Читать книгу Her Sister's Fiancé - Teresa Hill, Teresa Hill - Страница 6

Kathie threw her things into two suitcases while her friend Liz peered out the door to see where Joe was.

“Yep, still there,” she said, closing the door and then grinning. “And he’s kind of cute, in that clean-cut, not-a-wrinkle-in-sight, not-a-brown-hair-out-of-place kind of way.”

He was gorgeous, Kathie thought, but then she wasn’t going to let herself think that. He was never wrinkled or messy, never had a hair out of place and never looked anything but solid, dependable and completely capable of handling anything that might come along. Everything a man should be and that a woman could count on, and Kathie had thought so for too many years to deny it, at least to herself.

“I’m telling you,” Liz said, “a man doesn’t come all this way to get a woman to come back to him, if he’s not interested in her.”

“He’s not interested in me,” she insisted.

“Sure he is. You didn’t see the way he looked at you. Even in these ridiculous schoolmarm getups they make us wear. I mean, if a man can be interested in a woman wearing this…”

“He’s not interested. He never has been, and he never will be,” Kathie insisted.

“So…all that stuff that happened last year—”

“It wasn’t all that stuff,” she insisted, shoving two sweaters and a pair of hiking boots into her suitcase. “It was a few kisses. A few hugs, and a lot of guilt. That was it. And he didn’t kiss me. I kissed him, and now everybody is blaming him for it. It’s terrible.”

“Wait a minute. He came up here to get you to come back because everyone’s blaming him for what happened? He said that to you?”

“He didn’t mean to,” Kathie said, reaching for her CD collection and the earrings her mother had left her. “I could tell he didn’t mean to. It just slipped out.”

“So, why did he come to see you?”

“Because he’s a nice guy—”

“Who got caught making out with his fiancé’s sister? This is not the way a nice guy acts,” Liz insisted.

“He is a nice guy. He just…I just…I practically attacked him!”

Liz laughed. “No way. You wouldn’t know how to attack a guy, even if you wanted to, not that I can imagine you wanting to. You don’t have an attack-the-opposite-sex bone in your body.”

“I do where he’s concerned!”

Liz gasped. “You still want him?”

“I do not,” Kathie lied, her face flaming. Dammit.

Liz gasped again. “You do! You swore it was nothing. A schoolgirl crush gone mad, coupled with the grief over losing your mother.”

“It was. That’s what it was.” The first time she’d kissed him was the day her mother died. She’d been crying hopelessly one minute and in his arms the next. “I still don’t even know how it happened.”

Honestly, she didn’t.

“How old were you when you met him?” Liz asked.

“Just turned nineteen,” Kathie whispered.

Nineteen and never really been in love before. Never even been close. It was insane. Girls all around her, all through high school had fallen in love every time they turned around. She kept waiting for it to happen to her, and it never did. Not back then.

But her older sister had come home from college where she’d met a guy. Kate brought him home, and Kathie had taken one look and felt like she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anyone but him.

She’d told herself it was crazy, that she’d get over it, outgrow it, but she never had.

It had been her guilty secret for the five long years in which Kate and Joe had been engaged. Years in which everyone had agreed that they were perfect for each other. She had tormented herself over that man and maintained a façade of easy friendship and nothing more, until she’d thrown herself into his arms the day her mother died.

And then…everything just went crazy.

He’d broken it off with her sister, or maybe Kate had broken it off with him. Kathie had never been sure and she’d heard several different versions of the story. Rumors had been flying all over town.

Almost at the same instant, Kate met Ben, and then, to everyone’s amazement, fell for him completely and married him, and in the middle of that, she’d found out about Kathie and Joe. Kathie had been horrified. The moment the wedding was over, she’d run away and hadn’t come back. She couldn’t bring herself to face her family or Joe.

“Oh, honey, you’ve got it bad for the man,” Liz said, coming to Kathie’s side and giving her a hug.

“I don’t. I can’t. I have to forget about him—”

“Why? He hasn’t forgotten about you.”

“He feels guilty about what happened. That’s all. He loved my sister. He’s always loved my sister, and he lost her, because of me!”

