man was not Richard Hancock.
This man was Liam James.
With dawning horror, Katie gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. She’d just had sex with her sister’s boyfriend!
STUNNED, Liam could only stare as the woman in the French-maid costume almost knocked him down getting past him. In the stark glare of the closet light bulb, he saw her auburn wig was knocked askew, blond curls were peeking out around it.
“Wait,” he called.
She tossed him one last panic-stricken look over her shoulder. Even with the mask covering most of her face, she seemed oddly familiar. Did he know her?
He shook his head to clear it. Who?
Brooke. She reminded him of Brooke Winfield.
The synapses in his brain fired rapidly as alarming thoughts crowded in. Had Brooke dressed up in the French-maid costume to seduce him at the party? But Brooke had brown hair and she was taller than this woman.
And then it dawned on him and he recognized where he’d seen that saucy little walk before.
She was Katie Winfield. Brooke’s baby sister.
Shoving a hand through his hair, Liam groaned aloud.
He had to go after her, had to explain himself. Had to justify what he’d done. Had to make sense of what they’d done together.
Liam took off after her, but she’d already disappeared in the crowd. People were staring at him, pointing and tittering. Agitated, he glanced down and saw that his bare chest was exposed from where Katie had ripped the buttons off his shirt and that his pants were unzipped.
Frantically, he tugged up his zipper as he ran. He was desperate to talk to her before she got away. But by the time he reached the front door, she’d already fled to the parking lot.
“Katie!” he yelled as he stumbled down the stairs and out onto the asphalt road, just as her red BMW convertible sped past him.
All he saw were her taillights disappearing into the darkness, leaving him feeling like the world’s biggest jerk.
4
KATIE SPENT the remainder of the weekend holed up in her condo. She sprawled out on the couch, eating handfuls of caramel popcorn, guzzling hot chocolate and immersing herself in a romance-classics movie marathon. When Katie was a kid and feeling down in the dumps, her mother would get out the popcorn, the cocoa and the old movies to pick up her daughter’s flagging spirits.
Normally the self-indulgent trick pulled Katie right out of the doldrums. This time, however, it hadn’t worked. For one thing, it reminded her of Daisy and that made her sad. For another, watching lovers repeatedly meet, mingle, mate and marry hammered home what she already knew—sisters don’t stab sisters in the back by sleeping with their boyfriends.
She would never be able to look Brooke in the eye again.
Cut yourself some slack. You didn’t do it on purpose.
No, Katie might not have done it on purpose, but once again, she hadn’t looked before she leaped. Witness the result of her recklessness.
She was so ashamed.
Brooke doesn’t have to know. No one has to know.
Except Liam knew.
Maybe not, she hoped. Maybe he hadn’t recognized her with the costume and the mask. She prayed it was so. But here was the terrible truth: sex with Liam was the best sex she’d ever had, and she wanted to do it again and again and again.
It wasn’t him, she tried to convince herself. It was the masquerade, the semipublic location, the forbidden thrill of it all.
Oh God, she’d made such a mess of things.
By Monday evening, she was so sick of her own company she picked up the phone and called Tanisha.
“How was your weekend,” she asked her best friend.
“Great,” Tanisha purred like a satisfied kitten. “Dwayne and I spent the entire weekend in bed. In fact, he just left. How was your weekend?”
“Sucky.”
Tanisha hissed in her breath. “Things didn’t go so well with Richard?”
“I wasn’t with Richard,” Katie mumbled.
“Oh?”
“I had sex with my sister’s boyfriend,” she blurted.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Katie wailed. “I thought he was Richard. He was wearing a pirate costume. It was an honest mistake but now I feel so—”
“Hold the phone, girlfriend. I’ll be right over.”
An hour later, Tanisha showed up on her doorstep, a bag of takeout from the Chinese restaurant down the block clutched in her hand and a half gallon of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream in the other.
“This sounded like the kind of emergency best soothed by food,” she explained, and breezed into the condo. “Besides, I’m starving. Dwayne and I must have burned up a thousand calories.”
“Braggart,” Katie accused.
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t be doing some bragging of your own if the shoe was on the other foot.” Tanisha dished up sweet-and-sour chicken and several kinds of dim sum on two paper plates. She passed one of the plates to Katie and handed her a set of chopsticks.
The delicious smell teased Katie’s nose and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything but caramel popcorn all weekend long. They sat at the wrought iron bistro table in the breakfast nook.
“Give me all the details,” Tanisha said. “Don’t leave anything out.”
Cringing, Katie told her everything.
“Look,” Tanisha said when she’d finished, “it was a case of mistaken identity. No one can fault you for that. If anything, he’s the one who should be ashamed for sneaking off with someone else when he’s dating your sister.”
“That’s true.” She perked up. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I betrayed Brooke.”
“You didn’t do it on purpose. How serious is Brooke and this guy, anyway? And what’s his name?”
“Liam James.”
Tanisha’s eyes widened. “The real-estate mogul who was nominated Boston’s most eligible bachelor by Young Bostonian?”
“That’d be the one.”
“All I gotta say is, girl, when you screw up, you do it in style.”
Katie groaned and sank her head in her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do anything.” Tanisha shrugged. “Forget all about it.”
“I can’t.”
Tanisha studied her for a moment. “This is really eating you up inside, isn’t it?”
Katie nodded miserably.
“Your guilt only underscores what I was trying to tell you on Friday.”
“Which is?”
“You’re into self-sabotage.”
“You’re probably right,” Katie said glumly, poking at her dim sum with a chopstick. Of all the dumb things she’d done in her life, this had to be one of the dumbest.
“There’s a cure, you know.”
Katie looked up from her plate. “And that is?”
“Give up casual sex.”
Katie arched an eyebrow. “This coming from the queen of casual