Her Sister’s Fiancé
Teresa Hill

To everyone at The Whole You, Rutherfordton, NC.

Without a doubt, some of the coolest, nicest,

funniest, kindest, most interesting people in the

world. (The only other group I’ve ever found that

I’d describe that way are romance writers.)

I love you all. We don’t really have to leave, right?

And for Michael, because that’s

just the way he is and because he asked,

I will write words I have never before used in

all of my twenty-three published novels:

Heaving Bosoms.

Heaving Bosoms.

Heaving Bosoms.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Coming Next Month

Chapter One

The little old ladies by the picnic tables glared at him like he was pond scum.

Joe Reed tried to ignore them as he stood under a giant magnolia tree eating a hot dog at the town’s May Day picnic, trying to look like the old him—respectable, predictable, an all-around good guy.

Wait a minute. He leaned to the right to get a better look at one of the little old ladies.

Was that a friend of his grandmother’s?

He groaned.

His grandmother was hard of hearing and not quite living in the present. She often thought she was a girl looking for her poodle, CoCo, who’d been dead for seventy-five years. Joe had hoped she’d never get the whole story of his downfall, but if one of her friends from the nursing home was here, she’d probably be treated to the whole unsavory thing. Which meant, he had to hope his grandmother either wouldn’t hear what the woman had to say or that she’d forget it very quickly, both highly likely.

Still, he really didn’t want her to know.

Yeah, now that he’d gotten a better look, he was afraid that was her friend Marge and…maybe she was coming this way, probably to give him a piece of her mind. He turned around hoping to disappear, but the next moment, he got nailed in the shoulders and dragged off into the woods by two men.

Not strangers, unfortunately.

He’d rather be mugged.

Not that anybody got mugged in Magnolia Falls, Georgia.

But he’d rather.

“Hey, come on,” he tried.

Wherever they were going, he could at least get there under his own power. But his captors would have none of that, and one of them was armed, so he stopped arguing and let them do what they wanted.

They released him a half mile later, dumped him with his back against a tree, then backed up to face him, both glaring.

One was a cop.

Joe used to date his sister.

The other was a minister.

He was now married to the sister Joe used to date. Very happily married, by all accounts, so, as Joe saw it, Ben couldn’t object too much to the fact that Joe and Kate had broken up. Otherwise, Ben and Kate would never have gotten together.

It was just the way in which Joe and Kate had broken up that was the problem.

That was where the other sister came into it. Kathie.

There was a third sister, Kim, the baby of the family, but Joe had never laid a hand on her.

It was the middle one who had been his downfall. Still was, judging by the way the people of their little town were treating him six months after the whole debacle.

“We have a problem,” the brother who was the cop, Jax, said.

“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Joe insisted, feeling like he was in third grade and had gotten caught pulling Celia Rawlins’ hair. Not that he’d actually done it. She had just kept accusing him of it to get him into trouble. His mother said it was a crude form of flirtation, but he just hadn’t understood. He didn’t like being in trouble. He really was a good guy. Not that anybody believed that anymore.

“Oh, yes, you did,” Jax said, looking as big and intimidating as he had in high school, whether he’d been plowing through linebackers like they were zombies or dating the girls of the cheerleading squad one after another. Everybody got a turn. He’d made it look easy, still did.

Joe had been quieter, spent more time on his studies, been president of the senior class and valedictorian, a chess champion, a force to be reckoned with in debate, none of which had helped him get girls.

He was not a ladies’ man, not at all the type to be engaged to one sister and sneaking around kissing the other.

He still wasn’t sure how it had happened.

Temporary insanity was all he’d managed to come up with.

It still made his head spin when he thought about it too much, so he tried not to. He was a bank president, for God’s sake. The youngest in the state when he’d been named to the job. Voted most likely to succeed. Mr. Straightlaced.

What had happened to that man?

“I really didn’t do anything,” Joe tried again.

He hadn’t called anyone, hadn’t talked to anyone, hadn’t seen anyone. He’d lived the life of a monk for six months, trying to keep his head down and do his job and not give anyone reason to talk about him, not ever again.

Not that it had stopped any of the gossip.

He felt like he’d been branded for life, would never live down what had happened.

He looked at Jax, seething, his gun at his side, then to Ben, the calmer of the two. Surely a minister wouldn’t be a part of beating the crap out of him here in the woods, would he? Not that Joe didn’t think he deserved a beating. Honestly, he was surprised Jax had waited this long.

But that was it, a few punches? They weren’t going to really hurt him, right? At least, he didn’t think so.

He looked to Ben for help.

“It would probably be better if you just listened for a while,” Ben said, looking calm as could be, like he took part in dragging people off into the woods all the time, which seemed quite unminister-like to Joe.

Kate had said her new husband had a way of making things happen. Surely she hadn’t meant this.

“This is the way it is,” Ben said, smiling a bit while Jax scowled. “Kate isn’t happy.”

Joe puzzled over that. He hadn’t done anything to Kate, either. Had barely spoken to her, hadn’t gotten anywhere near her, and if Kate wasn’t happy, wasn’t that more Ben’s problem than Joe’s, given the fact that Ben was her husband now?

