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“Sarah?”
The voice was deeper, the edge harder. But it was his. Still gentle. Still featherbed warm. And ingenuously seductive. And the instant she heard it, she knew she was in seriously deep do-do.
Cursing fate, she turned, her arms tucked tightly against her chest. She couldn’t get a real good look at him; the light was fading quickly as the storm approached, and he stood on the porch at least thirty feet away. One hand, she thought, was braced against a white trellis laden with blueberry-hued morning glories, now tightly closed and flinching in the ruthless wind.
Apparently, however, he could see her just fine. “Good Lord!” he shouted over the wind. “What the hell happened to your hair?”
That these should be the first words out of his mouth, after all this time, came as no surprise. What was startling, though, was that it was as if no time had passed at all. There he stood, like he had hundreds of times before when he’d been waiting for her to get back from school or shopping or whatever.
But it was very different, even so.
Instinctively, almost protectively, her hand cupped her head. “What’s wrong with it?” she called, simultaneously annoyed and pleased at his reaction. “It turn green or something since I last looked in the mirror?”
He shook his head in slow motion. “Not green. Gone.”
“Oh, right.” She shrugged. “It got to be a pain. So I chopped it off.”
Dean now descended the porch steps, one hand anchored on the banister, each step deliberate, careful, as if he knew she was a breath away from bolting. The wind whipped dust and leaves in Sarah’s face, so she still couldn’t clearly see him, even as he came closer. When he’d narrowed the gap to five feet or so, he stopped, blatantly staring at her. The debris finally ceased its assault long enough for her to stare back.
“You’ve changed, too,” she said, crossing her arms again to support her roiling stomach.
He smiled, but it wasn’t real steady, she didn’t think. “Yeah. Guess you’re not the only one with shorter hair.”
He fidgeted with his hands, like a little boy giving a speech in front of his class, then slipped them into the pockets of pleated-front chinos. That was something, right there: a new pair of jeans was about as dressed up as Sarah had ever seen Dean get. The pants were topped by a conservative knit shirt in a remarkably unconservative shade of aqua, stretched across shoulders and a chest that had broadened nicely over the years. Another blast of wind made her squint.
“You…look good.” She had to say something. And it was true.
Dammit.
Another smile, this one perhaps a little more relaxed. “You, too.” Now he added a brief chuckle. “Crew cut and all.”
“It’s not that short—” She clamped her mouth shut, her face tingling from his knowing smile, the gentle teasing she’d forgotten how to handle. She used to encourage it, though. And give it right back.
Why couldn’t she take her eyes off his face?
Which was older, of course. But…more mature, too, which was not the same thing. Age, perhaps, had sharpened features that might’ve seemed severe save for the smile she knew came so easily and often to his lips. Well, used to, anyway. His hair seemed lighter, but she couldn’t tell if the streaks were sun-bleached or premature gray, blended as they were into the moderate style that hooded the tops of his ears, curled over the top of his collar. Age, again—and an overdose of sun from summers of lifeguard duty—had bestowed the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, a faint bracketing around his mouth.
Time and gravity had wrought the physical changes. What had brought about the maturity, she had no way of knowing. But it was there, settled into his eyes. Even their color seemed more intense, like everything else about him, the gold-green she remembered now deepened to the color of damp moss.
She saw wisdom, she thought. Understanding. Maybe a little regret, but that might be wishful thinking. But what she didn’t see—happiness or contentment or even satisfaction—she found threatening in some vague, unexplainable way. Not vague at all, though, was an almost irrepressible urge to skim her fingertips down his cheek. To see if he smelled the same. Felt the same.
Tasted the same.
Her heart now fairly thundered in her chest.
His smile had faded in the wake of her extended silence. He glanced away for a second, then let out a short, nervous laugh. “Damn, this is awkward.”
“You could say that,” she allowed with a curt nod, mentally tucking away all those thoughts of touching and feeling and tasting.
“At least you didn’t claw my eyes out,” he said softly.
She held up her hands. “No nails. Sorry.” Then, realizing her hands were shaking, tucked them behind her back. “Maybe some other time.”
He blew out a puff of air that might have passed for a laugh. “Do you think…would you mind if we talked for a few minutes, alone? Before we have to face everyone else?”