“Because he confessed that he had feelings for another woman while he was engaged to your sister, and the other woman was you.”

“Feelings?” Kathie said, trying to shove five books and a plant in her suitcase. Okay, the plant was a lost cause. It would not go. She set it on the windowsill, where it had lived for the past four months, and tried not to cry again. “Guilt is a feeling, and believe me, guilt is the only thing he feels for me. He’s an honorable man who’s loved my sister forever, and then…everything just got all messed up. I messed it all up.”

“Yeah, but if he really cared about you—”

“He doesn’t. If he did, he would have said so, but he didn’t. He looked me right in the eye at Kate’s wedding, when everybody knew the whole story and everyone was watching us and whispering about us, and do you know what he told me?”

“What?”

“That he was sorry. Not that he cared about me, but that he was sorry about everything that had happened, that it was all his fault, but it wasn’t all his fault. It was mine. I knew it. He was just trying to be nice about it by saying it was his fault, because he’s a nice guy.”

“Who has a thing for you,” Liz insisted. “And you have a major thing for him.”

“I can’t. He can’t. We can’t. Too many people have been hurt by this. I’m trying to fix it now, not start something all over again.”

“I think you want to see him again,” Liz said.

“No. Really. I don’t.”

She wanted her life back, her nice, quiet, careful, never-done-anything-wrong life with her family who loved her and no one in town who ever gossiped about her and no rumors flying about her and her sister’s fiancé. Nothing to be ashamed about. No reason to run away.

That’s what she wanted.

Really.

Not Joe Reed.

“I just need to see my family,” she said.

“And what are you going to say to them?”

“I have no idea.”

Joe waited until her things were packed, carried her suitcases to her car, a cute little bright yellow Volkswagen bug, and then said he’d follow her.

“All the way back to Magnolia Falls?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, opening the door to his banker’s car, a sedate black four-door sedan.

“Why? You don’t trust me to really go back there?”

“Well…” he hedged, standing in the bright sunshine filtering down through the trees. “No. Not that. I just…I mean, we’re both going to the same place, right? We might as well drive together.”

“I’m twenty-four years old, Joe. I can find my way back to town by myself,” she insisted.

“Of course. I know that. I just…”

“Don’t trust me to actually come back. What do you think? I’m going to stand here and tell you I will, and then take off in the other direction? You think I’m a liar and a coward?”

“No. Really, I don’t,” he said, closing his car door and coming over to her, where she didn’t want him, not anywhere near her. “I just think it was a bad situation, and I’m sorry, about everything, and I know how important it is to your family to have you back, so…”

Not to him. To her family. Just as she suspected. He probably hadn’t given her a second thought, not in the way she wished he would.

“And what about you? With everything that happened, I mean?” she asked, before he could think she was asking about him and her. “Let’s say, with Kate being married. How are you with that?”

“I hope she’s happy,” he said, and seemed to mean it.

Could he possibly? He’d been crazy about her sister since the moment she’d met him. He’d followed her back to Magnolia Falls after graduation, taken a job at the local bank and settled down there, becoming as much a part of the town as Kathie and her siblings, who had been born there. His mother had left some silly retirement village someplace near Atlanta to go there, and when it had been time to move his grandmother into a nursing home, they’d brought her to Magnolia Falls, too. This was a man who’d been sure of himself and his future with her sister.

“Kate seems really happy with Ben,” Joe added. “I see them around town every now and then. I just ran into Ben yesterday, at the town picnic, as a matter of fact.”

Which meant…what? That they were buddies now? That it didn’t hurt at all, thinking about Kate married to someone else?

Kathie stared at the face of the man she’d dreamed about for years and couldn’t detect the first hint of what was going on inside of him. That was one thing about Joe that had always kept her guessing. He wasn’t a man to show easily how he felt. He could be dying inside, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever know it.

Was that how he felt now? Like he was dying inside?

Or was he over the whole thing?

Kathie didn’t see how that could be possible. Five years together didn’t just disappear into a puff of smoke, not what they’d had. They were meant to be together. Everyone had said so. And Kathie had ruined it by throwing herself at Joe and confusing him, until out of guilt, he’d confessed what had happened to Kate.