“Well, she would be happy—perfectly happy—married to me,” Ben said. “Except for one thing.”

Joe could just imagine what that one thing was.

“And Kim’s not happy,” Jax said. “Most important of all to you, I’m not happy, and I could hurt you so easily.”

Ben stepped between them at that point. “And if my wife and her family aren’t happy, of course I’m not happy,” he said.

Okay. Joe hadn’t gotten anywhere near any of them, either, but he nodded, to show that he was listening and taking it all in.

“We couldn’t possibly be happy right now because a member of our family isn’t here,” Jax said.

“Okay,” Joe said hesitantly.

Kathie. She’d taken off the day of Kate and Ben’s wedding, just disappearing after the ceremony. It had been weeks before they’d even known where she was, teaching at some expensive boarding school in North Carolina and resisting all their efforts to get her to come back home.

Joe couldn’t blame her. He’d have liked to run away, too, but he wasn’t the type to run. He had obligations, and he’d decided to tough it out here, thinking that years of being responsible, dependable, good-guy Joe would overcome a few moments of insanity with his then-fiancé’s sister.

But no. Apparently, he was going to be punished for this forever.

And now, they were all mad at him because Kathie wasn’t here?

Joe was afraid to have her within a hundred miles of him, afraid of what he might do next to screw up his life, but they wouldn’t care about that.

“And since you made this mess,” Jax said, glowering down at him, “you are going to fix it.”

Joe swallowed hard, bracing himself for a fist to the jaw, wondering if he’d be eating through a straw for the next six weeks because he had no teeth left or because his jaw would be wired shut.

Ouch.

He braced himself as best he could, but Jax didn’t hit him.

He just said, “You are going to bring our sister home.”

“Me?” Joe said. “But…she hates me.”

“That’s your problem,” Jax said.

“What he means is…we’re sure you can find a way around that,” Ben said, like all Joe needed to do was turn left instead of right, to get out of a traffic jam.

Women were nothing like traffic jams.

There was no road map, no real signals to tell a man when to stop and when to go ahead. You couldn’t call AAA and get a TripTik to tell you to go left for eighty-seven miles and then head north for thirty-seven and then take three right turns and you were there.

“She won’t even talk to me,” he tried. How could he convince her to come home when she wouldn’t even talk to him?

“We’re going to leave that problem up to you, too,” Ben said, slapping him on the back like they were buddies or something.

“But…I…”

Jax slapped a paper against his chest, and Joe grabbed onto it.

“That’s her address. Don’t bother to call. Like you said, she wouldn’t talk to you anyway. You need to just show up. We included directions. It’s only a four-hour drive. Tomorrow’s graduation day at that fancy school of hers. She’ll be free to do anything she likes once that’s over. You’re going to go home, pack a bag and start driving.”

“Tonight? You want me to go get her tonight?”

“I expect you to be out of town within the hour. And you know I’ll know if you’re not,” Jax said. “I bet you can imagine what’s going to happen if anyone catches you here after eight o’clock.”

Oh, yeah.

Jax and his buddies on the police force.

Joe had been cited for five moving violations within a week of Kathie leaving town, and he hadn’t been guilty of a one. But he hadn’t protested, either. Not until he’d ended up before a judge who was ready to take his license away, and then, he hadn’t had to say much. The judge had known exactly what was going on and let him off with a warning, specifically that he should try hard to undo whatever he’d done to upset Magnolia Falls’ finest.

“Do you have any idea what those tickets did to my insurance rates?” Joe complained.

“Could you possibly think I care?” Jax shot back.

“She won’t come back because I ask her to,” Joe said in all honesty.

“Then you’ve got some thinking to do, don’t you?” Ben said. “Good thing it’s a four-hour drive. I’m sure by the time you get there, you’ll have figured out just what to say to get her to come back.”

“I can’t. I mean…I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there’s anything I can say. If there was, I’d say it.” Not because he wanted her to come back…not really. What kind of man welcomed insanity back into his life?

But this was her home, the only one she’d ever known. Her father had died when she was five, her mother last year, and her sisters and brother were all the family she had left. They’d always been tight, and he hated thinking of her cut off from her family this way and all alone in the world, especially if she was upset.

And poor Kate. She’d been like a second mother to her two younger sisters, had always taken very seriously her obligations to them.

He really owed Kate.

And Kathie. He kept thinking of her as a teenager. He’d known her that long, but she was twenty-four now. He’d just turned thirty-one, a grown-up, supposedly a responsible, intelligent one, and he’d handled the whole thing between them so badly.

So he owed them both, and he’d been raised to believe that first, a man tried hard not to make mistakes, and if he did, he always tried to make up for those mistakes.

“Okay,” he said, resigned to it but having no idea how he’d accomplish the task of bringing her home. “I’ll go.”

Which meant, within the next twenty-four hours, Joe would be face-to-face with Kathie Cassidy.

God help him.

Kathie was working at a snotty boys’ school in the middle of nowhere. Joe drove into the woods for miles, thinking that surely he was going to end up at a summer camp, but then, there it was, something that looked like an ancient college campus of weathered stone covered in climbing ivy set in the middle of the forest. Odd place for a school, he thought. Jacobsen Hall, the sign had said, full of self-restrained grandeur, the kind that practically screamed old money.