For some reason, probably to avoid his eyes, she found herself staring at his mouth and remembered with startling clarity just how his lips had felt on hers. With that, all the thoughts she’d so carefully tucked away came tumbling free.
She snapped her gaze away from his mouth, from his face entirely, dragging her attention to a rhododendron bush a few feet away. But the image wouldn’t fade. She fisted her hands—maybe digging her nails into her palms would serve as a reverse aphrodisiac. If she’d had any nails. Rats.
This was not the way it was supposed to happen. She had expected to see the Dean who had broken her heart. Not the one who had stolen it to begin with.
And that screwed up everything. Big time.
So she forced to the surface the one memory she would cling to with every fiber of her being, the one that would keep her heart from ever getting torn apart ever again. Not by Dean Parrish, anyway.
“Hey, remember?” she said at last in a level voice, daring to look up at him again. “I’m just a hick from boring Sweetbranch, Alabama? What on earth could we possibly have to talk about?”
Then she reeled smartly, nearly twisting her ankle in the process, and stalked away, huddled tightly against the wind as the clouds swirled overhead like oil spills in water.
Chapter 2
Following her would be pointless. Besides, he’d only come back to stand as best man to his brother, maybe help out his aunt with some chores around the house, run some errands. Not to let Sarah Whitehouse get to him.
The thunder became more insistent as he watched her retreat, her arms tucked against her ribs. He hoped she’d get back to the house before all hell broke loose, although that didn’t look likely, judging from the churning gunmetal clouds overhead. But, he reminded himself, she was a big girl. She wasn’t going to melt in a little rainstorm.
Oh, boy, was she a big girl.
Even as a youngster, Sarah’s long legs and quick, energetic movements had always reminded him of a beautiful colt, sleek and sassy and filled with the promise of what she would become.
A promise that had been more than fulfilled.
Dean blinked in the wind, realizing Sarah had disappeared from sight some time ago. He turned back to the house, got as far as the porch steps and sank onto the next to bottom one as if deflated.
He wished—oh, how he wished!—he’d found her short hair repulsive or odd or just plain ugly. Instead, those bourbon-colored eyes looked even more enormous framed by the soft fringes of the simple cut, which also accentuated her proud jawline, her full mouth, that adorable little chin his fingertips could still feel when he’d tilt her face to his for a kiss.
With a sigh that rivaled the moan of the wind, Dean leaned his head against the banister. This sure wasn’t the little girl who’d been his best friend. Or even the adolescent who’d tripped up his hormones, at fourteen or so. This was a woman, regal and sexy and gorgeous and brilliant and completely unaware that she was any of those things. Except maybe the brilliant part, he amended with a rueful grin.
And just think. She could have been his.
The tears came almost immediately.
Sarah assumed Dean had gone back into the house; she didn’t look back and she didn’t care whether he had or not. But if she thought storming off in a snit would bring her peace, her brain needed some major retooling. As if she could walk away from the truth! Not that she hadn’t tried—and thought she’d succeeded, actually—more than once since Dean had left. Hell, a body’ll believe anything, if you tell it the same lie long enough.
Here she’d thought she’d worked through the pain of his abandonment, his betrayal. That she’d convinced herself that whatever they’d had, no matter how intense, was still nothing more than a teenage romance. Puppy love. The inevitable flaring of a mutual hormonal surge.
Now the truth nagged at her like an obnoxious telemarketer, insisting part of her would always love Dean Parrish, no matter that she’d denied her feelings for nearly a decade.
Ever since Jennifer dropped her little bomb this afternoon, Sarah had been trying to hold back the memories, the good ones even more than the bad, intuitively realizing how tenuous her control really was. It’d been like trying to keep out a flood with a piece of plywood, but until a few minutes ago, she’d managed. Now they hammered at her brain, brutally, relentlessly, bringing with them a crying jag that bordered on hysteria.
She realized she was gasping for air as if she were literally drowning, her hands clamped to her ears—a futile gesture to staunch the barrage, and the pain that came with it. Like a drunk, she weaved toward the kennels, the wind whipping grit in her face, which would turn into hideous clay-colored tracks on her cheeks, as the memories crashed in, wave after wave, surging and flooding and briefly receding only to crest again. For a moment, she thought she might die.
