LITMIR.BIZ

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      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!

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