“How many times do I have to tell you, Sarah, I made a mistake?”

Her hand plowed through her hair. “Don’t you see, Dean? It doesn’t matter.” Anguish again flooded her features; a cold, sick feeling washed over him that they weren’t having the conversation he thought they were having. “It’s not just a matter of my forgiving you, if that’s what you want. Too much has happened, too much time has passed….”

The look in those honey-brown eyes stabbed him all the way to his soul.

He didn’t care what happened now, even if she belted him clear into another zip code. She still cared. A great deal, unless he was way off course.

And, heaven help him, so did he.

Dear Reader,

You’ve loved Beverly Barton’s miniseries THE PROTECTORS since it started, so I know you’ll be thrilled to find another installment leading off this month. Navajo’s Woman features a to-swoon-for Native American hero, a heroine capable of standing up to this tough cop—and enough steam to heat your house. Enjoy!

A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with bestselling author Linda Turner’s The Enemy’s Daughter. This story of subterfuge and irresistible passion—not to mention heart-stopping suspense—is set in the Australian outback, and I know you’ll want to go along for the ride. Ruth Langan completes her trilogy with Seducing Celeste, the last of THE SULLIVAN SISTERS. Don’t miss this emotional read. Then check out Karen Templeton’s Runaway Bridesmaid, a reunion romance with a heroine who’s got quite a secret. Elane Osborn’s Which Twin? offers a new twist on the popular twins plotline, while Linda Winstead Jones rounds out the month with Madigan’s Wife, a wonderful tale of an ex-couple who truly belong together.

As always, we’ve got six exciting romances to tempt you—and we’ll be back next month with six more. Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Runaway Bridesmaid
Karen Templeton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KAREN TEMPLETON’s

background in the theater and the arts, and a lifelong affinity for love stories, led inevitably to her writing romances. Growing up, she studied art, ballet and drama, and wanted to someday strut her stuff on Broadway. She was accepted into North Carolina School of the Arts as a drama major but switched to costume design.

Twelve years in New York City provided a variety of work experiences, including assisting costume designers at a large costume house, employment in the bridal department buyer’s offices of several department stores, grunt work for a sportswear designer and answering phones for a sports uniform manufacturer. New York also provided her with her husband, Jack, and the first two of her five sons.

The family then moved to New Mexico, where Karen established an in-home mail-order crafts business that she gave up the instant the family bought their first computer. Now writing romances full-time, she says she’s finally found an outlet for all that theatrical training—she gets to write, produce, design, cast and play all the parts!

To Gail Chasan, editor and friend, who refuses to believe me when I say “I can’t.”

Acknowledgment

To Wendy Wade Morton, DVM, whose veterinary advice—as well as her insight into daily life in the Auburn/Opelika area of Alabama—has hopefully prevented me from looking like a total fool.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Chapter 1

“Hey—what’s with the horse out in the waiting room?”

At the familiar sarcastic drawl, Sarah Whitehouse glanced up from the examining table where she held an ill-tempered ginger tomcat in a hammerlock, treating it for ear mites. She allowed a beleaguered grin for her younger sister, Jennifer, who worked at the travel agency just up the street. “Ah. That would be Bojangles.”

“Bo-what?”

Sarah grimaced as she wrestled with the pissed-off cat. “Bojangles. Great Dane. Nine months old.”

“Nine months?” Jennifer rolled her eyes, then shifted in the doorway, crossing her arms so that her engagement ring, modest though it was, twinkled brilliantly. “Hey, listen—”

“Anybody else out there?”

“Uh…oh, I don’t know….” Sarah caught the whiff of petulance in her sister’s voice. “Two more cats, maybe? At least, two more cat carriers. I can’t vouch for what’s in ’em. A collie, a Dobie…and some small fuzzy thing I’ll have to guess is a canine with indiscreet parents. Sarah—”

“Damn. They must all be drop-ins. The Dane was all I had scheduled, which is why I let Jolene go off to lunch.” Sarah ignored the cat’s menacing growl as she swabbed his ear. “Anyone seem panicked? Bleeding? In labor?”

Her sister considered for a moment, then shook her head, a half-can’s worth of Aqua Net prohibiting any individual movement of her shoulder-length waves. “Nope. Just the usual panting and get-me-outta-here whimpering and butt-smelling routines. Though one owner looks like she misplaced her Prozac—”

“Could you tell everyone to hold on, I’ll get to ’em soon as I can?”

