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“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.
