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.
“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—”