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