There was something shy in that, his old Sophie, not the girl she had tried to convince him she was when she had kissed him. This Sophie’s laughter was so genuine it made him ache.
Brand glanced at his watch, amazed at how much time had gone by. Somehow the genuineness in her, coupled with the genuineness of the emotion in Sinclair’s letters made him feel bad about playing with Sophie’s world.
He didn’t want to have lunch with her and look at her lips and be the kind of guy who plotted another taste of them.
“You know what?” he said. “You were probably right. Let’s follow your schedule. I’ll see you tomorrow night after supper. We’ll ride our bikes down Main Street, go for ice cream. It will be a highly visible activity that the whole town can see.”
She stared at him. Disappointed? Annoyed?
That was good, he tried to tell himself. If they were going to carry off this courtship thing with no one getting hurt, it would be for the best if she found him disappointing and annoying.
“I’ll take these with me,” he said, gathering up the letters. “And get them back to you when I’m finished going through them.”
Why did he feel that he had to protect her from the letters? They were just sweet letters a young, heartsick man had written home.
For some reason, Brand wanted to make sure they had a happy ending.
As though he needed to protect her if they didn’t.
He had a feeling this desire to protect Sophie was going to do nothing but get him in trouble. Especially since it was now evident this was a more complicated mission than he had first perceived.
He had to protect her from himself and his reaction to her hunger.
“See you tomorrow,” he said breezily. “Are you still a purely vanilla girl?”
“You think I’m really boring,” she said.
Her lips had already told him there was a secret side to her that was anything but boring, but he was determined he wasn’t going there.
He thought of the world he had lived in for four years, where God forbid anybody should ever be bored, and so they had become adept at manufacturing all the excitement money could buy. And become so addicted to it, they were prepared to do anything to keep a lifestyle they had not legitimately earned, were not legitimately entitled to.
He thought of the letters in his hand, letters from a young man who was probably beginning to yearn for all those things he had once called boring.
“Don’t,” he told Sophie sternly, moving by her, the letters in his hand, “say boring as if it’s a bad thing.”
SOPHIE could not resist going to the window and watching Brand get on an old bicycle and peddle away. It was a woman’s bike, and ancient. Probably it had belonged to his mother.
And yet, the way he rode it, he could have been a knight and the bike a war horse. With his colossal confidence he could probably stride down Main Street in a pair of canvas pirate’s pants, and nothing else without flinching.
Not that she wanted to be thinking about him like that! Why would he flinch? She had seen his considerable assets, seen him without his shirt, the perfection of skin stretched taut over hard muscle marred only by recent thorn scratches. He knew what he had, the devil, and probably knew exactly the effect it had on women!
The man was maddening! He’d tempted her to kiss him! He had made her feel driven to show him that just because she was a small-town girl, naive and heartbroken, his big strong self was not going to march into her world and take control of everything!
Ha! She was going to show him. That kiss had just been a start!
Though when she thought of that it occurred to her she wasn’t quite ready to mess with a force that had the potential for so much power.
Even thinking about that, her hand moved to her lips, to the puffiness where his lips had touched her lips—collided really—and she felt a shiver, of longing, of awareness, of aliveness.
No, she had better stick to surprising him with small things.
“Vanilla ice cream, indeed. Tiger passion fruit,” she told herself. “Or banana fudge chunk.”
That’s it, girl, she added silently, live dan-gerously.
But she already knew that once you had played with the danger of lips like his, the chances of erasing the thrill of that memory were probably slight to nil.
Sophie willed herself to be only annoyed with Brand for messing with her plans, for tilting her tidy world so off-kilter, for making her want so badly to be seen in ways she had never been seen before.
And probably never will be, she thought with a resigned sigh.
He was a force to be reckoned with, fast and furious, like a hurricane sweeping through. Only a fool thought they could play with a hurricane, or tame it or force it onto a path other than the one it had chosen.
But the scent of the sweet peas filled her office, a poignancy in the fragrance that made it hard to be annoyed, and harder still to build her defenses against his particular kind of storm. It reminded her everything was more complicated than that.
He wasn’t just a hurricane.
Sometimes, like when he’d leaned across that counter this morning and played with her fingertips, he was so much what she had remembered him being a devil-may-care boy, full of himself and mischief, his charm abundant, his confidence reckless.
But when she had walked into that conference room and he had looked up at her, and refused to go for the lunch he’d invited her on, it had not been that boy.
Or a hurricane, either.
It had not even been the man she had stolen a daring kiss from.
That new veil had been down in Brand’s eyes, something remote and untouchable, the fierce discipline of a warrior surrounding him like impenetrable armor.
That had never been in him before. Something hard and cold, a formidable mountain that defied being climbed. It was something lonelier than the wind howling down an empty mountain valley on a stormy winter day.
She shivered thinking about it, and thinking about the kind of bravery it would take to tackle what she had seen in his eyes, to ignore the No Trespassing signs, to try and rescue him from a place he had been and could not leave.
Sophie, she scoffed at herself, you don’t know that.
But the problem was that she did. And now that she knew it, how could she walk away and leave him there?
Even if that’s what he thought he wanted?
The next evening Sophie dressed carefully for their outing to the ice-cream parlor. Her war with herself was evident in her choices: her shorts rolled a touch higher up her thigh than they would normally have been, the V in her newly purchased halter top a touch lower.
Just in case that kiss had not done the trick, she was not going to be dismissed as the little sweet geek from next door! She wanted the days of Brand Sheridan feeling like her brotherly protector to be over!
And at the same time, she didn’t want him to get the idea she was trying to be sexy for him, because she thought probably every girl in the world had tried way too hard around him for way too long.
So she wore no makeup and pulled her hair back into a no-nonsense ponytail.
Her grandmother approved of the outfit, but not ice cream or bike-riding as romantic choices.