With a telling sigh, Jennifer stuck her honey-gold head out the door and delivered Sarah’s message, then waltzed on into the examining room and plopped her handbag on a chair in the corner. By now she was pouting.

Sarah got the message.

“I’m sorry, honey…was there something you wanted to tell me?”

Jennifer hesitated, then gave a short, dismissive wave of her hand. “It’ll wait. You’re busy.”

“You sure?”

“No point in talking to you if you’re not listening.”

“I promise to give you my undivided attention just as soon as I’m finished….” The thing twisted out of Sarah’s grasp and spit at her.

Her sister took a circumspect step backward, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “And what is our problem?”

Sarah wrapped the cat’s leash around her palm, reined him back in. “I think we know that ear mites aren’t the only things being removed today.”

“Oooh,” Jennifer said with a comprehending nod in the creature’s direction. The cat actually sneered at her as Sarah elbowed the thing into her chest and went after the other ear. “Heck, you ask me, it couldn’t happen to a better guy. Except maybe Bruce Miller. Did you know Abby’s pregnant again?”

Sarah stifled her laugh. “Stop it, will you? I’m having enough trouble doing this.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.” Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah caught Jennifer’s glance around the room. “Where’s Katey?”

“Little girl’s room, I expect.” Sarah paused in her torture of the cat and stroked his head. The feline’s eyes squeezed shut with each touch, though whether in pleasure or irritated tolerance, she couldn’t say. “Begged the living daylights out of me to come, but now that she’s here, of course, she’s bored to tears.”

Jennifer’s expression indicated she agreed with her baby sister’s assessment of the situation, but she diplomatically refrained from comment. Instead, she said with a bright, lip-glossed smile, “So…how about lunch? Then I can tell you my news.”

The sigh just sort of slipped out. “This have anything to do with the wedding?”

“Now, how’d you know that?”

“Thank God—oh, be still, you nasty beast—we only have a week more to go through this,” Sarah groused good-naturedly. She finished with the cat and pushed him into a carrier. “But lunch ain’t gonna happen today, as you may have guessed.” Shoving a hand through her cropped hair, she added, “Ed’s out on farm duty, and Doc’s off, so it’s just me. I can’t leave. So you’ll have to tell me here.”

Jennifer squinted at her through smoothly mascara’d eyelashes. “I was trying to.”

“Sorry. So…spit it out.”

But “spitting it out” had never been part of Jennifer’s repertoire. She paused for dramatic effect, which had been part of her repertoire since she was two and a half. “We-e-ell…you know how Tim Reynolds couldn’t be Lance’s best man after all ’cause he’s got National Guard training camp that week?”

Sarah leaned one hip against the examining table. “Ye-e-es—”

“But did you know Tim wasn’t Lance’s first choice, anyway?”

“He wasn’t? But they’ve been best friends since kindergarten—”

“I know,” Jennifer said with a slow, conspiratorial nod of her head. “But, see, turns out Lance had someone completely different in mind. He just didn’t think he could convince him to do it.”

“Jen. Today, please.”

“Oh, all right.” She struck a pose, hands splayed out to the sides. “Ta-da! Dean said he’d be Lance’s best man.”

Sarah went catatonic, staring at Jennifer with what must have been an incredibly stupid expression on her face. Her sister however, continued bubbling away like a just-poured glass of warm Dr. Pepper. “Isn’t that the best? Lance is so excited he’s been talking a mile a minute ever since Dean called him and said he’d be in tonight.”

That brought Sarah back to the land of the living. Underneath her smock, her sleeveless cotton blouse fused to her back. “He’ll be here tonight?”

“Uh-huh,” Jennifer continued in euphoric oblivion. “And he’s gonna be here for a whole week, I guess since he hasn’t been here in so long. Anyway, Mama said to tell you dinner’s at our house, and for you to get your skinny little butt home on time. You know, hang the little sign on the clinic door that says Closed?”

For emphasis, her sister mimed hanging up the sign, flashing long, tapered fuchsia fingernails the same color as the six-inch flowers splashed across her romper. Then she let out a little squeak, as if she’d been pinched.