He consulted his directions and found the dorm where she’d been living, serving as a kind of housemother.

Housemother?

Kathie was twenty-four.

Housemothers were not twenty-four.

There was a steady stream of boys and luggage exiting the front door, aided quite often by chauffeurs piling the boys’ belongings into limousines.

Okay.

Kathie had talked about teaching in the inner city someday. Jacobsen Hall was as far from that as she could get.

Joe dodged luggage and snotty-looking boys to make his way inside. There in the foyer, clipboard in hand, her blond hair piled on her head in a very prim knot, looking as schoolmarmish as could be, stood Kathie.

He was dismayed to feel a little kick in the gut at the sight of her, even in that little black dress with its little white collar and cuffs.

For one outlandish second, he thought if the skirt was a little shorter and she wore a little white apron, unbuttoned a few of those neat brass buttons and took her hair down, she’d look like…like….

Joe gave an anguished groan.

He was not going to be fantasizing about her.

Under no circumstances would he be having any remotely sexual thoughts about her. None. Never.

He wasn’t going insane again for his ex-fiancé’s little sister.

No.

He might as well shoot himself right now than go there again.

He just needed a woman. A sane, sensible, practical, responsible, dependable woman. All the things he’d always thought Kate was. All the things he’d always been. And he would settle down with her and have a sane, sensible, practical, responsible, dependable life. He would become his old self. Everyone would forget about the little incident six months ago that had so besmirched his reputation.

There.

He knew what he had to do.

And he could get started on that plan, right after he convinced Kathie to go back home to Magnolia Falls, so her brother and brother-in-law wouldn’t beat the crap out of him or have him thrown in jail.

That’s all he needed to do.

And stay away from her and have no impure thoughts about her, once she got back there.

Joe didn’t feel at all confident about the staying-away part or the lack-of-impure thoughts part, not after he’d been mentally redoing her outfit to make her look like a naughty French maid within moments of seeing her again.

But he couldn’t go back to town without her. He’d lose all his teeth.

Not that it was wholly the threat that kept him from turning around and leaving. He owed her. She belonged back there with her family, and he was not going to be the one who ruined her life by taking her away from them, impure thoughts or no impure thoughts.

You’re a man. Act like one, he told himself quite sternly.

He marched over to her, his mind firmly on his mission.

She looked up, spotted him and whimpered like a frightened animal.

Honest to God, did she think he was the lowest creature on earth? That she had something to fear from him?

She turned pale. Her hands started to shake, and she looked for a moment like she was going to turn tail and run, like he’d have to chase her. But she finally decided to stand her ground, drawing herself up taller, her chin coming up, a look of embarrassment—and maybe disgust—in her pretty brown eyes.

“Hi, Kathie,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets and wondering if she was going to hit him, thinking he probably deserved it.

She didn’t.

She just glared at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” he said.

“How did you find me?” she demanded.

“Your brother.”

“He would never tell you where I was,” she insisted.

Joe pulled out the sheet that contained a little map and directions Jax had printed off the web, along with a scribbled note from Jax that had the name of Kathie’s dorm and held it up for her to see.

She made a face, and he could just imagine the phone call Jax was going to get about this if Joe didn’t manage to drag her back home, at which point she and her brother could have the conversation in person.

“I have nothing to say to you,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her and doing her best to look stubborn, something that had his mouth twitching, trying to hold back a smile.

She was not a stubborn woman. She couldn’t be intimidating if she tried, and the only reason he would ever be scared of her was in thinking about his own temporary insanity which he blamed on her.

Which reminded him, he was trying to make up for that.

Which meant, he had to make her listen to him and come back home.

No time for Mr. Nice Guy, not that she’d ever believe that of him again.

“Well, I have something to say to you,” he said. “And you’re going to listen.”

That’s how Jax would have treated a woman, right?

Maybe not. Jax would have charmed her into it, but Joe had always felt he lacked in the charm department.

So how the hell was he supposed to manage this?

She gaped at him, no doubt surprised by both his tone and his words, and then she looked hurt, maybe a little teary.

Oh, hell. He’d blown it already.

“Okay, just…listen to me, please?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t talk to you. I don’t want to see you. Just leave me alone!”

Her voice rose at the end. They were attracting attention. Two of the boys were standing halfway across the room staring in what could only be delight, and one of the other adults, a woman dressed as primly as Kathie, came rushing toward them.

“Kathie? Are you all right?”

Kathie nodded, her lower lip trembling, eyes glistening with unshed tears.

Oh, great, Joe thought.

He was going to be the bad guy again.

“I am not a bad guy!” he said.

Her friend gave him a look that said, Yeah, right!

“No, he’s not,” Kathie said, jumping to his defense.

Which thoroughly puzzled him. If he wasn’t the bad guy, who was? He was the only guy involved in the whole situation, which had gone horribly wrong, so he had to be the bad guy, didn’t he?

