Teresa Hill - Her Sister's Fiancé

“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—”

“He doesn’t. If he did, he would have said so, but he didn’t. He looked me right in the eye at Kate’s wedding, when everybody knew the whole story and everyone was watching us and whispering about us, and do you know what he told me?”

“What?”

“That he was sorry. Not that he cared about me, but that he was sorry about everything that had happened, that it was all his fault, but it wasn’t all his fault. It was mine. I knew it. He was just trying to be nice about it by saying it was his fault, because he’s a nice guy.”

“Who has a thing for you,” Liz insisted. “And you have a major thing for him.”

“I can’t. He can’t. We can’t. Too many people have been hurt by this. I’m trying to fix it now, not start something all over again.”

“I think you want to see him again,” Liz said.

“No. Really. I don’t.”

She wanted her life back, her nice, quiet, careful, never-done-anything-wrong life with her family who loved her and no one in town who ever gossiped about her and no rumors flying about her and her sister’s fiancé. Nothing to be ashamed about. No reason to run away.

That’s what she wanted.

Really.

Not Joe Reed.

“I just need to see my family,” she said.

“And what are you going to say to them?”

“I have no idea.”

Joe waited until her things were packed, carried her suitcases to her car, a cute little bright yellow Volkswagen bug, and then said he’d follow her.

“All the way back to Magnolia Falls?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, opening the door to his banker’s car, a sedate black four-door sedan.

“Why? You don’t trust me to really go back there?”

“Well…” he hedged, standing in the bright sunshine filtering down through the trees. “No. Not that. I just…I mean, we’re both going to the same place, right? We might as well drive together.”

“I’m twenty-four years old, Joe. I can find my way back to town by myself,” she insisted.

“Of course. I know that. I just…”

“Don’t trust me to actually come back. What do you think? I’m going to stand here and tell you I will, and then take off in the other direction? You think I’m a liar and a coward?”

“No. Really, I don’t,” he said, closing his car door and coming over to her, where she didn’t want him, not anywhere near her. “I just think it was a bad situation, and I’m sorry, about everything, and I know how important it is to your family to have you back, so…”

Not to him. To her family. Just as she suspected. He probably hadn’t given her a second thought, not in the way she wished he would.

“And what about you? With everything that happened, I mean?” she asked, before he could think she was asking about him and her. “Let’s say, with Kate being married. How are you with that?”

“I hope she’s happy,” he said, and seemed to mean it.

Could he possibly? He’d been crazy about her sister since the moment she’d met him. He’d followed her back to Magnolia Falls after graduation, taken a job at the local bank and settled down there, becoming as much a part of the town as Kathie and her siblings, who had been born there. His mother had left some silly retirement village someplace near Atlanta to go there, and when it had been time to move his grandmother into a nursing home, they’d brought her to Magnolia Falls, too. This was a man who’d been sure of himself and his future with her sister.

“Kate seems really happy with Ben,” Joe added. “I see them around town every now and then. I just ran into Ben yesterday, at the town picnic, as a matter of fact.”

Which meant…what? That they were buddies now? That it didn’t hurt at all, thinking about Kate married to someone else?

Kathie stared at the face of the man she’d dreamed about for years and couldn’t detect the first hint of what was going on inside of him. That was one thing about Joe that had always kept her guessing. He wasn’t a man to show easily how he felt. He could be dying inside, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever know it.