That was all it had been. Kathie was sure of it. Guilt, confusion and a few stolen kisses.

Not love.

Not anything like that.

And now he stood there in front of her saying Kate seemed happy and acting like he and Kate’s new husband were the best of friends?

No way Kathie was buying that act.

“Are you ready to go?” Joe asked.

“Yes, but there is no way you’re following me all the way back home, like I’m sixteen and can’t be trusted in a car by myself,” she said.

“But—”

“No. No arguments.” She wasn’t going to be treated like a child. “Go on. I’ll see you there.”

He followed her!

That infuriating man tried to follow her all the way home. She’d speed up. He’d speed up. She’d slow down, and he would, too, from his spot three cars behind her on the highway.

She finally made it back to the apartment she used to share with her younger sister, Kim, a place she’d been paying rent on for months, even though she wasn’t living there, because she wouldn’t leave her sister in the lurch like that. Besides, living at the boarding school, she had practically no expenses, so she could afford it. She hadn’t done it because she hadn’t been able to stand the idea of not having a place to come home to one day. Really, she hadn’t.

Kathie parked on the street in front of the big old house now cut up into apartments. Joe pulled in behind her, getting out of his car, slamming the door behind him and stalking over to her side.

“Did you know you were going ninety-one miles an hour back there at one point?” he bellowed. “I didn’t think this little thing you drove could go ninety-one miles an hour, but it did.”

“What do you mean, Joe? Were you following me or something?” She blinked up at him, as innocently as she could manage, considering the fact that she was furious.

“No,” he claimed.

“Oh. You just happened to be three cars behind for the last four hours?”

“I…I just wanted to make sure you got home okay,” he said.

She was about to lay into him again when she heard a quick blast of a siren behind her. It was her brother. He pulled in, in his police cruiser, right behind Joe and was out of the car in seconds, grabbing her and hugging her and swinging her around in his arms.

“It’s about time you came back home,” Jax said, flashing the megawatt grin that had had women falling all over themselves to get to him for more than a decade. “God, I’ve missed you. We all have. I’m so happy you’re home.”

She gave him a big hug, once he put her back on her own two feet on the ground. “I missed you, too.”

Then she realized he’d just happened to drive down this street at exactly the right moment to find her getting out of her car. Not that it was the first time her big brother had just happened to drive along at exactly the right moment. He’d made a habit of it during her teen years.

Plus, there was something about the look that passed between him and Joe, as Jax said, “We can take it from here, Joe.”

“Wait a minute,” Kathie said, then turned to her brother. “How did you know the minute I pulled in?”

He shrugged easily. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Okay, I might have had some friends watching for you,” he said. “You know me. I’m always watching out for you and Kim, even Kate.”

“And you just thought, hey, maybe today of all days, Kathie will come home?”

“Sure,” he said, looking a bit less comfortable now.

“No, that’s not it. You sent Joe to get me,” she said, wishing she could die right then and there on the street, so she would never have to face Joe again. Joe who hadn’t come because he’d wanted to or because he’d wanted her back, but because her older brother had twisted his arm, or something to that effect! Joe who’d never really wanted her. How she could have thought he might…

Kathie could have sunk into the ground quite happily at the idea of her thinking that for once, Joe had really wanted her and had come to get her.

“And you!” She turned to Joe, because it was either yell at him or cry, and she really didn’t want to cry over him anymore. Not one more tear. “You must have called him and told him the minute I’d be back!”

“Kathie, wait a minute,” her brother said. “Joe and I aren’t exactly buddies, you know? We don’t have a lot to say to each other these days.”

She turned to Joe. “Tell me. He sent you, didn’t he?”

“I…I was worried about you, Kathie,” Joe said, looking very, very guilty.

Oh, God. If it was possible to die of embarrassment, now was the time. Right now. She waited, barely breathing, disappointed to realize she was going to live and that she’d have to face them both.

She laughed, a scary sound even to her own ears, and said, “But Jax is the one who sent you, isn’t he? I wouldn’t talk to him or come back for him, so he sent you.”

“Kathie, everybody wants you back home,” her brother insisted.