He started to ask, but Kathie didn’t give him a chance. She handed her clipboard to her friend and said, “Sign the boys out for me, okay? I have to talk to Joe.” Then grabbed him by the hand and started dragging him across the room.

“Joe?” her friend called out. “That’s Joe?”

So, he was famous at Jacobsen Hall.

Great.

“Come on,” Kathie said, reaching for a door. “In here. Now.”

He went without argument, dismayed to find himself alone with her in an empty office. She closed the door behind them, then stood with her back pressed against it, like she didn’t want to get too far from it because she might want to flee at any second.

This was going really well.

“You might as well sit down,” she said, motioning to an armchair in front of the desk.

Trying to be cooperative and not a bad guy, he sat.

She stood there breathing hard and looking pained. “Okay, what do you want?”

Oh, geez.

He really was no good at this. He was supposed to have figured out how he was going to handle this before he got to this point with her.

“Your family wants you to come back home,” he said.

She laughed. “No way. I can’t go back there.”

“Sure you can. Your whole family’s there. They all want you home, Kathie.”

“I doubt that.”

“Of course they do. They love you. They’re miserable without you.”

“They were miserable with me. You and I made them miserable.”

“Well…they’re over it,” he said.

It was true, wasn’t it?

Not over being mad at him, but certainly over being mad at her.

“They could not possibly be over it,” she insisted.

“Sure they are. Call them. They’ll tell you.”

“I can’t talk to them,” she said, like he was an idiot for thinking she could.

“Of course you can.”

“Joe…what we did…it was awful. It was horrible! I’m so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t stand to face them. That’s why I had to get away.”

“Okay,” he said. “I get that. But you’ve been gone for six months. Believe me, they’re all over being mad at you. I mean…they weren’t even that mad at you to start with. They’re mad at me. Everybody is. You don’t have anything to worry about. Everybody in town blames me.”

She looked horrified at that.

What? What had he said? He ran through it again in his head.

Everybody in town blames me.

Okay, maybe that was a bad thing to tell her, but it was true.

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“Well…” What could he say to that? “Not really.”

It was uncomfortable and annoying and frustrating, but not awful.

“No, it is. It’s not fair at all,” she said. “It was me. I was the one. It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he claimed. So what if he thought she’d bewitched him or something. He was a grown man, responsible for his own actions. He wasn’t going to blame this on her.

“It was. Oh, God, I feel even worse now! They all blame you?”

Joe puzzled over that. It wasn’t at all what he had intended to say, but at least she was listening to him. They were having a conversation, and she didn’t look like she was going to run away any minute or cry.

Jax had said to do anything it took to get her back. Joe knew this wasn’t what he meant, but he was starting to think it was the one thing that might actually work. He knew her, knew how her mind worked and how kindhearted she was. It would be much easier to get her to come back in order to help someone else out of a jam than to help herself.

“Okay, yeah, it’s been awful,” he said, watching her face as he did. Oh, yeah. This would work. “The way you ran away like that. They all thought I must have just been…toying with you, which made what I did even worse.”

As if he’d ever been one to toy with women. Her brother toyed with women. Joe did not.

“But, it wasn’t like that,” she insisted.

He didn’t argue that it had been very much like that, just went on, spinning things any way he could to make it most likely that guilt would bring her back.

“And then, when everyone found out about you and me, and then you left…they all thought I dumped you.” Had he dumped her? He supposed it could have looked like that as he tried to keep his distance and not make anything worse, tried to not do another stupid thing and kept hoping the whole thing would just blow over. “Everybody thought I was so awful to you, you couldn’t even stand to be in the same town with me.”

Joe decided it sounded remotely plausible and potentially highly guilt-inducing on her part.

Enough to make her come back?

He hoped so.

Joe figured once he got her back, it was up to Jax and his sisters to keep her there. They hadn’t said anything about him having to keep her there, just to get her there.

“But everyone in town loves you,” Kathie said.

“Not anymore.” He tried to look devastated by that, even if he was more mad than anything else.

Was it working?

“But it wasn’t your fault. It was my fault. All of it!”

It wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. He’d kissed her. More than once. While he was engaged to her sister, someone she loved and he loved, too.

But if Kathie thought it was her fault, then she’d think it was up to her to fix it, and she couldn’t do that from here. She could only do that from Magnolia Falls.

Jax would kill him if he ever found out what Joe said and Joe might dislike himself a little bit more for saying it, but he was with Jax and her family on this—she needed to come home. It was where she belonged, where everyone she loved and who loved her was, and that wasn’t something to walk away from in this world. Life was hard enough without people on your side.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” he said, still trying to look devastated. “People will get over it. I’m sure of it. And it’s not like the bank’s business is suffering or anything because of it. Not really—”

“It’s hurting the bank’s business?” she asked.

“Did I say that? No. Not really.”

“Yes, you did. It must be.”

He shrugged. “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Some new scandal will hit town, and everybody will forget about how awful I was to you and Kate.”

Kate.

That gave him another idea.

He knew she loved her sister.

“And I don’t think anyone really believes Kate’s so mad at you that she can’t forgive you,” he added on a whim. “Or that silly rumor about her ordering you to leave town and never come back!”