“Oh! Oh, my God! I just realized…” Jennifer grabbed Sarah’s wrist, sending a cloud of flowery perfume wafting up from between a set of breasts that had been making men bump into things since she was fourteen. “Here the two of you were high school sweethearts, and now, after all this time, he’s going to be best man and you’re going to be maid of honor at my wedding!” Her palm flattened over the magnificent bosomage. “What a hoot!”

“Yeah,” Sarah said weakly. “Hoot.”

“Well, hey, listen, I’ll get out of your hair.” Jennifer flapped at her sister’s boyish ’do. “What’s left of it, anyway.” She scooped up her handbag and straightened out her perfectly straight collar. “Oh—don’t forget. Gown fittings tomorrow morning at Miss Ellis’s.”

Sarah managed something close to a smile. “How could I forget?”

Jennifer paused by the door, her hand on the frame. “Isn’t tonight just going to be great?” She crinkled her nose in time-honored cute Southern cheerleader tradition, giggled and disappeared like Tinkerbell. Poof! Gone.

Sarah sank onto the desk chair in the examining room, dropping her head onto her arms. She wasn’t sure what she felt at that moment, but great was not one of the choices. What most shocked her was that the prospect of seeing Dean again should be producing any effect at all. She’d long since gotten over him.

Long since.

“Sarah? You okay?”

She lifted her gaze to a pair of large, worried eyes the same whiskey color as hers set in a face with the same narrow nose, the same wide mouth, the same square jawline ending in an incongruously pointed chin. People always said they’d never seen sisters look as much alike as Katey and Sarah. Like twins born eighteen years apart.

Sarah let out a long, shaky breath and clasped the little girl’s slender waist, forcing a smile which God knew she did not feel. “Sure, baby. Just resting my eyes for a moment. Why don’t you go tell Mr. Arby to bring Bojangles on in?”

As Katey scampered over to the door, Sarah rubbed her makeup-less eyes with a stubby-nailed forefinger. According to Jennifer’s count, she had at least a half-dozen cases to see, and that wasn’t counting later appointments or any emergencies that might come in. Of all the times to be the only vet in the clinic. Well, she told herself as she got to her feet and smoothed out the front of her smock, she’d just have to deal with her ambivalent feelings about Dean Parrish later. Preferably before she came face-to-face with him in her living room.

Panic sliced through her.

She heard extra-large-size canine toenails scraping on the linoleum floor as Ben Arby half lugged, half shoved the reluctant Great Dane into the examining room. The black behemoth took one look at Sarah, yelped, and promptly piddled all over the floor.

“Oh, come on, now, sweetie…” She ripped off a half-dozen paper towels from the spindle over the sink and tossed them onto the floor, stepping on them to soak up the puddle as she scratched the dog’s ears. “How bad can it be, huh?”

She didn’t want to know.

Dean wished he were invisible. At least for a hour or so, anyway, just until he got used to the idea of being back in Sweetbranch before anyone else noticed he was.

That not being an option, he decided to hide out in his pickup for a bit, cruising the back roads, trying to come to terms with that weird sensation when you return someplace after being away for a long time and everything seems so familiar and strange all at once. And here he’d gone and said he’d stay for a whole week. Lord. If he’d been a drinking man, he’d’ve sworn he’d had one too many when he’d made that promise. He’d figured he’d feel unsettled. What he hadn’t figured on was how right it felt to be home.

And he didn’t quite know what to do with that feeling.

Nine years. Nine years of growing up, of making something of himself in spite of a reading disability that had finally bested him halfway through his junior year of high school. Nine years of forcing himself to stay away from everything good he’d ever known in order to give Sarah Whitehouse the chance to become everything she could. Nine years of wondering if he’d made a dumb-assed mistake.

Well, he thought as he took a swallow of warm Coke from the almost empty can he’d been nursing since Atlanta, nothing to be done for it now. Not a dad-blasted thing.

For a long time, he’d tried to blame his leaving on his Aunt Ethel, his father’s older sister, who’d taken him and Lance in after his mother died when he was fifteen, with her constant harping on the differences between him and Sarah. She’s a doctor’s daughter, not the offspring of some small-time country carpenter. Lookit how bright she is, gettin’ straight A’s in school, and that scholarship to Auburn. What’s a poor country boy got to offer a girl like that? she’d say. Face it—in the long run, you’ll end up feeling like half a man. That what you really want? For either one of you…?