For a moment, she wanted to.
What she didn’t want was to remember the laughter in Dean’s eyes, or his teasing smile. She didn’t want to remember how he’d listen to her tirades about school or her mother making her do dishes again or how Priscilla Long had made fun of her in front of the entire student council, how he’d listen and hug her and tell her it would be okay but never, ever say she was being silly. She didn’t want to remember long walks with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, when they’d talk for hours about whatever came into their heads, about their hopes and dreams and plans. But most of all, she couldn’t bear to remember the one sweet, perfect time they’d been as intimate as two people can be.
Except his presence had smacked her in the face with the hard, now undeniable fact that, of course, she’d never really forgotten any of it.
A gust of wind knocked her off balance, making her trip over a tree root; she stumbled, regained her footing, wiped her cheek with her shirt sleeve. Had she really been that naive? To think if she refused to acknowledge the truth, it would somehow slink away like a guilty dog with its tail between its legs, never to be seen again? Or thought about again? Or admitted again?
That no one would ever find out?
Out of breath, unable to see, she fell against the trunk of the old magnolia tree at the gate to the vegetable garden, knowing she was courting disaster—she’d already seen lightning fork the slate sky ahead of her. But tears of sorrow and anger and confusion had rendered her immobile, her fomenting emotions parodying the charged atmosphere of the imminent storm.
He’d told her he’d never loved her.
“Dammit!” she cried, the word lost in a roar of thunder. She pounded the solid trunk with her fists, the bark scraping her skin. “Oh, you loved me, Dean! You did! I know that as well as I know my own name.” She clumsily wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand and said on a whimper, “I know it as well as I know you’ll never, ever get to me again, you…you doodyhead!”
Time ground to a halt while she leaned back against the huge trunk, letting its steadfastness support her, as she cried, and cried, and cried some more, until her sobs settled into shaky sighs. She rummaged in her jeans pocket with a hand stinging from self-inflicted abuse, found a mashed tissue, blew her nose. If nothing else, she had to take it as a sign that, as the tree had not been struck by lightning, she was probably meant to live. At least until after this dang wedding.
She took several deep breaths of the rain-fragrant air until she felt some semblance of normalcy return, then stuck out her chin. She’d made it this far; she’d be fine. All she had to do was stay out of Dean’s path.
And get the truth tucked safely away again where no one could find it.
After God knew how long, Dean finally forced himself off the porch steps and back into the house before he started an epidemic of eyebrow-raising. Not that it would have mattered, as it turned out: his brother and future sister-in-law were far too busy oohing and aahing over the newest batch of wedding presents, as well as each other, to have noticed his absence, and Sarah’s mother was in the kitchen, judging from the sounds of pans clanging and the familiar contralto voice belting out a dimly remembered hymn.
Only Katey was unoccupied, perched cross-legged on a window seat, her chin resting in one hand while the other hand automatically stroked a large, smug-faced Siamese cat lolled across her lap. Situated as far from the lovebirds as possible, the child stared out at the approaching storm with that long-suffering expression kids get when they’re forced to make the best of a bad situation.
Dean felt a smile tug at his lips; he’d seen that expression before, many times, on another face, an expression that usually presaged some prank or other that like as not had gotten both Sarah and him in trouble. The cat shifted, cantilevering one splayed paw out over Katey’s knee, and Dean frowned slightly, trying to remember the beast’s name. Something weird Sarah’d thought up when she got the kitten for her twelfth birthday. Which meant—good Lord!—the animal had a good fifteen years under its belt. Maybe it wasn’t the same cat.
Hands in pockets, Dean drifted over to Katey and nodded toward the empty half of the window seat. “Mind if I join you?”
The child flashed him a holey grin that would have suckered him into buying ice in January. Then she eyed the couple as if they’d suddenly developed oozing sores over most of their bodies. “Kinda makes you sick, don’t it?”
“Doesn’t it,” Dean gently corrected her as he eased himself onto the seat, then stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. He could still hear his mother declaring there was no excuse for shoddy grammar. Ever. Just pure laziness, if not contrariness, far as she was concerned, stringing words together every which way the way people did. There were times he still expected his mother’s hand to descend from heaven and whomp him one on the backside for some linguistic infraction or other.
