipped off to an old folks’ home. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Whoo boy. Everything was going to be a fight—if he let it. Brand wasn’t going to let it. There was absolutely no point telling his father he wasn’t a cop, and he didn’t have a badge. He was an operative. But he wasn’t a doctor, and that’s all his father really cared about.

“How are you, Dad?”

“That fire could have happened to anyone,” his father said, defensively. “Your sister sent you here, didn’t she?”

Brand felt relieved that his dad was obviously mentally agile enough to figure that out.

“Any chance of getting a cup of coffee?”

“Get your own damn coffee,” his father snorted, “I’m having coffee next door.”

“At Sophie’s?” Brand asked, intrigued.

But his father didn’t answer, gave him a dark look that let him know he was not included in coffee plans, and slammed the bedroom door.

That went well, Brand thought. On the bright side, Dr. Sheridan hadn’t ordered Brand to get out of his house and never come back. Maybe there was something here they could salvage.

Unless his sister was right. If his dad was losing it, not capable of living on his own anymore, and if Brand was the one who had gathered the evidence, there would be nothing left to salvage.

“How did I get myself into this?”

He’d known he’d have to come home sooner or later, and, as it happened, he needed a place to be safe. God, if Sugar Maple Grove didn’t qualify in spades. As if to confirm that, a church bell pealed in the distance.

Brand got up, stretched mightily, aware of how deeply rested he felt.

In four years deep undercover, assuming an identity, moving in a glitzy world of wealth and crime, a man lost something of himself. And he never quite slept. One eye open, part of him ever alert, part of him hating the life he lived, making people he would betray like him and trust him.

Well, not him. The role he played—Brian Lancaster—though who he was and who he pretended to be had begun to fuse together in ways he had not expected.

Now, having slept well, Brand felt more himself than he had felt for a long time. Or was it because he had seen the reflection of himself as he used to be, in Sophie’s huge hazel eyes?

A funny irony that the place he couldn’t wait to get away from might have something to give him back now, all these years later.

“Who could have predicted I would become a man who would treasure a good night’s sleep more than most men would treasure gold?” he muttered ruefully to himself.

Brand showered and dressed, then moved downstairs, guiltily aware he was looking for evidence his father might be slipping.

Everything seemed to be in need of repairs, but Dr. Sheridan had never been gifted at things like that, faintly flabbergasted when Brand had shown an early knack with something so primitive as a hammer.

Brand’s sister, Marcie, had said, vaguely: if there’s something wrong, you’ll know. Mittens in the fridge, that kind of thing.

“No mittens in the fridge,” Brand said, opening the fridge door and peering inside. “No food, either.” Did he report that to Marcie?

He went out the front door to his car—a little sports number he’d purchased before his Brian Lancaster assignment. Now, it seemed too much like a car Lancaster would have chosen, and he was aware of wanting to get rid of it.

Brand needed coffee. Did everyone still go for coffee at Maynard’s, morning coffee house, afternoon soda fountain and evening ice-cream parlor?

Brand was aware of a reluctance to see everyone, the chasms that separated his life from the life in this small town probably too deep to cross.

He never made it to the car.

“Young man. You! Come!”

An old woman, dapper in a red hat, was waving at him from Sophie’s porch. He saw his dad and Sophie out there, too, and remembered Sunday brunch on the porch was always something of a pre-church tradition in Sugar Maple Grove.

He could smell the coffee from here and it smelled rich and good and added to that sense of coming home to small-town America.

He hesitated only for a moment, was drawn by curiosity to see Sophie in the light of day, and went through the gap in the hedge that separated the front lawns. The path between the houses was worn.

He registered, peripherally, a man trained to notice everything, that there was a lot of going back and forth between these two houses.

When his dad wasn’t around, he would have to thank Sophie for looking in on him.

