Teresa Hill - Her Sister's Fiancé

Joe didn’t feel at all confident about the staying-away part or the lack-of-impure thoughts part, not after he’d been mentally redoing her outfit to make her look like a naughty French maid within moments of seeing her again.

But he couldn’t go back to town without her. He’d lose all his teeth.

Not that it was wholly the threat that kept him from turning around and leaving. He owed her. She belonged back there with her family, and he was not going to be the one who ruined her life by taking her away from them, impure thoughts or no impure thoughts.

You’re a man. Act like one, he told himself quite sternly.

He marched over to her, his mind firmly on his mission.

She looked up, spotted him and whimpered like a frightened animal.

Honest to God, did she think he was the lowest creature on earth? That she had something to fear from him?

She turned pale. Her hands started to shake, and she looked for a moment like she was going to turn tail and run, like he’d have to chase her. But she finally decided to stand her ground, drawing herself up taller, her chin coming up, a look of embarrassment—and maybe disgust—in her pretty brown eyes.

“Hi, Kathie,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets and wondering if she was going to hit him, thinking he probably deserved it.

She didn’t.

She just glared at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” he said.

“How did you find me?” she demanded.

“Your brother.”

“He would never tell you where I was,” she insisted.

Joe pulled out the sheet that contained a little map and directions Jax had printed off the web, along with a scribbled note from Jax that had the name of Kathie’s dorm and held it up for her to see.

She made a face, and he could just imagine the phone call Jax was going to get about this if Joe didn’t manage to drag her back home, at which point she and her brother could have the conversation in person.

“I have nothing to say to you,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her and doing her best to look stubborn, something that had his mouth twitching, trying to hold back a smile.

She was not a stubborn woman. She couldn’t be intimidating if she tried, and the only reason he would ever be scared of her was in thinking about his own temporary insanity which he blamed on her.

Which reminded him, he was trying to make up for that.

Which meant, he had to make her listen to him and come back home.

No time for Mr. Nice Guy, not that she’d ever believe that of him again.

“Well, I have something to say to you,” he said. “And you’re going to listen.”

That’s how Jax would have treated a woman, right?

Maybe not. Jax would have charmed her into it, but Joe had always felt he lacked in the charm department.

So how the hell was he supposed to manage this?

She gaped at him, no doubt surprised by both his tone and his words, and then she looked hurt, maybe a little teary.

Oh, hell. He’d blown it already.

“Okay, just…listen to me, please?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t talk to you. I don’t want to see you. Just leave me alone!”

Her voice rose at the end. They were attracting attention. Two of the boys were standing halfway across the room staring in what could only be delight, and one of the other adults, a woman dressed as primly as Kathie, came rushing toward them.

“Kathie? Are you all right?”

Kathie nodded, her lower lip trembling, eyes glistening with unshed tears.

Oh, great, Joe thought.

He was going to be the bad guy again.

“I am not a bad guy!” he said.

Her friend gave him a look that said, Yeah, right!

“No, he’s not,” Kathie said, jumping to his defense.

Which thoroughly puzzled him. If he wasn’t the bad guy, who was? He was the only guy involved in the whole situation, which had gone horribly wrong, so he had to be the bad guy, didn’t he?

He started to ask, but Kathie didn’t give him a chance. She handed her clipboard to her friend and said, “Sign the boys out for me, okay? I have to talk to Joe.” Then grabbed him by the hand and started dragging him across the room.

“Joe?” her friend called out. “That’s Joe?”

So, he was famous at Jacobsen Hall.

Great.

“Come on,” Kathie said, reaching for a door. “In here. Now.”

He went without argument, dismayed to find himself alone with her in an empty office. She closed the door behind them, then stood with her back pressed against it, like she didn’t want to get too far from it because she might want to flee at any second.

This was going really well.

“You might as well sit down,” she said, motioning to an armchair in front of the desk.

Trying to be cooperative and not a bad guy, he sat.

She stood there breathing hard and looking pained. “Okay, what do you want?”

Oh, geez.

He really was no good at this. He was supposed to have figured out how he was going to handle this before he got to this point with her.

“Your family wants you to come back home,” he said.

She laughed. “No way. I can’t go back there.”

“Sure you can. Your whole family’s there. They all want you home, Kathie.”

“I doubt that.”

“Of course they do. They love you. They’re miserable without you.”

“They were miserable with me. You and I made them miserable.”

“Well…they’re over it,” he said.

It was true, wasn’t it?

Not over being mad at him, but certainly over being mad at her.

“They could not possibly be over it,” she insisted.

“Sure they are. Call them. They’ll tell you.”

“I can’t talk to them,” she said, like he was an idiot for thinking she could.

“Of course you can.”

“Joe…what we did…it was awful. It was horrible! I’m so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t stand to face them. That’s why I had to get away.”

“Okay,” he said. “I get that. But you’ve been gone for six months. Believe me, they’re all over being mad at you. I mean…they weren’t even that mad at you to start with. They’re mad at me. Everybody is. You don’t have anything to worry about. Everybody in town blames me.”

She looked horrified at that.

What? What had he said? He ran through it again in his head.

Everybody in town blames me.

Okay, maybe that was a bad thing to tell her, but it was true.

“That’s terrible,” she said.

“Well…” What could he say to that? “Not really.”

It was uncomfortable and annoying and frustrating, but not awful.

“No, it is. It’s not fair at all,” she said. “It was me. I was the one. It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t,” he claimed. So what if he thought she’d bewitched him or something. He was a grown man, responsible for his own actions. He wasn’t going to blame this on her.

“It was. Oh, God, I feel even worse now! They all blame you?”

Joe puzzled over that. It wasn’t at all what he had intended to say, but at least she was listening to him. They were having a conversation, and she didn’t look like she was going to run away any minute or cry.

Jax had said to do anything it took to get her back. Joe knew this wasn’t what he meant, but he was starting to think it was the one thing that might actually work. He knew her, knew how her mind worked and how kindhearted she was. It would be much easier to get her to come back in order to help someone else out of a jam than to help herself.

“Okay, yeah, it’s been awful,” he said, watching her face as he did. Oh, yeah. This would work. “The way you ran away like that. They all thought I must have just been…toying with you, which made what I did even worse.”