“Fine,” she said, tightly. “We never turn down volunteer help. I understand you’ve been home in Sugar Maple Grove for nearly forty-eight hours. It’s inevitable that the boredom is setting in. Let me set you up in the conference room.”
She did. There. Now he could find out what boredom really was!
“Just keep out anything that pertains to the Second World War,” she instructed him sweetly. “Bitsy can sort through the rest later.”
And she closed the door firmly on him.
Brand found himself in the conference room, alone, the door shut on him. She’d done that deliberately, kissed him in retribution for his messing with her schedule, just to let him know what was going to happen if he messed with her—that she could be wild and unpredictable, too.
She couldn’t really. She was as transparent as a sheet of glass. His sweet little next-door neighbor trying to be something she was not, trying to erase her image as a bookworm, wallflower, librarian.
She’d be surprised by how much Brand liked that about her. Sophie, with all her awkwardness and intellect, was different in a world where so much was same old, same old—cookie-cutter women who looked the same and talked the same and were the same.
Didn’t Sophie know what a treat it was to unearth an original? He smiled. A long time ago, before she was even old enough to know anything about anything, she’d shown disdain for his taste in women.
Still, for all that he knew she was trying to prove something to him that she couldn’t, that kiss had been startling.
There had been something disturbingly wild and unpredictable in her lips meeting his for the second time.
What had he tasted?
Hunger.
More evidence that agreeing to romance Sophie had been about his worst idea ever.
Still, no wonder she’d fallen for the first guy to pay some attention to her. She wasn’t just lonely for the family she had lost.
Nope, she was hungry, there was a fire in that girl only one thing was going to put out.
And it wasn’t the fire that was roaring to life inside him just thinking about it. He hadn’t come here planning to burn up with her. No, he’d wanted her to loosen up a little, throw out her rigidly uptight rule book, encourage her to be herself, to have a little unexpected fun.
The girl was like a tightly coiled spring of tension. Even her kiss had said that.
Ah, well, he’d sort through her dusty box for her, then take her out for lunch, coax that funny, lively original side of her to the surface.
With absolutely no kissing. He could be the better man. He could resist the temptation of Sophie…for her own good, of course.
He’d put out the fire he was feeling by giving his attention to the kind of stuff she did. If she’d been wrong that he was bored in Sugar Maple Grove—and she had been—the truth was that nobody was more surprised than him. He’d been here nearly two whole days and wasn’t climbing the walls yet?
But the box she’d given him to sort through promised to change that!
Much as Brand appreciated that she had not been lured by the temptations of a glitzy world, he couldn’t help but think, no wonder Sophie was so ready for a little excitement.
The box of so-called memorabilia contained things someone thought were important to the history of Sugar Maple Grove.
He forced himself to focus. He began to scan scraps of paper and old photos.
There were newspaper cuttings of the high-school basketball team making the state finals in 1972, faded color photos of the work team from Holy Trinity Church that had built an orphanage in Honduras in the eighties. There was a whitish-gray plaster mold of a hand that said Happy Mother’s Day on the front, and on the back, in pen, Terry Wilson. Died Vietnam, 1969.
Brand had been dealing with subtle and not so subtle forms of evil for four years. For some reason, it felt as though this box immersed him in good, in the plain living of people with small-town values and humble ambitions.
To leave the world better.
No wonder Sophie had ended up here, at the Historical Society, documenting what made a small town tick.
There were several random items, including recipes and an old garter, possibly from a wedding.
And then, in the very bottom of the box, he found a packet of letters, tied up with a frayed black velvet ribbon.
Was this the gem of Second World War memorabilia he was supposed to be hunting for? Brand untied the ribbon, and plucked the first fragile letter out of the bundle. The envelope was addressed in a careful masculine hand to Miss Sarah Sorlington, General Delivery, Sugar Maple Grove. The return address was Private Sinclair Horsenell, a censor’s heavy black pen blotting out the rest. But the postmark was February of 1942.
Pay dirt, he thought. Was this how Sophie got her thrills? It was kind of thrilling.
He carefully unfolded the letter from the young private. The paper was fragile along the fold marks, and the ink had begun to fade in places. Still, Brand was able to discern that Sinclair Horsenell had just disembarked in Ireland, part of the U.S. Army V Corps, the first Americans to deploy overseas.
“My dearest Sarah,” he read, “what an extraordinary adventure I find myself on!”
The letter was beautifully descriptive of the lushness of Ireland, describing sights and sounds, camaraderie, funny incidents around the camp.
Despite all the new things I am seeing, and the grave sense of purpose I feel, the rightness of my being here, I miss you so deeply. I think of that last afternoon we spent and the picnic you prepared, the blue of your eyes matching the blue of the sky, and I feel both that I want to be with you, and that I want to be part of protecting the simple pleasures we were able to enjoy that afternoon. My darling, I am prepared to give my life for the protection of all that we hold dear.
I know you wanted to marry before I left, but that is not what I wanted for you. You deserve so much more than a rushed ceremony. I live to see you in a white dress, floating down the aisle toward me, a bouquet of forget-me-nots to match your eyes.
Wait for me, sweet Sarah. Wait.
Yours forever,
Sinclair
The letters had been carefully saved in their chronological order and Brand soon saw that Sinclair wrote faithfully, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes long letters. As the time passed, Brand noticed the excitement waning, giving way to the tedium of military life. Now the letters held occasional complaints about the lack of action, the officers, the terrible food.
The letter made Brand think, sadly, that things didn’t change. Young men went away to war, and left sweethearts behind them.
“Did you find something?”
Things didn’t change, but people did.
Sophie stood in the doorway, watching him, and he put away the letter he was reading.
Why did he feel reluctant to let her know what he had found? Because those letters were making him feel something. Uneasy.
“Just some old letters. They might have value. I haven’t finished reading them yet. Bitsy is probably better qualified than me to decide what has historical value, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess these two items don’t.”
He handed her the recipe for Corn Flakes casserole and the garter.
She laughed, and it was a good sound. Not a girlish giggle, but genuine. He was unaware how he had longed for genuine things until he heard