Someone had come into the yard. She knew it. Had come in silently, and was watching her. How long had he been there? Who was it? She could feel something hotter than the fire burning the back of her neck.
She turned her head, carefully. For a moment, she saw nothing. And then she saw the outline of a man, blacker than the night shadows.
He was standing silently just inside the gate, so still he didn’t even seem to be breathing. He was over six feet of pure physical presence, his stance both alert and calm, like a predatory cat, a cougar.
Sophie’s heart began to hammer. But not with fear. With recognition.
Even though the darkness shrouded his features, even though it had been eight years since he had stood in this yard, even though his body had matured into its full power, Sophie knew exactly who he was.
The man who had wrecked her life.
And it wasn’t the same man whose name was beside hers on a mock-up wedding invitation, either.
It was the one she had thought of when she’d made that fateful statement that she needed some time to think. That something was missing.
Oh, she hadn’t named him, not even in her own mind. But she had felt a longing for something only he, Brand Sheridan, wayward doctor’s son, wanderer of the world, had ever made her feel.
She knew it was ridiculous to toss her whole life away on something that had begun whispering to her when she was a preteen, and had become all-consuming by the time she was fifteen years old.
But there was no substitute for that feeling. It was like the swoosh in the pit of your stomach when you jumped off the cliff at Blue Rock. There was a thrilling suspended moment after the decision to go and before you hit the ice-cold pool of water, where you felt it. Intensely alive. Invigorated. As if that one glorious moment was all that mattered.
Brand had made her feel that. Always. She’d been twelve when her family had moved in next door to his, he’d been seventeen.
Just setting eyes on him had been enough to make her whole day go as topsy-turvy as her insides. Filled with a kind of wonder, and an impossible hope.
Sophie had loved the man who stood behind her in the darkness as desperately as only a young teen could love. She had loved him un-realistically, furiously, unrequitedly.
The fact that she had been only the teeniest glitch on Brand Sheridan’s radar had intensified her feelings instead of reducing them.
She felt the familiar shiver in her belly—the damn something missing—when he spoke, his voice rough around the edges, sexy as a touch.
“What the hell?”
She knew his eyes to be a shade of blue that was deeper than sapphire. But in the shadows where he stood, they looked black, sultrier than the summer night, smoky with new and unreadable mysteries.
For a moment she was absolutely paralyzed by his puzzled gaze on her. But then she came to her senses and lurched to her feet.
This was not how Brand Sheridan was going to see her after an eight-year absence! Pathetic.
Sophie scrambled toward the safety of the little hole in the hedge that she could squeeze through, and that she hoped he couldn’t—or wouldn’t. She would have made it, too, if she hadn’t remembered the damned box.
She wasn’t leaving it there for him to find, a box full of her romantic notions, as ridiculously unrealistic as a princess leaving a glass slipper for her prince to find.
The rest of the town might know she was pathetic, still think of her affectionately as their sweet geek—a romantic catastrophe now adding to her reputation—but she could keep it a secret from him.
She turned back, grabbed the box and then, disaster. She tripped over the hem of a dress she had left too long in the hope it would make her look taller and more graceful as she glided down the aisle.
Sophie crashed to the ground, face-first, and the box sailed from her hands and spilled its contents to the wind. Papers and pictures scattered.
He moved toward her before she could find her breath or her feet.
And then his hand was on her naked shoulder, and he turned her over. And she gazed up into his face and felt the sizzle of his hand on the tender flesh of her shoulder, whatever had been missing between her and Gregg bubbled up so sweetly in her it felt as if she had drunk a bottle of champagne.
He stared down at her, his brow furrowed, his expression formidable and almost frightening. This was Brand?
And then the hard lines of his face softened marginally. Puzzlement knitted the line of dark brows. “Sweet Pea?”
She drank in his face. Still a face that could stop the sun, but a new dimension to it, the lines cast in steel, his eyes colder, she thought, dazed. Something in his expression that had never been there. Haunted.
His hand moved from her shoulder, he brushed a smudge of something from her cheek.
It would be way too easy to mistake the leashed strength in those hands for all kinds of things that it wasn’t.
Just taking care of his awkward-situation-prone little neighbor, as always. Picking her up and dusting her off after yet another catastrophe. Her love for him giving her an absolute gift for clumsiness, for downright dumbness, for attracting mishap and mayhem.
She closed her eyes against the humiliation of it. The truth was, in those tender adolescent years after he had gone away and joined the military, she had imagined his return a million times. Maybe a zillion. The day he would come home and discover her. Not a gawky teenager with not a single curve, unless you counted the metallic one of the braces on her teeth.
But a woman.
She had imagined his voice going husky with surprise. Delight. Sophie, you’ve become so beautiful.
But of course, nothing ever went as she imagined it.
“Sweet Pea, is that you?”
She allowed herself just to look up at him, to drink in his scent and his presence and his mystery.
Brand Sheridan had always been crazy sexy. It wasn’t just that he was breathtakingly good-looking, because many men were breathtakingly good-looking. It wasn’t just that he was built beautifully, broad and strong, at ease with himself and his body, because many men had that quality, too.
No, there was something else, unnamable, just below the surface, primal as a drumbeat, that made something in Sophie Holtzheim go still.
If he had ever gone through an awkward teenage stage, she had been blind to it. Since the day she had moved in next door, Sophie had worshipped her five-years-older neighbor.
Laughter-filled, devil-may-care Brand Sheridan had always been too everything for sleepy Sugar Maple Grove. He’d been too restless, too driven, too adventure-seeking, too energetic, too fast, too impatient.
His father, the town doctor, had been conventional, Brand had defied convention. And his father’s vision for him.
To Dr. Sheridan’s horror, Brand had defied the white-collar traditions of his family, quit college and joined the military. He had left this town behind without so much as a glance back.
Sophie had rejoiced with his parents when he had returned safely to the United States after a tour of duty abroad.
When had that that been? Five years ago? No, a little longer, because he had been overseas when her parents had died. But, in truth, Brand had never really returned.
He had not come home, and to his mother’s horror, before they had really even finished celebrating his safe return from the clutches of danger, he had been recruited into an elitist international team of warriors known as FREES. For