Teresa Hill - Her Sister's Fiancé

“What did you do?” Kate stared at her new husband, who should know her moods well enough by now to be uneasy about her current state of mind, then at her brother, who definitely knew better, but just did ridiculous things anyway.

“What do you mean, what did we do?” Jax made himself comfortable in her kitchen by grabbing a carton of orange juice out of the fridge and downing what was left in it in practically one gulp. “We got her home. I thought you’d be happy. I thought you’d be jumping for joy, and we’d be heroes.”

“That depends. What did you do?” Kate said, crossing her arms and trying out her sternest look on both of them.

Ben was going to play innocent and then try to make her laugh. She could tell. That’s what he always did when he annoyed her, and it usually worked, because she adored him, but her brother was a different story altogether.

She and Jax both tended to think they knew what was best for their younger siblings, which had led to any number of clashes over the years. Kate was trying to let go of her controlling tendencies, but Jax’s had gotten even worse since their sister took off six months ago and, to date, had adamantly refused to come home, no matter what kind of begging or pleading anyone had done.

“Can you not just be happy?” Jax asked, maybe catching a hint of the trouble he was in, but maybe not. Maybe he was oblivious still. “You know? Wow! Jump up and down. Kiss your husband. Hug your brother. Go see your sister? That kind of happy?”

“Not until I know how you got her back here,” Kate said, picking up the knife she’d been using to chop carrots and holding it purposefully in front of her. “What did you say? What finally worked?”

“We didn’t say anything,” said Ben, doing his Mr. Innocent routine.

“Oh, okay. Neither one of you said a word, and yet, you somehow got her back here,” she said, waving the knife a bit for good measure. “Which leads me to my previous question. What did you do?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Jax claimed. “Joe did it.”

“Yeah, Joe did it.”

“Joe, who she won’t talk to any more than she’ll talk to any of us? He got her to come back? Okay, what did Joe do?”

“He didn’t say exactly,” Jax said, looking to Ben. “Did he?”

“Not to me.”

“Right. He didn’t say.”

“Okay, now I’m really worried,” Kate said. “You two have done something, and I’m thinking it didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped and now you want me to fix it.” She looked pointedly at her brother, whom she was sure was the guilty party.

“No. You’ve got it all wrong,” he claimed. “We just wanted to tell you she was back…so you could go see her. Don’t you want to go see her?”

“Yes.”

“And you should go now. You could put the knife down and go now,” Jax said. “I mean…why not go now? You haven’t seen her in months. Why wait?”

“For one thing, I’m in the middle of cooking dinner.”

“I’ll do it,” Ben offered, taking the knife from her before she could object.

“Me, too.” Jax jumped in, picking up a container of rice and shaking it. “I can help. Really. What do you do with this?”

“I’m going to start throwing things in five seconds, if you don’t tell me what’s going on!”

“Okay, okay,” her brother said, putting the rice back down. “She might be…a little upset.”

Kate arched a brow. “Because…”

“She might be…a little mad,” Ben said.

Kate tried again. “What did you two do, kidnap her?”

“No,” they insisted.

“Because I know Joe wouldn’t kidnap her.” He would never force anyone to do anything against their will.

“No, I’m sure it wasn’t anything like that,” Ben said. “She just…well—”

“Okay, she might be leaving again,” Jax said, his expression bland as could be.

Oh, this was bad.

Bad!

“And why would she be leaving, when she just got here?” Kate asked.

“We’re not sure,” Ben said. “Maybe…because we sent Joe to get her? Was it really that bad? Sending Joe?”

“That depends,” Kate said, thinking she could imagine scenarios in which that would be very, very bad, depending on how her sister now felt about Joe. Then she thought of something else. “Exactly how did you send Joe to get her?”

“We might have…threatened him,” Ben said, stripping off his clerical collar as he said it. He always got rid of it when he’d done something decidedly unministerly. “Okay, I didn’t threaten him. I swear. You know I don’t do that stuff. I just…stood by and advised him to cooperate while your brother threatened him.”

“You threatened him?” She yelled at her brother, then turned to her husband. “And you went along with it?”

“Just trying to fit in with the family, you know?” Ben claimed. “Be a part of things? Make you happy, by getting your sister home. That kind of thing. That’s all.”

Kate wanted to scream, but managed not to, barely.

Poor Kathie.

She’d been through so much in the last fifteen months, starting with losing their beloved mother.

“Let me take a wild guess,” Kate said, turning back to her brother. “You threatened Joe that if he didn’t go get her and convince her to come back…”

“He’d break his jaw,” Ben said, eager to help her understand now.

“Who’s breaking someone’s jaw?” Shannon, Kate and Ben’s sixteen-year-old, soon-to-be-officially-adopted daughter showed up in the kitchen at just the right moment.

“No one broke anyone’s jaw,” Ben said.

“Your uncle just threatened to,” Kate said.

“Oh.” Shannon nodded as she opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside. “And they thought I’d be trouble.”

“Yeah, who’d have thought the adults would be the ones to make trouble?” Kate said. “Another big guess here…Kathie found out you threatened to break Joe’s jaw, and because of that, Joe went to see her and convinced her to come back, right?”

“Yeah,” her brother admitted. “Why is that so bad?”

“Ahhhhhh!” Kate did scream then. “People think you know so much about women and that you’re so good with them, but it’s just crap, Jax. It’s complete and total crap!”

Kate knocked three separate times, knowing her sister had to be there, because her car was out front. Who else drove a bright yellow bug with a rainbow sticker on the back and bumper stickers that said, Visualize Whirled Peas and, What Would Jesus Bomb? Kate had missed her sister desperately.

“Kathie, please,” Kate called out through the door. “I have dinner on the stove. I’ll go home and poison them with it, if it’ll make you feel better, promise. Just let me in first.”

That did it. The door swung open.

Her poor sister stood there with big red eyes and a thoroughly defeated expression on her face.

“Oh, baby,” Kate said, taking her sister in her arms.

“They told you what they did?” Kathie asked.

“It wasn’t easy, but I got it out of them.”

“And you’re willing to hurt them for me?”

“Sure, I will. They’ve gotten to be buddies, but they’re dangerous together. I think Jax has been waiting for years to have another man in the family, you know, so it won’t be three against one anymore. And he’s going a little nuts waiting for Gwen’s mother to get better, so they can have their wedding with her here. Ever since she broke her hip, and Jax and Gwen postponed the wedding, he’s been a little…intense.”

Kathie nodded, her head still on Kate’s shoulder.

Kate gave her a big squeeze. “How about I make them both throw up their dinner? I think I can do that with no problem. I mean…I did it by accident once, trying to impress Ben’s mother. Surely I can do it on purpose.”