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“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.