“They think she threw me out of town?”

“No. I don’t think anyone really believes that. They know Kate. They know she’d never do that. The idea that she had you stand up for her at the wedding, so she wouldn’t look so bad, and then turned around right afterward and ran you out of town…that’s just silly. Forget I even said it.”

Kathie looked horrified. “I never thought of them blaming you and Kate.”

“And don’t think of it now. Really. We’re fine. We’ll weather this. It’ll just take some time.”

“It’s not right,” Kathie insisted.

“It’s fine,” he said again.

“No, it’s not. And I can’t let this happen. I have to do something.”

“Well…if you really want to help—”

“What? Tell me what to do?”

“I think if you came back for the summer and saw Kate, it would show everyone that those silly things people are saying about Kate not forgiving you and running you out of town…that would be over. Everyone would know it wasn’t true.”

“Yes, they would.” Kathie squared her shoulders, looking determined and very, very sad. “And you. I can’t have them thinking you’re to blame for all of this. I’ll have to spend some time with Kate, and then I’ll have to spend some time with you.”

No, no, no, Joe thought.

Not him.

Not him and her.

No.

That was not part of the plan.

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

“No, I have to make this right. They think you…that you and I…while you were engaged to Kate?” She couldn’t even say it. “And then when she found out about us, you dumped me?”

Joe nodded, thinking this was bad. It was going to be so bad.

“No wonder they hate you,” she said, then looked dismayed. “Joe, we have to convince them that you didn’t dump me.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we do. I could just tell them I dumped you. I could just tell Melanie Mann, that girl Kate went to school with, the one who was spreading all the rumors about Kate last fall. She’d tell the whole town in no time. That’s it. I’ll tell Melanie I dumped you.”

“Okay,” Joe said, thinking it was time to say goodbye to his teeth. Jax would despise any plan that involved making Kathie look bad, and he wouldn’t take it sitting down.

How bad would it be living on little cans of Ensure, the thing old people drank, because they could suck it up through a straw, no teeth needed? He had a second cousin who broke nearly every bone in his face in a car accident and lived on Ensure for months. He’d made it. Surely Joe could, too.

“And if that doesn’t work, we’ll just have to be seen together again,” Kathie said, looking as miserable about the idea as Joe was.

Just shoot me now, Joe thought.

He’d made a fool of himself over her.

A complete fool.

Undone years of careful, respectable living, all in a few stolen moments with her.

“Yeah, that’s what we’ll do,” Kathie said. “We’ll…you know…be seen together, like we are together, just a few times, and a few weeks later, I’ll dump you. I’ll just say I’m done with you, and you can claim you’re heartbroken, and everyone will feel sorry for you and be nice to you again.”

Joe groaned.

Oh, hell.

Jax had said to get her back home.

And it sounded like Joe had convinced her to come back.

So why was he certain things were about to get worse instead of better?

Maybe he’d break his own jaw, just to save time.

Chapter Two

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.

Chapter Three

Kathie’s younger sister, Kim, threw open the door and squealed when she got home from a late day at school and saw Kathie standing there. The next thing Kathie knew, they were in each other’s arms. Kim was practically bouncing with joy and squeezing her so tight.

Kathie was so relieved she nearly cried right then and there.

“I can’t believe it!” Kim said over and over again. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”

Then Kim was almost crying, too.

“Really. Not ever. The longer you stayed away, the more worried I got. I didn’t think we’d all ever be together again, and I couldn’t stand that idea. I just couldn’t stand it!”

“I know,” Kathie said, her bottom lip trembling.

It had been the worst thing. The absolute worst, right after thinking they all must hate her for what she’d done to her beloved older sister. Thinking that they’d never be a family again, the way they always had been. That she’d be completely cut off from them, and that it was something she deserved…it had been horrible.

She feared she still deserved it, but couldn’t help but think it was so incredibly wonderful to be home, no matter what the circumstances.

“So, it’s all over, right?” Kim asked, nearly begging. “You’re back. To stay. Right?”

“I don’t know,” Kathie said, watching her sister’s face fall into disbelief.

She hadn’t thought about this—about how hard it would be on Kim to have her back and think everything would go back to normal, when all Kathie was doing was trying to fix the mess she’d made as best she could and then disappear again.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? This town is your home. This is where you belong!”

“I know. I just…I’ve never really lived anywhere else, except when I was at college,” Kathie tried. She’d never been the adventurous sort. She was the quiet one. Jax was the charmer. Kate, the smart one, and Kim the beauty. Kathie was the mouse. All she’d ever wanted was to feel safe, right here in Magnolia Falls, in the midst of her loving family, but she had to say something to try to explain herself. “I mean, there’s a whole world out there. You know that. You love to travel. There might be all sorts of places I’d love to live.”

Kim looked unconvinced. She looked hurt, and maybe even mad. Kim who was never mad at her.

“I have to try, you know?”

“No. I don’t know,” Kim complained. “Don’t you love us anymore? Don’t you miss us?”

“Of course, I do.”

“You’re supposed to be getting over everything,” Kim argued. “So that everything can get back to normal.”

“I want that,” Kathie insisted.

