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To everyone at The Whole You, Rutherfordton, NC.
Without a doubt, some of the coolest, nicest,
funniest, kindest, most interesting people in the
world. (The only other group I’ve ever found that
I’d describe that way are romance writers.)
I love you all. We don’t really have to leave, right?
And for Michael, because that’s
just the way he is and because he asked,
I will write words I have never before used in
all of my twenty-three published novels:
Heaving Bosoms.
Heaving Bosoms.
Heaving Bosoms.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Coming Next Month
Chapter One
The little old ladies by the picnic tables glared at him like he was pond scum.
Joe Reed tried to ignore them as he stood under a giant magnolia tree eating a hot dog at the town’s May Day picnic, trying to look like the old him—respectable, predictable, an all-around good guy.
Wait a minute. He leaned to the right to get a better look at one of the little old ladies.
Was that a friend of his grandmother’s?
He groaned.
His grandmother was hard of hearing and not quite living in the present. She often thought she was a girl looking for her poodle, CoCo, who’d been dead for seventy-five years. Joe had hoped she’d never get the whole story of his downfall, but if one of her friends from the nursing home was here, she’d probably be treated to the whole unsavory thing. Which meant, he had to hope his grandmother either wouldn’t hear what the woman had to say or that she’d forget it very quickly, both highly likely.
Still, he really didn’t want her to know.
Yeah, now that he’d gotten a better look, he was afraid that was her friend Marge and…maybe she was coming this way, probably to give him a piece of her mind. He turned around hoping to disappear, but the next moment, he got nailed in the shoulders and dragged off into the woods by two men.
Not strangers, unfortunately.
He’d rather be mugged.
Not that anybody got mugged in Magnolia Falls, Georgia.
But he’d rather.
“Hey, come on,” he tried.
Wherever they were going, he could at least get there under his own power. But his captors would have none of that, and one of them was armed, so he stopped arguing and let them do what they wanted.
They released him a half mile later, dumped him with his back against a tree, then backed up to face him, both glaring.
One was a cop.
Joe used to date his sister.
The other was a minister.
He was now married to the sister Joe used to date. Very happily married, by all accounts, so, as Joe saw it, Ben couldn’t object too much to the fact that Joe and Kate had broken up. Otherwise, Ben and Kate would never have gotten together.
It was just the way in which Joe and Kate had broken up that was the problem.
That was where the other sister came into it. Kathie.
There was a third sister, Kim, the baby of the family, but Joe had never laid a hand on her.
It was the middle one who had been his downfall. Still was, judging by the way the people of their little town were treating him six months after the whole debacle.
“We have a problem,” the brother who was the cop, Jax, said.
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Joe insisted, feeling like he was in third grade and had gotten caught pulling Celia Rawlins’ hair. Not that he’d actually done it. She had just kept accusing him of it to get him into trouble. His mother said it was a crude form of flirtation, but he just hadn’t understood. He didn’t like being in trouble. He really was a good guy. Not that anybody believed that anymore.
“Oh, yes, you did,” Jax said, looking as big and intimidating as he had in high school, whether he’d been plowing through linebackers like they were zombies or dating the girls of the cheerleading squad one after another. Everybody got a turn. He’d made it look easy, still did.
Joe had been quieter, spent more time on his studies, been president of the senior class and valedictorian, a chess champion, a force to be reckoned with in debate, none of which had helped him get girls.
He was not a ladies’ man, not at all the type to be engaged to one sister and sneaking around kissing the other.
He still wasn’t sure how it had happened.
Temporary insanity was all he’d managed to come up with.
It still made his head spin when he thought about it too much, so he tried not to. He was a bank president, for God’s sake. The youngest in the state when he’d been named to the job. Voted most likely to succeed. Mr. Straightlaced.
What had happened to that man?
“I really didn’t do anything,” Joe tried again.
He hadn’t called anyone, hadn’t talked to anyone, hadn’t seen anyone. He’d lived the life of a monk for six months, trying to keep his head down and do his job and not give anyone reason to talk about him, not ever again.
Not that it had stopped any of the gossip.
He felt like he’d been branded for life, would never live down what had happened.
He looked at Jax, seething, his gun at his side, then to Ben, the calmer of the two. Surely a minister wouldn’t be a part of beating the crap out of him here in the woods, would he? Not that Joe didn’t think he deserved a beating. Honestly, he was surprised Jax had waited this long.
