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.
But when she took a little nibble of the new croissant, ignoring the jam, and a crumb stuck