Oh, God, she wanted it.

She just didn’t think it was possible.

“It was awful when you left,” her sister said, sitting down on the sofa. “Terrible. It was the worst thing. Mom was gone, and then you were gone, and I just kept thinking, who’s going to disappear next? For months, everybody else kept saying you were bound to come home soon, that you wouldn’t be able to stay away. Not me. I kept thinking, who’s going to leave next?”

“Oh, Kimmie. I’m so sorry!”

One more thing to add to her list of sins against her family.

She took her sister into her arms and held on tight.

Kimmie had been a baby when their father died. She had no memories of him at all, just pictures and the stories they all told her about him. And she’d still been in college when their mother died. Because she was so young, Kathie and her brother and sister had tried harder for Kim than anyone else to make sure she felt safe and secure, a part of a strong, loving family.

But Kathie had just left, not even thinking of how her younger sister would feel about it. Kathie had thought she was trying to save the rest of them by leaving. But Kim just saw it as losing one more person in an ever-dwindling family circle.

Kathie had done even more damage than she thought.

Kim hardly spoke to her the rest of the night. She went to bed early, got up early and left. The school year still wasn’t over in Magnolia Falls, and Kim taught art at the elementary school.

Kathie hid in their apartment for three solid hours, then had to call herself all forms of the word coward just to get herself to go outside and risk seeing anyone she knew.

It was spring in Magnolia Falls, warm and sunny, very, very green, everything smelling fresh and new.

If only Kathie could have started all over again, just wound back the clock, what would she do?

Never fall for Joe. Never have some silly, schoolgirl crush in the first place or have it and get over it, completely, ages ago, like other girls did, so that no one would ever be hurt or ever have to know.

But she couldn’t do that.

Which meant she had to do the next best thing.

She had to fix this as best she could. Make people see that it wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t her sister’s. Move on with the plan, and then get away from here again, even if it killed her this time.

She’d taken the time to fix her hair, put on a bit of makeup and dress in her favorite jeans and a bright yellow top, trying to look as good as she could and not have anyone guess how terrible she felt, how scared, how ashamed, how sad.

She was going to march into the center of town, into the bank where Joe worked and go to lunch with him, in full sight of everyone there, on the street and in the Corner Café, a hotbed of gossip dead-center in town.

Time to get moving with the Joe-didn’t-dump-Kathie-and-Joe-isn’t-the-bad-guy plan.

Which meant she had to look happy to see him, and he had to look happy to see her. Kathie was afraid that might be a problem, so she pulled out her cell phone and called the bank, asking for him.

“May I say who’s calling?” the receptionist asked politely.

Kathie was pretty sure it was Stacy Morganstern, who used to be on the same peewee football cheerleading squad as Kim.

“Stacy? It’s Kathie.”

Stacy gasped. “Kathie Cassidy?”

“Yes.”

“You’re back in town? I hadn’t heard!”

“Just got in last night,” Kathie said. “How are you?”

“Well…fine. Just fine. How are you?”

“Great.”

“Where have you been? Everyone was so worried, and then no one knew, and—”

“Teaching. I was teaching. A temporary position in North Carolina, but it’s over now. Joe brought me home yesterday.”

“Joe?” Stacy gasped once more.

“Yes. He drove up and helped me move.” Not entirely untrue. He’d carried her suitcases to her car, after all.

“You’ve been seeing Joe? All this time?”

No way to answer that without lying, which Kathie really didn’t like to do.

“Stacy, I’m sorry. I’m kind of in a rush. I want to catch Joe before he makes lunch plans. Could you put me through?”

“Oh. Okay. Sure. I’ll get him for you.”

Kathie breathed a bit easier after escaping from the you’ve-been-seeing-Joe question. Relief was still rushing through her when Joe came on the phone.

“Kathie?” He sounded like a man approaching a rabid dog.

God, help me, please. I won’t ever go after my sister’s fiancé again. I swear. I won’t fall for any man I’m not allowed to have.

“We need to have lunch together,” she said in a rush, not giving herself time to think about it.

Just do it.

Follow the plan.

The Joe-is-not-the-bad-guy plan.

“Okay,” he said, still sounding like she might bite his head off or something.

“I mean, if we’re going to do this, we just have to do it. Which means, people have to see us together.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “I’ll pick you up in a half hour?”

“No, I’ll meet you at the bank. It’s always crowded at noon. Might as well start there, letting people see us, and then we’ll go to the Corner Café.”

Joe groaned. “You mean the diner?”

“Yes.”

“Darlene remodeled and changed the name. It’s actually called the Corner Diner now and it’s bigger.”

His chance meeting with Kate at the Corner Diner last fall was still probably the talk of the town, the best gossip to come out of the place in years. They’d run into each other in the midst of breaking up, and Kate had informed Joe very loudly that no, despite gossip to the contrary, she was not pregnant with his child or anyone else’s. She’d been spotted at the local OB/GYN’s office, taking a then-pregnant Shannon for a checkup. Everyone in town had assumed it was Kate who was pregnant, not Shannon, a girl Kate had met while volunteering with the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization.

