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“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.