Dean slanted Katey a smile, remembering he was in the middle of a conversation. “Yeah, I guess watching your sister and Lance drool over each other’s a little hard to take. But you know…” He reached over and scratched the cat’s chin, eliciting a blissful rumble. “They are in love, you know.”
“It’s disgustin’.”
Dean chuckled. “When you come right down to it, though, that’s what most people want.” While Katey seemed to contemplate how on earth she’d managed to be born into the human race, it suddenly came to him. “Balthasar!”
“Huh?” Katey said, her nose wrinkled under wide eyes. Her resemblance to her big sister made his heart stumble.
“Isn’t that the cat’s name?”
The little girl looked from him to the cat and back to him. “How’d you know that?”
In an instant, he realized she’d been told nothing. That she had no idea he’d known her sister before. Eventually, she’d figure it out, but right now she probably thought he’d just sprung up like a mushroom after a rainstorm. Nor was it his place to tell her any differently.
His shoulders hitched in a nonchalant shrug. “Oh…I think…Lance must’ve told me. I’d just forgotten for a moment, sugar.”
Enormous eyes shot to his, brimming with tears. “Why’d you call me that?”
The child’s sudden mood change threw him. “I…don’t know. It just kind of popped out. Does it bother you?”
One tear slipped down a soft cheek. “My daddy used to call me that.”
“Oh…” Dean hesitated, then leaned forward, his hands loosely clasped together. “You really miss him, don’t you?”
Katey nodded, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand, jutting out her chin. Sarah’s chin. “Sarah says I’ll always remember him, but—” she shook her head, straight maple-colored hair swishing softly against delicate shoulders “—but I think she’s just trying to make me feel better.” She swallowed and looked out the window again. “Every night, I imagine him sittin’ beside me on my bed and sayin’ my prayers with me, just like he used to. But I can’t hear his voice no more.” Dean saw her lip quiver, then the effort exerted to control it, and decided to let the grammatical slip pass. Then the child leaned her head to one side, considering. “Are you lonely, Dean?”
He choked on his own startled laugh. “What makes you ask that?”
“Lance said you don’t have a wife or girlfriend or nothin’. I just thought most grown-ups had somebody, ’less they were widows like Mama.”
He slowly shook his head. “Nope. Not me, honey,” he said, then stiffened, wondering if that endearment, too, would provoke a reaction. Apparently not. The child continued the conversation without missing a beat.
“You know,” she said in a low voice, “Sarah’s all alone, too.”
His heart lurched like a fish out of water. “She is, huh?”
“Uh-huh. Well, sometimes she goes to the movies with Dr. Stillman from the clinic, but they’re just friends.”
“Oh? And how do you know that?”
Katey shrugged, scowling at her sister and her fiancé. “Because they don’t look at each other like that—”
“Katharine Suzanne!” rang out from the kitchen. “What about this corn?”
Then, just like Sarah would’ve done, Katharine Suzanne shoved the disgruntled cat off her lap and took off out the front door, her waist-length hair flapping against her narrow back.
A mixing bowl in a choke-hold between one arm and her bosom, her other hand clamped around a wooden spoon, Vivian Whitehouse pushed through the swinging door and glanced around the room. Not seeing her quarry, her questioning eyes lit on Dean. He cleared his throat and nodded toward the front door, still ajar.
A sound that was half sigh, half chuckle, rumbled from Vivian’s throat. “Figures.” Then she added, “Sarah’s not here, either?”
“Uh…no, ma’am.” Why did he suddenly feel so self-conscious? Wiping the palms of his hands on his thighs, Dean said, “Last I saw her, she was headed toward the kennels.”
A pair of shrewd gray eyes bore into his. “You talked to her?”
“For a moment.”
Vivian nodded, then banged back the swinging door again, jabbed the spoon into the center of the bowl and clunked both down on a counter just inside the door. Wiping her hands on the front of her untucked shirt, she passed Dean on her way toward the front door. “I’ll be back,” she said, then thrust a no-nonsense index finger in his direction. “Then you and I are gonna talk. So don’t you dare move your backside out of this room, you hear me?”