“How did you make him do it, Jax? How did you make him drive up there and talk me into coming back?”

“Kathie—”

“Tell me,” she yelled at both of them. “It’s my life. I think I have a right to know!”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t known how much they all want you back. They’re your family, Kathie. You guys have always been so close, and I know you love them. This is where you should be.”

He turned around and left.

Kathie watched him, hot, angry tears filling her eyes.

He had no idea.

She couldn’t be here. Not with him here, not loving her, not even thinking about her. She couldn’t!

Kathie looked back at her brother, whom she’d been so happy to see just moments ago, and wished she could smack him.

“What did you do?” she asked, sounding weak and weepy, everything she didn’t want to be. “Go ahead. I’ll get it out of you eventually. You know that. What did you do to get him to come after me?”

“I threatened to break his jaw into sixteen different pieces,” Jax said, like it was no big deal, like he threatened people every day.

For all she knew, he did. Maybe that was why he loved his job so much. He got to order people around all the time, just like he had when they were kids. Make him the oldest and the only boy, and then take away their father to a bullet when they were little, and what did you get?

A brother who thought he was in charge of everything.

“I cannot believe you did this!” she yelled, then stood there while every bit of the fight drained out of her and she was so weary, she could hardly breathe.

“Kathie, I—”

He reached for her, but she jerked her arm away and stalked off toward the house, leaving him standing there yelling back at her.

“Oh, come on, Kathie. Was it really so bad? Sending the rat after you? We just wanted you back, that’s all, and you wouldn’t talk to any of us! Kathie!”

She ran inside the house, up the stairs and got her key in the front door of her apartment, ignoring her brother altogether when he knocked on the door, when he pounded, even when he shouted.

They all wanted her back.

Well, fine. She was back.

It didn’t mean she had to talk to them or see them, and it certainly didn’t mean she had to stay.

“What did you do?” Kate stared at her new husband, who should know her moods well enough by now to be uneasy about her current state of mind, then at her brother, who definitely knew better, but just did ridiculous things anyway.

“What do you mean, what did we do?” Jax made himself comfortable in her kitchen by grabbing a carton of orange juice out of the fridge and downing what was left in it in practically one gulp. “We got her home. I thought you’d be happy. I thought you’d be jumping for joy, and we’d be heroes.”

“That depends. What did you do?” Kate said, crossing her arms and trying out her sternest look on both of them.

Ben was going to play innocent and then try to make her laugh. She could tell. That’s what he always did when he annoyed her, and it usually worked, because she adored him, but her brother was a different story altogether.

She and Jax both tended to think they knew what was best for their younger siblings, which had led to any number of clashes over the years. Kate was trying to let go of her controlling tendencies, but Jax’s had gotten even worse since their sister took off six months ago and, to date, had adamantly refused to come home, no matter what kind of begging or pleading anyone had done.

“Can you not just be happy?” Jax asked, maybe catching a hint of the trouble he was in, but maybe not. Maybe he was oblivious still. “You know? Wow! Jump up and down. Kiss your husband. Hug your brother. Go see your sister? That kind of happy?”

“Not until I know how you got her back here,” Kate said, picking up the knife she’d been using to chop carrots and holding it purposefully in front of her. “What did you say? What finally worked?”

“We didn’t say anything,” said Ben, doing his Mr. Innocent routine.

“Oh, okay. Neither one of you said a word, and yet, you somehow got her back here,” she said, waving the knife a bit for good measure. “Which leads me to my previous question. What did you do?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Jax claimed. “Joe did it.”

“Yeah, Joe did it.”

“Joe, who she won’t talk to any more than she’ll talk to any of us? He got her to come back? Okay, what did Joe do?”

“He didn’t say exactly,” Jax said, looking to Ben. “Did he?”

“Not to me.”

“Right. He didn’t say.”

“Okay, now I’m really worried,” Kate said. “You two have done something, and I’m thinking it didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped and now you want me to fix it.” She looked pointedly at her brother, whom she was sure was the guilty party.

“No. You’ve got it all wrong,” he claimed. “We just wanted to tell you she was back…so you could go see her. Don’t you want to go see her?”

“Yes.”