Sophie’s porch was out of the American dream: deep shadows, dark wicker furniture with bright-yellow striped cushions, a gray painted wood floor, purple-and-white petunias spilling color and scent out of window boxes.

And she was part of the same dream. Despite the fact his father and the old woman were there, Brand could see only Sophie. Somehow, in the years between them, she had gone from being a delightful little nerd to the all-American girl.

“Good morning, Sweet Pea,” he said, taking the empty seat beside her.

“Don’t call me that.” Then, with ill grace, remembering her manners, “Brandon, this is my grandmother, Hilde Holtzheim.”

“The pleasure is mine, but my granddaughter, she is not a sweet pee in the morning,” the old woman said in heavily accented English, “More like a sour poop.”

He could tell from the accent that Sophie’s grandmother was German, and he almost greeted her in that language, one of three he spoke fluently thanks to countless hours in language school getting ready for overseas undercover assignments.

But before he could speak, Sophie did.

“Grandma! He doesn’t mean that kind of pee! He’s talking about a flower.” Sophie was blushing. Brand could already feel that heavy place in him lightening.

“Oh.” Sophie’s grandmother’s eyes widened. “He compares you with flowers?” she asked in German. “That’s romantic!”

Maybe, he decided, it would be way more fun not to let on he spoke German. His father, colossally indifferent to any career choice outside of medicine, did not know his only son spoke any language other than English.

His decision paid off immediately when Hilde turned to Sophie and said in rapid German, “Ach. Gorgeous. You and him. Beautiful babies.”

Sophie shot him a glance, and Brand kept his expression carefully bland, congratulated himself because it was obviously going to be so entertaining not to let on he spoke German.

“What did she say?” he asked Sophie innocently.

Today, Sophie wore a white T-shirt and shorts. Her hair, that amazing shade of mink browns and coppers mixed, was thick and sleep-rumpled. It was half caught up, half falling out of a rubber band. She didn’t have a lick of makeup on.

She looked all of sixteen, but he knew she hadn’t looked like this at sixteen because he had been the recipient of a picture taken at her sixteenth birthday party and she’d still been awkward then, duckling, pre-swan.

Now, it occurred to Brand that Sophie was going to be one of those women who came more and more into herself as she got older, but who would somehow look young and fresh when she was fifty.

“She said you don’t look like the kind of man who would be interested in flowers.” She shot Hilde a warning look.

“What kind of man do I look like?” he asked Hilde.

He was aware of liking sitting beside Sophie. She smelled of soap, nothing else, and he was surprised by how much he had missed something as simple and as real as a girl sitting on her front porch with no makeup and no perfume and her hair not styled.

She tried to hide her naked legs under the tablecloth, but before they disappeared, he noticed her toenails were painted candy-floss pink.

And he was struck again with a sense of having missed such innocence. In the world of Brian Lancaster, there had been no modesty. The types of women who were attracted to the wealth and power of the types of men he had been dedicated to putting in jail all aspired to be swimsuit models or actresses.

They were tanned, fit, artificially enhanced and wore lots of makeup and very little clothing. He did not think he had seen a natural hair color in four years. They had also been slickly superficial, materialistic and manipulative. For four years he had been surrounded by the new and international version of the old-fashioned mafia moll. His colleagues envied him the lifestyle he pretended at, but he had felt something souring in his own soul.

Brand had not even allowed himself to think of this world back here, of women who didn’t care about flashy rings, designer clothes, parties, lifestyles so decadent it would have put the Romans to shame.

It occurred to him that he might have died of loneliness if he had allowed his thoughts to drift to someone like Sophie as he immersed himself deeper and deeper into a superficial world where people were willing to do anything—absolutely anything—to insure their place in it.

“You look like a man,” Hilde said, starting in English and switching to German, “who would have a kiss that could change lead into gold.”

“She says you look like a man with a good appetite,” Sophie said, without missing a beat. “She wants you to eat something.”

