Her Sister's Fiancé

“No. I don’t think anyone really believes that. They know Kate. They know she’d never do that. The idea that she had you stand up for her at the wedding, so she wouldn’t look so bad, and then turned around right afterward and ran you out of town…that’s just silly. Forget I even said it.”

Kathie looked horrified. “I never thought of them blaming you and Kate.”

“And don’t think of it now. Really. We’re fine. We’ll weather this. It’ll just take some time.”

“It’s not right,” Kathie insisted.

“It’s fine,” he said again.

“No, it’s not. And I can’t let this happen. I have to do something.”

“Well…if you really want to help—”

“What? Tell me what to do?”

“I think if you came back for the summer and saw Kate, it would show everyone that those silly things people are saying about Kate not forgiving you and running you out of town…that would be over. Everyone would know it wasn’t true.”

“Yes, they would.” Kathie squared her shoulders, looking determined and very, very sad. “And you. I can’t have them thinking you’re to blame for all of this. I’ll have to spend some time with Kate, and then I’ll have to spend some time with you.”

No, no, no, Joe thought.

Not him.

Not him and her.

No.

That was not part of the plan.

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

“No, I have to make this right. They think you…that you and I…while you were engaged to Kate?” She couldn’t even say it. “And then when she found out about us, you dumped me?”

Joe nodded, thinking this was bad. It was going to be so bad.

“No wonder they hate you,” she said, 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.