But that was it, a few punches? They weren’t going to really hurt him, right? At least, he didn’t think so.
He looked to Ben for help.
“It would probably be better if you just listened for a while,” Ben said, looking calm as could be, like he took part in dragging people off into the woods all the time, which seemed quite unminister-like to Joe.
Kate had said her new husband had a way of making things happen. Surely she hadn’t meant this.
“This is the way it is,” Ben said, smiling a bit while Jax scowled. “Kate isn’t happy.”
Joe puzzled over that. He hadn’t done anything to Kate, either. Had barely spoken to her, hadn’t gotten anywhere near her, and if Kate wasn’t happy, wasn’t that more Ben’s problem than Joe’s, given the fact that Ben was her husband now?
“Well, she would be happy—perfectly happy—married to me,” Ben said. “Except for one thing.”
Joe could just imagine what that one thing was.
“And Kim’s not happy,” Jax said. “Most important of all to you, I’m not happy, and I could hurt you so easily.”
Ben stepped between them at that point. “And if my wife and her family aren’t happy, of course I’m not happy,” he said.
Okay. Joe hadn’t gotten anywhere near any of them, either, but he nodded, to show that he was listening and taking it all in.
“We couldn’t possibly be happy right now because a member of our family isn’t here,” Jax said.
“Okay,” Joe said hesitantly.
Kathie. She’d taken off the day of Kate and Ben’s wedding, just disappearing after the ceremony. It had been weeks before they’d even known where she was, teaching at some expensive boarding school in North Carolina and resisting all their efforts to get her to come back home.
Joe couldn’t blame her. He’d have liked to run away, too, but he wasn’t the type to run. He had obligations, and he’d decided to tough it out here, thinking that years of being responsible, dependable, good-guy Joe would overcome a few moments of insanity with his then-fiancé’s sister.
But no. Apparently, he was going to be punished for this forever.
And now, they were all mad at him because Kathie wasn’t here?
Joe was afraid to have her within a hundred miles of him, afraid of what he might do next to screw up his life, but they wouldn’t care about that.
“And since you made this mess,” Jax said, glowering down at him, “you are going to fix it.”
Joe swallowed hard, bracing himself for a fist to the jaw, wondering if he’d be eating through a straw for the next six weeks because he had no teeth left or because his jaw would be wired shut.
Ouch.
He braced himself as best he could, but Jax didn’t hit him.
He just said, “You are going to bring our sister home.”
“Me?” Joe said. “But…she hates me.”
“That’s your problem,” Jax said.
“What he means is…we’re sure you can find a way around that,” Ben said, like all Joe needed to do was turn left instead of right, to get out of a traffic jam.
Women were nothing like traffic jams.
There was no road map, no real signals to tell a man when to stop and when to go ahead. You couldn’t call AAA and get a TripTik to tell you to go left for eighty-seven miles and then head north for thirty-seven and then take three right turns and you were there.
“She won’t even talk to me,” he tried. How could he convince her to come home when she wouldn’t even talk to him?
“We’re going to leave that problem up to you, too,” Ben said, slapping him on the back like they were buddies or something.
“But…I…”
Jax slapped a paper against his chest, and Joe grabbed onto it.
“That’s her address. Don’t bother to call. Like you said, she wouldn’t talk to you anyway. You need to just show up. We included directions. It’s only a four-hour drive. Tomorrow’s graduation day at that fancy school of hers. She’ll be free to do anything she likes once that’s over. You’re going to go home, pack a bag and start driving.”
“Tonight? You want me to go get her tonight?”
“I expect you to be out of town within the hour. And you know I’ll know if you’re not,” Jax said. “I bet you can imagine what’s going to happen if anyone catches you here after eight o’clock.”
Oh, yeah.
Jax and his buddies on the police force.
Joe had been cited for five moving violations within a week of Kathie leaving town, and he hadn’t been guilty of a one. But he hadn’t protested, either. Not until he’d ended up before a judge who was ready to take his license away, and then, he hadn’t had to say much. The judge had known exactly what was going on and let him off with a warning, specifically that he should try hard to undo whatever he’d done to upset Magnolia Falls’ finest.
“Do you have any idea what those tickets did to my insurance rates?” Joe complained.
“Could you possibly think I care?” Jax shot back.
