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“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.”
