He's the One. Jackie Braun

      He opened his eyes again, contemplated the flicker of light on the ceiling and realized the fire was still burning in the yard. He tried to reclaim the lightness he had felt earlier by thinking of his encounter with Sophie.

      A thought blasted through his brain, unwelcome and uninvited.

       Had Sweet Pea been crying?

      He got it suddenly. Ah. She wasn’t marrying the night. She’d just tried to distract him from the real story with her legendary cleverness. She was in his father’s backyard at midnight burning wedding pictures in a wedding dress because somebody had broken her heart.

      And it was only a sign of how tired he was, how the world he’d left behind was colliding with the one he’d made for himself, that instead of feeling sad for her, he felt oddly glad.

      He didn’t want Sweet Pea marrying anyone without his approval. It was as if eight years of separation didn’t exist at all, and he was stepping back into the role he’d always assumed around her.

      Big brother. Protector.

      Only now, he thought, thinking of her huge eyes and the swell of her naked breast beneath the film of that sheer dress, he didn’t exactly feel like a big brother. In fact, he could probably add himself to whomever or whatever he was protecting her from.

       Chapter Three

      “I THINK I’ll call the police,” his father said, eyeing him from the bedroom door. “Break and enter is still against the law.”

      Brand turned over, winced at the light pouring into the room, eyed his father and then the clock. From his sister’s reports he had expected his father to look older, frazzled, his white hair sticking up à la Albert Einstein.

      Dr. Sheridan, in fact, had already combed his rather luxurious steel-gray hair, and looked quite dapper in dark pants, a crisp white shirt, a suit vest that matched the pants.

      “It’s not break and enter if you have a key,” Brand said mildly. “Hi, Dad.” It was nearly noon. Brand had slept for close to twelve hours.

      “Humph. I guess you’re the expert on all things criminal. If I called the cops, you’d probably flash your badge at them, wouldn’t you? You’d probably have me arrested. Shipped off to an old folks’ home. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

      Whoo boy. Everything was going to be a fight—if he let it. Brand wasn’t going to let it. There was absolutely no point telling his father he wasn’t a cop, and he didn’t have a badge. He was an operative. But he wasn’t a doctor, and that’s all his father really cared about.

      “How are you, Dad?”

      “That fire could have happened to anyone,” his father said, defensively. “Your sister sent you here, didn’t she?”

      Brand felt relieved that his dad was obviously mentally agile enough to figure that out.

      “Any chance of getting a cup of coffee?”

      “Get your own damn coffee,” his father snorted, “I’m having coffee next door.”

      “At Sophie’s?” Brand asked, intrigued.

      But his father didn’t answer, gave him a dark look that let him know he was not included in coffee plans, and slammed the bedroom door.

      That went well, Brand thought. On the bright side, Dr. Sheridan hadn’t ordered Brand to get out of his house and never come back. Maybe there was something here they could salvage.

      Unless his sister was right. If his dad was losing it, not capable of living on his own anymore, and if Brand was the one who had gathered the evidence, there would be nothing left to salvage.

      “How did I get myself into this?”

      He’d known he’d have to come home sooner or later, and, as it happened, he needed a place to be safe. God, if Sugar Maple Grove didn’t qualify in spades. As if to confirm that, a church bell pealed in the distance.

      Brand got up, stretched mightily, aware of how deeply rested he felt.

      In four years deep undercover, assuming an identity, moving in a glitzy world of wealth and crime, a man lost something of himself. And he never quite slept. One eye open, part of him ever alert, part of him hating the life he lived, making people he would betray like him and trust him.

      Well, not him. The role he played—Brian Lancaster—though who he was and who he pretended to be had begun to fuse together in ways he had not expected.

      Now, having slept well, Brand felt more himself than he had felt for a long time. Or was it because he had seen the reflection of himself as he used to be, in Sophie’s huge hazel eyes?

      A funny irony that the place he couldn’t wait to get away from might have something to give him back now, all these years later.

      “Who could have predicted I would become a man who would treasure a good night’s sleep more than most men would treasure gold?” he muttered ruefully to himself.

      Brand showered and dressed, then moved downstairs, guiltily aware he was looking for evidence his father might be slipping.

      Everything seemed to be in need of repairs, but Dr. Sheridan had never been gifted at things like that, faintly flabbergasted when Brand had shown an early knack with something so primitive as a hammer.

      Brand’s sister, Marcie, had said, vaguely: if there’s something wrong, you’ll know. Mittens in the fridge, that kind of thing.

      “No mittens in the fridge,” Brand said, opening the fridge door and peering inside. “No food, either.” Did he report that to Marcie?

      He went out the front door to his car—a little sports number he’d purchased before his Brian Lancaster assignment. Now, it seemed too much like a car Lancaster would have chosen, and he was aware of wanting to get rid of it.

      Brand needed coffee. Did everyone still go for coffee at Maynard’s, morning coffee house, afternoon soda fountain and evening ice-cream parlor?

      Brand was aware of a reluctance to see everyone, the chasms that separated his life from the life in this small town probably too deep to cross.

      He never made it to the car.

      “Young man. You! Come!”

      An old woman, dapper in a red hat, was waving at him from Sophie’s porch. He saw his dad and Sophie out there, too, and remembered Sunday brunch on the porch was always something of a pre-church tradition in Sugar Maple Grove.

      He could smell the coffee from here and it smelled rich and good and added to that sense of coming home to small-town America.

      He hesitated only for a moment, was drawn by curiosity to see Sophie in the light of day, and went through the gap in the hedge that separated the front lawns. The path between the houses was worn.

      He registered, peripherally, a man trained to notice everything, that there was a lot of going back and forth between these two houses.

      When his dad wasn’t around, he would have to thank Sophie for looking in on him.

      Sophie’s porch was out of the American dream: deep shadows, dark wicker furniture with bright-yellow striped cushions, a gray painted wood floor, purple-and-white petunias spilling color and scent out of window boxes.

      And she was part of the same dream. Despite the fact his father and the old woman were there, Brand could see only Sophie. Somehow, in the years between them, she had gone from being a delightful little nerd to the all-American girl.

      “Good morning, Sweet Pea,” he said, taking the empty seat beside her.

      “Don’t call me that.” Then, with ill grace,