At twenty, he’d discovered, sometimes you’re not so all-fired set in your convictions. At twenty, maybe you’re not so sure who’s right and who’s wrong. Or what’s right or wrong, for that matter. Oh, he didn’t doubt his feelings for Sarah at the time, but his aunt’s objections slowly ate away at his resolve to make the relationship work, birthing an annoying little gremlin of doubt that eventually became a constant, unwelcome companion. At last, he came to believe that maybe his aunt was right, that maybe he would be an impediment to Sarah’s future, that maybe she’d end up resenting him.

So better she hated him then, went the impaired reasoning, than waiting around for their love to die a slow, agonizing death.

He hadn’t known his heart would shatter into a million pieces when he realized how well he’d played his part that day. And in the end, he also realized, he had no one to blame but himself.

He steered the Dakota onto the road leading to his aunt’s house, the eerie feeling of…displacement, he guessed it was, becoming even stronger. The differences in the scenery stood out like black sheep, simply because there were so few. For instance, he noticed Percy Jenkins had planted a new elm to replace the old one he’d had to take out because of disease. The new tree reached over the roof already, its deep green leaves quivering in the light breeze.

And Myrtle Andersen had painted her house trim a deep blue. He liked it.

And Frank Cuthbertson had finally gotten rid of that old Chevy on the side of his house that his chickens had adopted as a sort of coop-away-from-coop. He chuckled, remembering how, as kids, he and Sarah used to sneak up and pilfer the eggs that sometimes appeared on the back seat, an odoriferous booty the all-too-frequent reward for their clandestine activity.

There were some kids he didn’t recognize, of course, as well as the occasional unfamiliar stray dog nonchalantly trotting across the road right in front of his truck. But for the most part, it was all the same. Kudzu-choked pastures sandwiched between the same pecan and peach and apple orchards; the same heady aroma of wild honeysuckle and mimosa; the same Alabama clay that tinged everything in the vicinity a garish orange.

And Sarah’s house, too, was just as he remembered it. Still stately and fussy at the same time—the curse of a good Queen Anne—still yellow and white and forest green, although it looked like it could use a new paint job. He drew in a quick breath: Lance had told him Sarah’s father had died suddenly about three years ago. Heart attack. The news hadn’t really registered until he saw the house, the house Dr. Whitehouse had spent so much time restoring and caring for, ever since Dean could remember. The house he’d grown up in nearly as much as his own. Lance said Sarah’s parents had had a midlife baby, too, a little girl just now turned eight. A real shame, a child losing her daddy that young.

Dean leaned over, peering out the passenger’s side window. That willow tree in the front yard was even bigger than he remembered, as were the maples tickling the roof from the back of the house. The kennel sign was spiffier, though, more professional. Lance’d said Sarah and her mother had done real well with the kennel, even had a champion or two. Black Labs, wasn’t that it? Sarah’d always been partial to Black Labs.

Returning his attention to the road, he reminded himself she wasn’t there. Lance had told him she worked most days at a veterinary clinic over in Opelika, assisting old Doc Jefferson….

Lord. The memories were relentless. He sped up, consigning Sarah’s house to his rearview mirror, not ready to deal with any of it yet. Time enough to do that at dinner tonight. When, he assumed, he would see Sarah, for the first time since his Oscar-worthy performance as the slimeball boyfriend.

How the Sam Hill had his brother managed to fall for Sarah’s sister? Out of all the girls at Auburn, you’d’ve thought at least one of them might have caught Lance’s eye while he was there getting his degree. But no. Lance had to choose someone who’d lived a half mile down the road almost his entire life.

A hiss of air escaped Dean’s lips. Wasn’t as if he didn’t understand. He’d done the same fool thing. Only difference was, he’d turned tail and run, instead of marrying Sarah like he should’ve done and let the consequences be damned. No, he sure couldn’t fault his brother for not finding anyone he liked better. Not when Dean, after all this time in Atlanta, kept seeing Sarah’s syrupy eyes and square jaw and long, silky maple-colored hair superimposed on every woman’s face he saw, dated, slept with. Not that there’d been all that many of the latter, he admitted to himself, slinging his right arm across the back of the seat and trying to shift his weight off his numb bottom.

They say you can’t go home again. Well, he had, but even if all the houses and roads and even most of the damn trees were exactly as he’d left them, he’d be even a bigger fool than he already was if he thought Sarah was. There was nothing left between them but memories. If even that much. He’d hurt her, deliberately and unforgivably. He’d think less of her if she didn’t hate him.