“And you should go now. You could put the knife down and go now,” Jax said. “I mean…why not go now? You haven’t seen her in months. Why wait?”

“For one thing, I’m in the middle of cooking dinner.”

“I’ll do it,” Ben offered, taking the knife from her before she could object.

“Me, too.” Jax jumped in, picking up a container of rice and shaking it. “I can help. Really. What do you do with this?”

“I’m going to start throwing things in five seconds, if you don’t tell me what’s going on!”

“Okay, okay,” her brother said, putting the rice back down. “She might be…a little upset.”

Kate arched a brow. “Because…”

“She might be…a little mad,” Ben said.

Kate tried again. “What did you two do, kidnap her?”

“No,” they insisted.

“Because I know Joe wouldn’t kidnap her.” He would never force anyone to do anything against their will.

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t anything like that,” Ben said. “She just…well—”

“Okay, she might be leaving again,” Jax said, his expression bland as could be.

Oh, this was bad.

Bad!

“And why would she be leaving, when she just got here?” Kate asked.

“We’re not sure,” Ben said. “Maybe…because we sent Joe to get her? Was it really that bad? Sending Joe?”

“That depends,” Kate said, thinking she could imagine scenarios in which that would be very, very bad, depending on how her sister now felt about Joe. Then she thought of something else. “Exactly how did you send Joe to get her?”

“We might have…threatened him,” Ben said, stripping off his clerical collar as he said it. He always got rid of it when he’d done something decidedly unministerly. “Okay, I didn’t threaten him. I swear. You know I don’t do that stuff. I just…stood by and advised him to cooperate while your brother threatened him.”

“You threatened him?” She yelled at her brother, then turned to her husband. “And you went along with it?”

“Just trying to fit in with the family, you know?” Ben claimed. “Be a part of things? Make you happy, by getting your sister home. That kind of thing. That’s all.”

Kate wanted to scream, but managed not to, barely.

Poor Kathie.

She’d been through so much in the last fifteen months, starting with losing their beloved mother.

“Let me take a wild guess,” Kate said, turning back to her brother. “You threatened Joe that if he didn’t go get her and convince her to come back…”

“He’d break his jaw,” Ben said, eager to help her understand now.

“Who’s breaking someone’s jaw?” Shannon, Kate and Ben’s sixteen-year-old, soon-to-be-officially-adopted daughter showed up in the kitchen at just the right moment.

“No one broke anyone’s jaw,” Ben said.

“Your uncle just threatened to,” Kate said.

“Oh.” Shannon nodded as she opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside. “And they thought I’d be trouble.”

“Yeah, who’d have thought the adults would be the ones to make trouble?” Kate said. “Another big guess here…Kathie found out you threatened to break Joe’s jaw, and because of that, Joe went to see her and convinced her to come back, right?”

“Yeah,” her brother admitted. “Why is that so bad?”

“Ahhhhhh!” Kate did scream then. “People think you know so much about women and that you’re so good with them, but it’s just crap, Jax. It’s complete and total crap!”

Kate knocked three separate times, knowing her sister had to be there, because her car was out front. Who else drove a bright yellow bug with a rainbow sticker on the back and bumper stickers that said, Visualize Whirled Peas and, What Would Jesus Bomb? Kate had missed her sister desperately.

“Kathie, please,” Kate called out through the door. “I have dinner on the stove. I’ll go home and poison them with it, if it’ll make you feel better, promise. Just let me in first.”

That did it. The door swung open.

Her poor sister stood there with big red eyes and a thoroughly defeated expression on her face.

“Oh, baby,” Kate said, taking her sister in her arms.

“They told you what they did?” Kathie asked.

“It wasn’t easy, but I got it out of them.”

“And you’re willing to hurt them for me?”

“Sure, I will. They’ve gotten to be buddies, but they’re dangerous together. I think Jax has been waiting for years to have another man in the family, you know, so it won’t be three against one anymore. And he’s going a little nuts waiting for Gwen’s mother to get better, so they can have their wedding with her here. Ever since she broke her hip, and Jax and Gwen postponed the wedding, he’s been a little…intense.”

