He's the One. Jackie Braun

in the shadows of secrecy.

      In those years away, Sophie was aware he had met his parents in California, in London, in Paris. She knew he occasionally showed up for family gatherings at his sister, Marcie’s, house in New York.

      It had, over the years, become more than evident Brand Sheridan had left Sugar Maple Grove behind him, and that he was never coming back. He’d been unconvinced of the joys of small-town life that Sophie had once outlined in her national-speech-competition talk, “What Makes a Small Town Tick.”

      Still, the whole town had felt the shock of it when Brand had not even returned home for his mother’s funeral. The framed picture of him staring out sternly from under the cap of a United States Marine uniform had disappeared from Dr. Sheridan’s mantel.

      “Brandon,” Sophie said, suddenly flustered, aware she had studied him way too long. She used his full name to let him know she was prepared to see him as an adult and that they could leave the endearment, Sweet Pea, behind them.

      “I wasn’t expecting you.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She always had a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing around him, as awkward as the Sweet Pea she was anxious to leave behind her.

      Of course she wasn’t expecting him! She was in a wedding dress at midnight! If she’d been expecting him, what would she be wearing?

      Well, a wedding dress would be nice, a part of her, the hopelessly romantic part of her she’d set out to kill tonight, said dreamily.

      She shivered at the thought of Brand Sheridan as a groom. Glanced into the hard planes of that face and tried to imagine them softening with tenderness.

      The tenderness she’d heard in his voice when he’d called her after the death of her parents. Aww, Sweet Pea…

      That had been sympathy, Sophie reminded herself sternly. It was not to be mistaken for that stupid something she had tossed her life away for!

      “Expecting someone else, if not me?” he asked.

      He held out his hand to her, and she took it, trying to ignore another jolt of shimmering, stomach-dropping awareness as her hand met the unyielding hardness of his.

      He pulled her to her feet with effortless strength, stood there regarding her.

      “No, no,” she said. “Just, uh, burning some urgent rubbish.”

      “Urgent rubbish,” he said, and a hint of a smile tickled across the hard line of his lips.

      She was suddenly aware that she truly, at this moment, was living up to Mrs. Hamilton’s assessment of her as pathetic. A simple touch, her hand enfolded in his, not even a romantic gesture, made her feel things she had not felt through her entire engagement.

      And that was before she added in the fact she had not had a decent haircut in months. Or put on a lick of makeup. Of all the people to catch her in her wedding dress, conducting ritualistic ceremonies at midnight, did it have to be him?

      Did it have to be Brand Sheridan?

      He let go of her hand as soon as she was steady on her feet, and turned away from her. He began to pick up the scattered wedding-dream debris, and shoved stuff back in the box, Sophie saw thankfully, without showing the least bit of interest in what that stuff was.

      Sophie could have made her getaway through the hedge, but she found herself unwilling to abandon the box, and even though she knew better, unwilling to walk away. She felt as if she had not had a drink for days and he was clear water.

      Days? No, longer. Months. Years.

      And so she drank him in, thirstily. Part of her parched with a sense that only he could quench it, even though she despised herself for thinking that.

      He was more solid than he had been before, boyish sleekness had given way to the devilishly attractive maturity of a man: broadness of shoulder, deepness of chest. And that was not all that had changed.

      His dark hair was very short, his face clean-shaven. His dress was disappointingly conservative, even if the short-sleeved golf shirt did show off the breathtaking muscles of his biceps and forearms.

      She felt a sharp sense of missing the boy who had walked away from here and not looked back. That boy of her memory had been a renegade. Back then, he had gone for black leather jackets and motorcycles.

      To his mother’s consternation, he had favored jeans with rips in them—sometimes in places that had made Sophie’s adolescent heart beat in double time. His dark hair had been too long, and he’d always let a shadow of stubble darken the impossibly handsome planes of his face.

      Now his hair was short, his face completely clean-shaven. There was the hard-edged discipline of a soldier in the way he held himself—an economy of movement that was mouth-dryingly masculine, graceful and powerful.

      But, then her eyes had caught on the tiny hole in his ear.

      Whoo, boy. Really too easy to imagine him as a pirate, legs braced against a tossing sea, powerful arms folded over the broadness of his chest—naked, she hoped—his head thrown back, welcoming the storms that others cringed from—

      Stop, she pleaded with herself. God, she had been a reasonable person for years now! Years. She had almost married the world’s most reasonable man, hadn’t she?

      And here he was, Brand Sheridan, wrecking it all. Wrecking her illusions, making her see she was not a reasonable person at all.

      And probably never had been.

       Chapter Two

      “DO you have a pieced ear?” Sophie gasped, despite the fact she had ordered herself not to ask. More of her gift for getting it so wrong. It would have been so much better if she hadn’t noticed, or at least pretended not to have noticed!

      Brand frowned, apparently not pleased that she had noticed, either. “I did,” he said, touched the lobe of that ear, let his hand fall away. But his voice invited no more questions, even while his ears invited nibbling…

      Ever since she’d been voted “girl least likely to nibble earlobes” in her high-school annual, she’d thought about what it would be like to do just that. Not that she had ever let those raucous boys who had voted for her know that.

      Let them think she was prim and stiffly uptight. They would have teased her even more unmercifully if they’d guessed at her secret romantic side.

      She’d never had any urges to nibble Gregg’s ears. She’d been pleased that he had brought out her reasonable side. But of course, the something missing had reared its ugly head, and it probably had something to do with the forbidden temptations of earlobe-nibbling.

       Especially ones that bore the mark of a piercing!

      Sophie reminded herself she did not even know this man who shared the shadows with her at the moment.

      He was not the same man who had called her all those years ago, on the worst night of her life, his voice alone penetrating the darkness, husky with pain. Aww Sweet Pea…she needed to remember that.

      Brand Sheridan was not the same man who had left here. Really, he’d only been a boy when he left. And she’d been a girl, a carefree one, her biggest trouble trying to leave her nerdy reputation behind her. She’d been blissfully unaware of the tragedies that awaited her, both her parents killed in a terrible accident when she was eighteen.

      Brand, apparently oblivious to her fascination with his earlobes, picked up another paper, stuffed it in the box, scanned the yard and then turned back to her.

      Now, she could see it was the look in his eyes, not his earlobes, that was the most changed. Sapphire-dark, the firelight winked off that impossible shade of blue, deep and mysterious as the ocean.