The Father Factor. Lilian Darcy

to each other again—casual hands, polite smiles—and he wondered what it was going to take for this to get easy.

      Go back and erase the past, maybe?

      Six years back, to Linnie and Ryan’s wedding, and then another five to the night of Shallis’s sixteenth birthday party, when he’d almost kissed her. That little word “almost” was the only thing that gave him any hope and any self-respect, when he looked back on his behavior that night.

      He’d wanted to, and Shallis at that point in her life would have practically fainted with ecstasy in his arms. Yeah, her crush had been as obvious to him as the sweet champagne on her breath, and as innocent and doomed as a baby doe caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

      She wouldn’t have turned him down, even though she wouldn’t have had a clue what was really happening. She’d have gone as far as he wanted, believed everything he said. The sweet-natured seventeen-year-old boy who’d been agonizingly and just as innocently in love with Shallis that year wouldn’t have had a chance.

      And Linnie, who’d considered herself just about engaged to Jared at the time, would never have known…unless Shallis herself had told her. Jared would have gone on his merry way, feeling like a winner after an easy victory, as usual.

      Two sisters wrapped around his little finger, when he didn’t have serious plans for either of them.

      But he hadn’t done it. He’d run his fingers softly through Shallis’s golden hair. His mouth had come within an inch of hers. She’d sighed up at him, her eyes huge and awed and gorgeous, as she waited.

      She was young enough to trust him, to have faith in her own feelings, and to believe that Linnie would forgive her such a betrayal, because this was love, and love conquered all.

      He didn’t understand how he’d been able to read her layered feelings so clearly, but somehow he had.

      Finally he’d muttered, “I can’t do this,” and he’d torn himself away, left with an enduring sense of protectiveness toward Shallis Duncan that he didn’t understand, either.

      It was one of the few moments in his life that had had the power to convince him, over the past six years, that he had any sense of honor in him at all.