Kathie nodded, her head still on Kate’s shoulder.

Kate gave her a big squeeze. “How about I make them both throw up their dinner? I think I can do that with no problem. I mean…I did it by accident once, trying to impress Ben’s mother. Surely I can do it on purpose.”

And if anyone at Ben’s church heard about it, she’d never live it down.

Oh, well.

She’d tried to tell him she wouldn’t quite fit in, but he hadn’t listened.

Not that it was going badly. Her and the church ladies, as she called them. Not at all. She just kept expecting it to go badly.

Poisoning her husband would definitely make things go badly, because they all adored him. They thought he was right up there with God.

“Just don’t tell anybody, okay? I’m afraid the church ladies are watching all the time, and that they’re convinced no one will ever be good enough for Ben,” Kate said.

Kathie finally lifted her head and stepped back. She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and smiled a bit. “So…I missed you.”

“Oh, honey, I missed you so much! I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

There were more hugs, more tears, and when those finally subsided, Kate had a million things she wanted to say and no idea how to start. All the possibilities seemed fraught with red flags.

Kathie finally started things off. “So…you’re okay?”

“I’m great.”

“And you’re…happy?”

“Yes. Kim’s settled right in for her first year of teaching. Shannon is doing so well, and we just saw the baby she gave up for adoption. They named her Elissa, and she’s sitting up and babbling and slobbers on everything. Her parents have a two-year-old named Emily, and they invited us all to Emily’s birthday party two weeks ago. Ben is absolutely wonderful, until Jax comes along and talks him into doing something like this. Poor Ben, he wants to fit in so badly, he’ll go along with anything Jax says, any scheme he comes up with.”

“Well…good,” Kathie said like she couldn’t quite believe it. “That’s good. I’m happy for you, and I just want you to know, I’m here to fix everything.”

“Okay.” Kate wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she was ready to agree to most anything her sister wanted.

“At least, everything I can fix. I mean, I know it was awful—”

“Kathie, no—”

“It was, and I know that, and I feel just awful about it—”

“I’m not mad, I promise,” Kate protested.

“But I’m going to fix as much of it as I can. Joe said people in town think I’ve stayed away because you can’t forgive me for what he and I did, that there’s a rumor going around that you threw me out of town.”

“Well, that’s just silly,” Kate said.

“No, it’s awful. I can’t let people think that about you.”

“Kathie, I don’t care what anybody thinks anymore. I know I used to, but I’m over it. I care about Ben and my family, and maybe the church ladies, a little bit, just because I want them to like me and think I’m right for Ben, because I know how much they all love him. But that’s it, I swear.”

“Well, I still don’t want anybody to think you kicked me out of town,” Kathie said. “So I thought if I just came back for a little while, and people saw us together and happy, they’d know that’s not true.”

“Okay.” That worked for Kate. Anything that got her sister back and had them spending time together, worked for Kate.

“And Joe didn’t want to tell me, but…I guess everybody hates him now!”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far….”

“Everybody blames him for what happened. Not me. Him. He said they all think he dumped me, after…you know, making trouble between you and him, and you and me. That he dumped me when everybody found out about it, and I was so devastated, I left town.”

“I guess it’s possible. I don’t know. Honestly, I’ve heard every rumor in the world about the whole thing, and I just try not to listen anymore.” Kate would have said again it didn’t matter to her, but like her brother, she wanted her sister to come back to stay.

She wasn’t going to be as bad as her brother, was she?

No jaw breaking and no threats, but still as bad in her own way. Like being ready to let her sister believe anything to keep Kathie here?

“It wasn’t Joe’s fault,” Kathie insisted. “Honest, it wasn’t. It was me. All of it was me.”

Kate didn’t believe that for a second. After thinking about it for a long, long time, she chose to believe that two of the people she knew best in the world had, completely unexpectedly, developed real feelings for each other, which might have been a real problem for her if, in the middle of the whole thing, she hadn’t found the love of her life.

So whatever had happened between her sister and her ex-fiancé was completely okay with her now. She just couldn’t seem to convince Kathie of that, no matter how hard she tried. Mostly, Kathie wouldn’t even let her bring up the subject. She wanted her sister here, and she wanted her happy, and one thing Kate had figured out was that Kathie and Joe both seemed miserable without each other.