The table was loaded with croissants and muffins and homemade jams, fresh fruit, frosty glasses of juice—the simple meal seemed so good and so real after the world he had come from.

His stomach rumbled as the old lady in the red hat glared at her granddaughter, smiled approvingly at him, poured him a juice and then coffee.

“Eat,” she insisted, and then in German, “A man like you needs his strength.”

Sophie’s German was halting. “Stop,” she warned her grandmother, “be good.”

“I’m supposed to be the old lady, not you,” Hilde muttered, unrepentant. In German. “Look at his lips.”

He was aware that Sophie looked, then looked away.

“Enough to make any woman,” Hilde searched for the word in German, blurted out in English, “swine.”

“Swoon,” Sophie corrected her automatically, and then turned beet-red. “She says to tell you the raspberry jam is to swoon for. She means to die for.”

The old woman was staring at his lips. “Yes, to die for.”

He laughed. “That’s mighty good jam.”

Brand was aware his father had his arms folded stubbornly over his chest, not finding the hilarity all that hilarious. Brand dutifully looked at his father for any signs of malnourishment, given the condition of his fridge, but the elder Sheridan actually looked fleshier than Brand could ever remember in the past.

He turned his attention back to Sophie, who was still blushing. In the light of day, he was aware again how pretty she had become in a wholesome way, and how watching a girl like her blush was an underrated pleasure.

After the life he had lived undercover—in-filtrating a gang of exceedingly wealthy and sophisticated weapons smugglers and currency counterfeiters—there was something about her wholesomeness—her ability to blush—that appealed to him, shocked him by making him yearn for a road not taken.

It occurred to him that maybe people should listen to the adage “you can’t go home again” and not even try.

Because he could never be this innocent again. But maybe he could just enjoy this moment for what it was: simple, enjoyable, companionable.

He was aware, again, that that was the first time in years he had felt relaxed in a social situation.

Safe, he thought in a way only someone who lived with constant danger could appreciate. Once, he had hated how this place never changed.

Now, he thought, maybe a month here wouldn’t be so bad after all.

He could see Hilde eyeing him with unremitting interest, despite Sophie elbowing her in the ribs and warning her in soft German to quit staring.

“Your father tells me you’re a secret agent,” Hilde said, pushing Sophie’s elbow away.

“No,” he said firmly, though it surprised him his father had said anything about him, since he was persona non grata. “I belong to a military branch that was developed as an antiterrorism squad. I’m just a soldier.”

“Very exciting,” Hilde declared.

“Not really. Ninety-nine percent pure tedium, one percent all hell breaking loose.”

“But you were under the covers?”

He saw Sophie, who was just beginning to recover from her last blush, turning a lovely shade of pink all over again beside him. In the world he had just come from, women didn’t blush. And they said things a whole lot more suggestive than you were under the covers. Sophie’s blush was so refreshing.

“I was. It’s not as exciting as it sounds, believe me.” The grandmother didn’t look like she believed him, so he headed her off at the pass. “Sophie, I didn’t have a chance to catch up with you last night. It’s been what? Eight years? What do you do now?”

“Last night?” his father sputtered.

Brand could tell by Sophie’s sudden slathering of marmalade on a croissant that what she had been doing last night was private to her. That instinct to protect her rose to the surface instantly.

“We ran into each other briefly when I arrived.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye, saw her catch a breath of relief that the details of her secret ceremony by the fire were safe with him.

Still, if he remembered correctly, Sophie didn’t even like marmalade.

“Oh,” his father said, his tone crotchety.

Her grandmother looked disappointed, Sophie looked relieved. She took a bite of her croissant, and her eyes nearly crossed. She glared at the marmalade.

“I’ll take that one,” he said smoothly and passed her his own croissant and the jar of raspberry jam. “As I recall, your grandmother says this is the one to swine for.”

He smiled at her to let her know he’d noticed she was rattled. And he raised an eyebrow evilly that asked if it was him that was rattling her.