He’d lost the best thing that’d ever happened to him, a fact he’d regret for the rest of his life. And one which made him wonder how he was going to get through the next week.

Hell. He’d be going some just to get through the next few hours.

Sarah actually closed the clinic on time, which gave her maybe a few minutes to sort out her very muddled thoughts about this turn of events. Jennifer had rescued poor Katey right after lunch, to Sarah’s immense relief—she didn’t think she could’ve stood an afternoon of bored sighs and moans and groans.

Almost of its own volition, the Bronco steered toward home. Her hands were seized, however, with an almost uncontrollable urge to veer south toward some secluded Mexican beach. Just for, say, the next week or so?

Oh, geez…why on earth was Dean coming for a full week? What was this, some resurgence of family devotion? Or, she thought with a sickening thud just below her sternum, a deliberate move to torture her? Her hands gripped the steering wheel as she passed the little turnoff that would, could, loop her around and send her in the opposite direction.

She watched the loop fade in her rearview mirror. And sighed.

Oh, come on. This was not like her. Sarah Whitehouse did not run from problems. Sarah Whitehouse faced them, dealt with them, solved them. No matter what. So…so…she would go home, change out of these hot jeans, run a comb through what there was of her hair, and simply ignore Dean Parrish.

One hand clamped around the steering wheel, the other found its way to her mouth, where she started to chew on a hangnail. Wrecked was the only word to describe how she’d felt after Dean’s abrupt departure, the night before her senior prom. After a while, though, she’d forced the unhappiness into a tiny cubicle in the farthest recesses of her brain, like an unwanted Christmas present you don’t know what to do with but you can’t return, so you stuff it up in the attic, forgotten, until some fool goes up there and unearths the damn thing and then brings it downstairs, setting it on the coffee table like it’s some great find.

Thank you, Jennifer, Sarah thought on a sigh as she pulled into her driveway and caught sight of the unfamiliar pickup parked in front of the house. Thank you so much for reminding me of what I’d worked so hard to forget.

Not that any of this was Jen’s fault. Who knew?

She sat for a long moment, staring out the driver’s side window at what was obviously Dean’s truck. This was no beat-up number on its last legs. Wheels, whatever. The color was understated enough—a dull silver, like her mother’s pewter candlesticks on the living room mantel—but it clearly had enough bells and whistles to make even the fussiest boy happy. Either he’d done very well or he was in hock up to his butt.

A sudden crack of thunder startled her; she peered up at the clouds, which had been playing round-robin with the sun all day, then glanced back at the truck. Then her house.

Not yet. She just couldn’t. She’d…just go check on the new pups first. Yeah. Good plan. She pushed open the door to the Bronco and hopped down.

The door crashed shut behind her; she held her breath. After a few seconds, when no crowd appeared, she let out her breath in a little huff, then headed across her front yard toward the kennels, the wind whistling in her ears.

The idea of seeing Dean again was wreaking more havoc with her gastrointestinal tract by the second. Right now, the last thing she wanted was to be anywhere near Jennifer’s wedding, let alone be in Jennifer’s wedding. An event she’d been looking forward to, despite her grumblings, until about six hours ago. Now, she’d rather eat Aunt Ida’s okra-and-ham-hocks casserole three times a day for the rest of her life—

“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.”

“Well,” Katey announced, unperturbed, “when I’m a vet, those dumb sheep will just have to have their babies when I’m on duty.”

Sarah regarded the little girl with a wry smile. Knowing Katey, she probably would get the dumb sheep to birth during office hours.

“So…still wanna be a vet?” She touched her forehead to Katey’s. “You didn’t seem real interested this morning at the clinic.”

Katey squirmed, her dark brows dipping. “Well…” Sarah could almost hear the child’s brain fast-forwarding through several dozen possible answers. Then the little face relaxed into a grin as she let a puppy sniff her fingers. “I’m just a kid. I’ve got a short attention span.”

Sarah let out a laugh, then hugged the little girl to her. No matter what, this precocious little girl never failed to make her smile. Even more than the pups. “You’ve never been ‘just’ a kid, you know that? Even when you were a baby, you always wore this funny, grown-up expression.”

“I did?”