So Kathie could understand why Joe was reluctant to be seen in the place, especially in another meeting destined to make the gossip rounds.

“We have to,” Kathie said. “And try to look happy when you see me. You’re supposed to be crazy about me, remember? Otherwise, you can’t be devastated when I break your heart in a month or so.”

Joe fought the urge to drum his fingers on his desk, a habit he’d given up two years ago as a New Year’s Eve resolution, because it wasn’t good for a man to show any outward sign of weakness. Or stress.

And drumming those fingers was something he did when he was stressed.

Right then, he could have drummed with baseball bats quite happily, and it wouldn’t have given him half the relief he needed considering what was about to happen.

Yeah, baseball bats.

And he had a quarter-inch-thick layer of glass lining the top of his desk to protect the wood from scratches. The bat would have made confetti out of it in seconds, but he wouldn’t have cared.

She was coming.

And he was supposed to look happy about it.

“Mr. Reed?” his secretary, Marta, said from the doorway to his office, an odd look on her face. “Is everything all right?”

Joe hadn’t known she was standing there, hadn’t had a clue, and she wasn’t a woman who moved with any kind of stealth. She was rather large, and besides that, she wore three charm bracelets with about fifty charms that jingled every time she so much as breathed. It drove him crazy, had for years, but it meant he always knew where she was.

Until today.

“I’m fine,” he lied. “Why?”

“You buzzed for me to come in,” she said.

He opened his mouth to say that he certainly hadn’t, but then looked down to find one of his non-drumming fingers perilously close to the button on the phone that he used to summon her.

Maybe he had buzzed her in, one little drum of the fingers before he forgot he’d given it up.

“Is there something I can get you?” she asked.

“No. I…uhhh…I’m going to lunch. In a few minutes.” He wouldn’t be able to choke down a bite, but he’d go and try to look happy about it and not like a man about to get his head chopped off or something.

He wondered if Kathie had briefed her brother, the cop, on the let’s-date-Joe-for-the-summer plan and how Jax might react, whether Joe would get hauled off into the woods yet again and threatened with bodily harm or more moving violations. If Joe was smart—and he’d always prided himself on being a very smart man—he’d park his car and walk to work for the next month. It was only a few miles, and the weather was fine so far.

Yeah, he should walk, just in case, at least until it got too hot.

Because a smart man knew how to pick his battles and avoid the ones he couldn’t win. He’d never win with Kathie’s brother over anything to do with him and Kathie Cassidy.

“Did I forget to write down an appointment, Mr. Reed?” Marta asked.

“No. Made it myself. Just now.”

“Oh. With whom?”

He frowned at her, not wanting to say, wanting to postpone just for a few more minutes that nice, sane, everything-is-getting-back-to-normal atmosphere he’d tried so hard to cultivate after…the unfortunate event, as he’d taken to thinking of it in his own mind.

The series of unfortunate events, he should say.

She’d ended up in his arms more than once, after all.

He could have pleaded temporary insanity if it had been only the one brief time the day her mother died. Granted it had felt like temporary insanity each time, but he really couldn’t claim a series of unfortunate lapses into temporary insanity. One didn’t have serial bouts of temporary insanity. One had to consider it was more than temporary insanity at that point. More of a long-term psychological disorder, which he certainly hoped he did not have.

There’d been the day her mother died. Grief could have easily accounted for him taking her in his arms that day. Not for the kissing part, but the holding at least.

But the second time, the did-that-really-happen, Oh-my-God-it-did time, as he tended to think of it. The no-denying-it-anymore-time, trouble-is-definitely-here, what-the-hellhad-he-done-time. After which, he’d wallowed in guilt and confusion and, if he was really honest with himself, an overwhelming sort of…desire.

For his fiancée’s little sister.

Rot in hell, Joe. You deserve it.

“Uhh hmmm.”

Standing in front of him, Marta cleared her throat pointedly, then frowned at him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Where were we?”

“Your lunch appointment? You were going to tell me who it’s with, so I know to send him in when he arrives.”

Joe tugged at his tie, which was getting tighter with every passing second. When had it gotten so hot in here? They’d turned on the air-conditioning last week, hadn’t they? It wouldn’t go off until sometime in September, at least.

He was starting to sweat when he realized something was going on in the bank. Or rather, that, oddly, nothing was going on in the bank.

A hush had come over the place. Through the glassed-in walls to his office, he could see that people had frozen in place and started to stare, mouths hanging open.

He leaned to the left, then the right, not able to see much of anything to either side of Marta. Her bracelet jingled, as she turned around, too, and started trying to figure out what was going on.

To the back of the lobby near the doors, he saw heads turning. More and more heads. She was halfway through the room now, judging by the stares.

Joe saw someone reach for a cell phone and hit speed-dial. Someone else looked like they were trying to ready their phone to take a photograph.

Great.

They could capture the moment for posterity and share it with the whole town.

When Joe met Kathie again, right there in the bank…

Marta gasped and jingled as her hand went, too late, to cover her mouth. “It’s her!”

His secretary was fiercely loyal to him. She was one of the few people in town who didn’t blame Joe for what happened. He noted with amazement that she had positioned herself between Joe and the door to his office, as if to shield him with her body from the walking disaster in the lobby, which had Joe fighting not to laugh.