“She won’t come back because I ask her to,” Joe said in all honesty.
“Then you’ve got some thinking to do, don’t you?” Ben said. “Good thing it’s a four-hour drive. I’m sure by the time you get there, you’ll have figured out just what to say to get her to come back.”
“I can’t. I mean…I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there’s anything I can say. If there was, I’d say it.” Not because he wanted her to come back…not really. What kind of man welcomed insanity back into his life?
But this was her home, the only one she’d ever known. Her father had died when she was five, her mother last year, and her sisters and brother were all the family she had left. They’d always been tight, and he hated thinking of her cut off from her family this way and all alone in the world, especially if she was upset.
And poor Kate. She’d been like a second mother to her two younger sisters, had always taken very seriously her obligations to them.
He really owed Kate.
And Kathie. He kept thinking of her as a teenager. He’d known her that long, but she was twenty-four now. He’d just turned thirty-one, a grown-up, supposedly a responsible, intelligent one, and he’d handled the whole thing between them so badly.
So he owed them both, and he’d been raised to believe that first, a man tried hard not to make mistakes, and if he did, he always tried to make up for those mistakes.
“Okay,” he said, resigned to it but having no idea how he’d accomplish the task of bringing her home. “I’ll go.”
Which meant, within the next twenty-four hours, Joe would be face-to-face with Kathie Cassidy.
God help him.
Kathie was working at a snotty boys’ school in the middle of nowhere. Joe drove into the woods for miles, thinking that surely he was going to end up at a summer camp, but then, there it was, something that looked like an ancient college campus of weathered stone covered in climbing ivy set in the middle of the forest. Odd place for a school, he thought. Jacobsen Hall, the sign had said, full of self-restrained grandeur, the kind that practically screamed old money.
He consulted his directions and found the dorm where she’d been living, serving as a kind of housemother.
Housemother?
Kathie was twenty-four.
Housemothers were not twenty-four.
There was a steady stream of boys and luggage exiting the front door, aided quite often by chauffeurs piling the boys’ belongings into limousines.
Okay.
Kathie had talked about teaching in the inner city someday. Jacobsen Hall was as far from that as she could get.
Joe dodged luggage and snotty-looking boys to make his way inside. There in the foyer, clipboard in hand, her blond hair piled on her head in a very prim knot, looking as schoolmarmish as could be, stood Kathie.
He was dismayed to feel a little kick in the gut at the sight of her, even in that little black dress with its little white collar and cuffs.
For one outlandish second, he thought if the skirt was a little shorter and she wore a little white apron, unbuttoned a few of those neat brass buttons and took her hair down, she’d look like…like….
Joe gave an anguished groan.
He was not going to be fantasizing about her.
Under no circumstances would he be having any remotely sexual thoughts about her. None. Never.
He wasn’t going insane again for his ex-fiancé’s little sister.
No.
He might as well shoot himself right now than go there again.
He just needed a woman. A sane, sensible, practical, responsible, dependable woman. All the things he’d always thought Kate was. All the things he’d always been. And he would settle down with her and have a sane, sensible, practical, responsible, dependable life. He would become his old self. Everyone would forget about the little incident six months ago that had so besmirched his reputation.
There.
He knew what he had to do.
And he could get started on that plan, right after he convinced Kathie to go back home to Magnolia Falls, so her brother and brother-in-law wouldn’t beat the crap out of him or have him thrown in jail.
That’s all he needed to do.
And stay away from her and have no impure thoughts about her, once she got back there.
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.”
As if he’d ever been one to toy with women. Her brother toyed with women. Joe did not.
“But, it wasn’t like that,” she insisted.
He didn’t argue that it had been very much like that, just went on, spinning things any way he could to make it most likely that guilt would bring her back.
“And then, when everyone found out about you and me, and then you left…they all thought I dumped you.” Had he dumped her? He supposed it could have looked like that as he tried to keep his distance and not make anything worse, tried to not do another stupid thing and kept hoping the whole thing would just blow over. “Everybody thought I was so awful to you, you couldn’t even stand to be in the same town with me.”
Joe decided it sounded remotely plausible and potentially highly guilt-inducing on her part.
Enough to make her come back?
He hoped so.
Joe figured once he got her back, it was up to Jax and his sisters to keep her there. They hadn’t said anything about him having to keep her there, just to get her there.