“Uh-huh.” Sarah pretended to shudder and Katey giggled. “It was freak-y, too, having this little tiny baby look at you with this serious face all the time—”

“Sarah Louise?” The lights flickered in the kennel as her mother’s low voice, easily overriding the next wave of thunder, filled the old barn.

“In with Mariah, Mama.”

“Katey with you?”

“Yes, Mama,” Katey piped up.

Clad in her usual attire of oversize man-tailored shirt and jeans, the full-figured woman now blocked most of the light coming into the stall. Vivian never had lost the weight from the last pregnancy. Not that she seemed to care.

Vivian settled what was supposed to be a stern gaze on the little girl. “I believe there’s something you’re supposed to be doing, young lady?”

The child looked from one woman to the other, then let out an affronted sigh. “Yes, Mama,” she muttered, getting to her feet. Wiping her hands on the already filthy seat of raspberry-colored shorts, Katey unlatched the gate and let herself out of the pen, stoically allowing Vivian to plant a kiss on the top of her glimmering chestnut head as she passed. Size two sneakers ground emphatic squeaks into the smooth cement floor as the child retreated.

Vivian joined Sarah in the cage, huffing a little as she lowered her ample form to the floor, then patted Sarah’s knee. “You okay?”

Sarah cuddled the tiny dog to her chest. “The pups needed to be checked.”

That got a snort as Vivian tucked a stray hank of silver-streaked, ash-brown hair back up into a loose bun at the back of her head. “Chicken.”

“Damn straight,” Sarah shot back with an attempt at a grin, then averted her face when her mother tried to look her in the eye.

“You’ve been crying.”

“What gave you your first clue?”

“Puffy eyes, blotchy face, swollen lips—take your pick.”

With a huge sigh, Sarah said, “I saw him.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Sarah leaned her head back against the whitewashed partition of the pen with a soft thud. “Could you just tell everyone I tripped and drowned in a mud puddle or something?”

Vivian grunted in what Sarah assumed was sympathy. “Now, baby, you knew he’d come back some day.” A beat. “And you knew what that meant.”

Sarah pulled her head forward, concentrating on the writhing mass of pups in front of them. “I just thought for some reason I’d have a little more time to prepare myself.”

“Hah! Bad news never seems to be terribly interested in giving much warning.” Vivian shifted her weight with a soft wince. “What’re you going to do?”

With a sigh, Sarah leaned her head back again and shut her eyes, the puppy snuffling the hollow of her throat with whiskers soft as the inside of a daisy. “Kinda liked the mud puddle idea, myself.”

“You could tell him.”

Sarah opened one eye and tilted her head just far enough to see the side of her mother’s face, sternly refusing to allow one more emotion into her already overcrowded brain. That didn’t stop her face from flushing, however. “Tell him what, exactly?”

The puppies’ mewling filled the silence as Vivian seemed to consider her answer. “You still being sweet on him might be a good place to start.”

The two women regarded each other for a moment, then Sarah looked away. “And what makes you think that?”

“I’m psychic.”

Sarah swallowed past the knot of anger in her throat, then said quietly, “Dean Parrish chewed up my heart and spit it out in little pieces all over Lee County.” Frowning, she shut her eyes and rocked her head from side to side against the wall. “I don’t deserve that.”

“That’s right.”

Sarah’s mouth pulled into a straight line as her voice dropped an octave. “And he sure as hell doesn’t deserve me.” She let out a long sigh. “You were right, you know. Back then. About our not being suited for the long haul.”

Vivian picked something off her jeans. “Maybe…he’s changed.”

“Yeah, and maybe Auburn’ll get a major league football franchise next year.” Sarah shook her head, finally opening her eyes, regarding nothing in particular. “You didn’t see the look on his face, the night he broke up with me.” She carefully placed the pup back with its siblings.

They sat in silence again for a full minute, Sarah fully aware if her mother touched her she’d start bawling all over again. Except what she did was far worse. “The question is, what did you see in his face today?”

Sarah turned away, determined to hold it together, determined not to be the pawn in whatever game her mother now seemed so determined to play.

“Honey, all you can do is take this one step at a time—”

“What’s done is done, Mama,” she said sharply. “There’s no going back.”

After a long moment, Vivian gently bumped shoulders with her daughter. A conciliatory gesture, Sarah figured. “How you handle this is up to you,” she said softly. “And it’s just one week. Dinner tonight, the rehearsal dinner, the wedding. That’s all. Think you can manage that?”