The idea that Marta was so terrified of what might happen next to poor Joe that she’d physically stand between him and Kathie Cassidy was both sad and hilarious. Sad that she thought he needed protecting that much and hilarious at the idea that anything as insubstantial as a person standing between them would be enough to keep Kathie from doing whatever it was that she did to him.

Because he just wasn’t himself around her.

It was like she short-circuited something in his supremely logical, well-organized, methodical brain, and he became someone he didn’t even know, someone he couldn’t begin to understand.

And what was his role in this charade today?

To act smitten?

He fought down another laugh.

Smitten?

Had he ever come close to being smitten with anyone?

Everything he’d ever felt for her sister had been completely reasonable and sensible. He’d been so happy to find someone who suited him so perfectly, who believed in the same things he did and had the same kind of calm, reasoned approach to life that he did. Theirs had been the completely rational, confident kind of courtship he’d always been seeking and feared he’d never find, because most women were…well, not so calm or rational or well-organized.

And Kathie…he would have never believed she was capable of causing havoc in anyone’s life.

She could be quiet as a mouse most of the time. Kate was the one in charge, the strong, smart, determined one. Kim was the baby of the family, full of energy and exuberance. Jax was…well, Jax. As flashy and outgoing as Joe was serious and calm.

Kathie could easily disappear in the midst of them, hardly uttering a word. Sometimes when the whole Cassidy family was together, he forgot she was even there.

He’d known about the crush, of course. No way he could not have known. But that had been over for years, he’d believed. She’d always been kind to him, always noticed him but never done anything in recent years to make him think her feelings for him were anything but a history likely to embarrass her.

In a lot of ways, he’d still thought of her as a teenager. It was like she hadn’t aged a day since he’d first met her, when Kate had brought him home to meet her family for the first time.

Little Kathie Cassidy.

His undoing.

“What do you want me to do?” Marta whispered to him urgently? “Get rid of her?”

“No, I don’t want you to get rid of her,” he said, all but prying open his own mouth after that and trying to force out the words, She’s my date. No luck. He just couldn’t get them out.

“I will if you want me to. I can do it. I get rid of people you don’t want to see all the time. I’m good at it.”

She made it sound like she’d been taking lessons from Jax, twisting arms and threatening people with broken kneecaps or something. It was a bank, for God’s sake.

“No one’s getting rid of anyone,” Joe said. “She’s here to see me.”

“Not if you don’t want her to. No one gets in to see you if you don’t want them to.”

“Marta—”

“I’m his lunch date,” Kathie announced to what seemed like the entire building.

Marta gasped.

Maybe the entire room did, as well. Joe couldn’t be sure.

He was too busy staring at her.

No naughty, French-maid-like outfit today.

Just jeans that were the tiniest bit snug and a little no-nothing, T-shirt-like top. Nothing that should have made her look so good, so young and fit and…

Something had happened to her while she’d been gone, he decided.

She looked…different. Not so teenage-girlish.

Oh, she still looked impossibly young to his thirty-one years, but not the way she used to.

Or maybe he’d just never really looked at her that closely because he’d never thought of her as anything but his fiancée’s little sister. Until she’d kissed him that day, and then he’d simply tried not to think of her at all. Guilt had left him all but blind. He wouldn’t even look at her, but now….

She looked different.

She looked…really good.

God, help him, he was headed straight for ruin again.

She was Kate only minus three years and a wealth of knowledge of how the world worked. Kate minus all the determination and drive and seriousness. Kathie was more carefree, a kinder, gentler, happier version of her sister, and he hated the whole idea of comparing the two of them. It brought to mind what a vile thing he’d done, being engaged to the one and kissing the other.

But as she stood before him that day, he couldn’t help but think she was different in ways he didn’t want to examine.

And that he was once again on the edge of sheer ruin because of the odd things he felt for her.

Kathie walked right up to him, stopping only a breath away.

Uh-oh.

Joe braced himself as best he could for what might come next.

Just how friendly were they going to pretend to be?

She put one hand against his chest, another on his shoulder, stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. While she was that close, she whispered in his ear, “You look like you’re afraid I’m going to pull out a gun and rob the place, Joe.”

Which was probably true.

He forced himself to try to relax, to let his hands rest lightly on her shoulders and smile as he brushed his lips against the side of her cheek, something he’d probably done a thousand times when he’d been engaged to her sister and never had so much as a remotely sexual thought.

Nothing but a friendly hello once again.

He could do this.

Except they were trying to look like more than friends, and she’d lingered too close, as did he, for a moment too long.

It only took a moment with her, her hand pressed against his chest, right over his heart, his face against hers, lips lingering beside the soft skin of her cheek, then his nose caught in the vicinity of her right ear, in the edges of her hair, taking in the smell of her.

He remembered this smell, so delicate, barely there. A man had to get this close to smell it.

Maybe it was the scent of her that did it, that went in through his nose and made a beeline to some part of his brain that just…couldn’t take it, had no defenses against that sweet, intoxicating smell.

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