Which wasn’t okay with Kate at all.

So, Kathie was worried about people blaming and hating Joe for whatever had happened between the two of them?

“Well…I don’t know what you can do about that,” Kate said carefully, in case there was something and it was something that would keep her sister in town, where she belonged.

“That’s why I came back,” her sister said. “To show everybody that you’re not mad at me and that you didn’t kick me out of town.”

“Okay,” Kate said. That was fine with her. That was very good.

“And to show everybody that Joe didn’t dump me,” Kate said. “I dumped him.”

“You dumped him?” Kate asked. Why would her sister dump Joe, if Joe was the one she truly wanted?

“Okay, I didn’t really dump him. I mean, he was never mine to dump. He and I were just…” Kathie’s face turned beet red. “I don’t know what we were. Stupid, I guess. I was just stupid and selfish and confused, and once everyone found out last fall, I just couldn’t stand to be here, with everybody knowing and talking about us. So, I have a plan.”

Kate nodded very carefully. “What plan?”

“If it’s okay with you, I mean, I’m going to pretend to see Joe for a few weeks….”

Her sister waited…for Kate to object? “Okay,” Kate said.

“And then I’m going to dump him, so people won’t blame him for the whole thing anymore. So he won’t be the bad guy.”

“Joe asked you to come back to town to pretend to date him, then dump him, so that people would stop blaming him for dumping you?” Kate asked.

“No! He would never do that. I don’t think he even meant to tell me. It just slipped out, but once I knew, I had to try to fix things, because it wasn’t right for people to blame you and him when it was all my fault,” her sister explained.

Okay.

That kind of made sense, but only because Kate knew her sister so well.

Joe had been threatened within an inch of his life and forced to go see Kathie, and then, when he tried to talk her into coming back, as ordered, something had gone wrong, and he’d ended up giving her the impression that everyone in town blamed Joe and Kate for Kathie’s decision to leave, and Kathie was here to make sure everyone blamed her instead?

Not what Joe intended, Kate was sure, but it had gotten her sister to come back. Once Kathie saw a problem that she believed she’d created, she wouldn’t give up until she fixed things.

And Kathie could only fix things from here in town.

Kate weighed her options carefully. If she protested that she wasn’t mad at her sister at all, that it was fine with her if Kathie and Joe fell madly in love, and that she didn’t care what anyone in town thought of any of that, Kathie might not stay and try to fix things.

And she really wanted Kathie to stay, no matter what the reason.

Maybe Kate was as bad as her brother.

“Well…that sounds like a good plan,” Kate said, feeling guilty about it but happy. It sounded like a plan that would keep her sister in town for weeks at least, forever if Kate had anything to say about it.

“Still mad?” Ben asked, coming up behind Kate in the kitchen and putting his arms around her.

“Maybe.”

He kissed her cheek, then nuzzled her neck. “Come on. It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Only if she’s in love with him,” Kate said.

“In love with him?” Ben turned her around in his arms.

“Yes,” Kate said, letting him draw her against him, her head tucked against his chest. “Think about it. She’s in love with him, and he just let her leave after our wedding. Probably because his head was still spinning from everything that had happened and because he was still trying to make sense of it and failing miserably. Joe doesn’t change his mind easily. He doesn’t change his plans, either. It would take him some time to figure everything out, and she left so fast, thinking he didn’t care about her at all, that it was some crazy fluke.”

“Okay, but—”

“I don’t think it was a fluke to Kathie. I think she’s in love with him, and now look what’s happened. Her brother and her new brother-in-law went to the man she loves, who she thinks doesn’t love her, and threatened to break his jaw if he didn’t go see her and get her to come back to town.”

“But…if she’s in love with him, doesn’t she want to see him again?”

“Not if she thinks it’s hopeless and the only reason he came to get her is because he didn’t want his jaw broken into sixteen pieces. Then, it’s just humiliating to have to be here with him, thinking he couldn’t care less about her.”

“Oh. Okay. I get it now.”

Yes, now, he got it.

Poor Kathie.