As the front door closed behind Sarah’s mother, Dean became aware of affianced couple’s attention riveted to his face. He gave a nervous laugh in their direction, then raised his hands guiltily, staring at the space where the imposing specimen of motherhood had just been standing.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” he murmured.
The dogs had smelled Sarah before she got within fifty feet. Rich, baritone barking and excited puppy yips mingled with another roll of thunder as she approached. Five minutes, she promised herself. Just five minutes.
“Hey, y’all!” Sarah scooted into the kennel, upwards of two dozen noses nudging her calves and knees as she tried to greet them all at once. A laugh bubbled out of her tight throat as one puppy immediately latched onto her sneaker lace and gave it what-for, complete with a fierce growl designed to bring the shoe into immediate submission.
Pointing at the lowering sky, she warned, “Y’all better get inside, now. It’s fixin’ to rain any minute.” In confirmation, a bolt of lightning split the clouds, accompanied by a crack of thunder that made her jump and several of the puppies scurry toward the open door of the converted barn.
Sarah shooed the rest of the gang inside, shutting the half-door behind them, then swung open the chain link gate to one of the overlarge pens, staring into assorted sets of tiny golden brown eyes.
“I know you don’t want to, but you gotta. Come on, now.”
Like children forced to come in when they still wanted to play, the dogs reluctantly obeyed, some of them gazing back outside with what seemed to be genuine regret, as if they knew wonderful wet stuff was going to fall out of the sky any minute. Labs and water went together like biscuits and gravy. Sarah allowed a sympathetic smile.
“Sorry. I’m in no mood to clean up mud today, okay? So whaddya think? Should I go check the babies— Oh, Lordy!”
Katey jumped as much as she did.
“Shoot, baby, don’t sneak up on people like that!” Sarah lay her arm across Katey’s shoulders, as much to steady herself as out of affection. “What on earth are you doing here? Looks like the sky’s about to burst wide open.”
Katey hunched her thin shoulders in a gesture Sarah took to mean there really was no reason other than it seemed like a good idea. Or that Mama had asked her to do something, was more like it. “I just figured you were here. And…I didn’t have nothin’ to do.”
“Anything to do.” Sarah pretended sympathy. “And Mama couldn’t even find something for you to do in the kitchen…?”
“What’s wrong?” Katey asked, squinting. “Why are your eyes all red?”
Rats. Sarah cleared her throat, forced a smile. “Just got a bunch of dirt in ’em, is all. You know, from the wind?”
Which got a tell-me-another-one look from the little girl. But then the newborns eeked again, and Katey clasped both hands to her chest in supplication.
“Just for a minute,” Sarah said. Wouldn’t take much longer than that before her mother sniffed her out, anyway.
Katey skipped over to the pen where mama and pups were quarantined from the rest of the dogs, Sarah following. It was chowtime; the tiny black lumps looked more like oversize fat bugs than dogs as they jostled for position at their mother’s teats.
“This is the cutest batch we’ve ever had,” the eight-year-old solemnly declared, her fingers entwined around the chain link. Sarah hid her smile. Katey said that about every litter. Without fail. “C’n I hold one?”
“Let’s just see how Mariah feels about it, okay?” Sarah slowly opened the gate so as not to startle the mother dog, then entered the pen, settling onto the floor beside the bitch and her six pups whose birth she had witnessed just two days before. Squirming as much as the pups, Katey squatted at her right knee. “Think it’d be okay if I held one of your precious babies for a minute?” Sarah asked, then carefully picked up one of the pups and cuddled it against her chest while the mother dog rooted at her offspring’s rump, just to be sure.
Katey sighed, stroking the little furrowed head with one finger.
“Wish I’d’ve been here when the pups were born.”
“It was two in the morning, baby. And Mama dog did it all by herself. I was just here for decoration.” Sarah traded pups. “Now, sheep, on the other hand, don’t even know which end the lamb’s supposed to come out of.” She thought of last March when she and Doc helped George Plunkett and his pubescent son Joshua usher two dozen new lambs into the world, and yawned automatically. “Except they always decide to do it when it’s raining and dark.”