Just one week. Right. With a toss of her head, Sarah said on an exhaled breath, “Doesn’t look like I’ve got a whole lot of choice in the matter, does it?” She stood, then held out a hand to help up her mother, the one person who, no matter what, had been there for her, had helped her through the most painful period of her life. And who, Sarah knew, felt more than bad about her part in creating the situation now facing all of them.

“There are always choices,” Vivian said with a grunt as she struggled to her feet. No longer taller than her daughter, her eyes met Sarah’s dead on. “Always.” She shrugged and draped an arm around Sarah’s shoulder as a teeth-rattling thunderclap ripped open the clouds at last, letting loose a barrage of stone-hard raindrops onto the tin roof overhead.

“Like now,” her mother shouted as they stood at the barn door watching the deluge quickly turn the yard into a river of slimy orange mud. “Do we stay and wait it out, or make a run for it?”

“Oh, come on, Mama,” Sarah challenged with a wicked grin. “I’ve never known you to wait anything out.” She dashed into the driving rain, calling over her shoulder, “Last one to the house cleans dog poop for a week!”

Not surprisingly, Sarah lost the bet. It always astounded her how quickly her mother could move, despite her generous proportions. In any case, they were both drenched by the time they made it to the house and up the steps. Flushed with exertion and laughing too hard to breathe, they wriggled out of sneakers that looked dipped in pumpkin pie filling, dumping them by the back door before stumbling over each other to see who got to the kitchen first.

“Oh, yuck!” Jennifer waved a half-peeled cucumber in front of her as if to ward off evil spirits. “You two are gross!”

Dripping all over the kitchen floor, Sarah grabbed a kitchen towel to wipe off her face. Still laughing, she threw a broad wink at Katey, giggling and half hidden behind a mountain of corn at the kitchen table, then directed her attention to the flinching Jennifer. “Would somebody please tell me how Vivian and Eli Whitehouse managed to produce such a priss? It’s just water, Jen—see?” She shook her head like a dog, sending a spray halfway across the room, cackling in glee as her sister squealed and nearly tripped over herself trying to back away.

“Mama! Make her stop!”

Vivian, her own hair hanging like tangled vines around her face, shifted her eyes to her oldest daughter, her mouth twitching. “Sarah Louise, stop torturing your sister.”

“Yes, Mama,” Sarah said, tucking her hands behind her back and shuffling one bare foot back and forth over the puddled floor. Then she went after Jennifer with a war whoop and the wet towel, sending her shrieking out the kitchen door.

And sending Sarah straight into Dean’s chest, which, along with the rest of him, happened to pick that moment to come out to the kitchen.

She felt strong, rough hands close firmly around her upper arms, her chest and hips meld into his as he steadied her to keep from being knocked over. For more seconds than she wanted to know, his breath, sweet and warm, fanned over her still damp face, making her shiver. Her nipples pebbled, instantly and just this side of painfully. She froze, not sure whether it was her heartbeat or his she felt pounding against her skin.

“Well, now…” One side of his mouth hitched up around a low drawl that was affected and deliberately irritating and made her bare toes curl against the cool lacquered floor. “I see you’re just as clumsy as you always were. Nice to see not everything’s changed about you, Sarah Louise.”

She wasn’t sure, but she thought he drew her just a little closer, close enough that she knew with certain dread that two layers of limp, thin, wet fabric were no barrier to his being able to feel her taut nipples against his chest. The half-grin grew downright insouciant. Lightning flickered eerily across his taut features as he said in a voice too soft for anyone else to hear, “But then again, it would appear that some things have improved considerably.”

It would appear the man had a death wish.

Panicked eyes locked with his, a little cry of alarm escaped parted lips…and, exquisitely timed with the next roar of thunder, two surprisingly strong fists crashed down with unerring aim on either side of his collarbone.

The cups in the glass-fronted cupboard rattled like maracas as Dean let go of Sarah with a grunt, then watched as she streaked past him and out the kitchen door. Rubbing one wounded shoulder, he heard her footsteps pound down the hall, up the stairs and down the upstairs hallway to her room, ending with a door slam that rattled the cups in the cupboard all over again.

Whoo-ee—she sure as hell was stronger than she used to be.

Still coddling his shoulder, he leaned against the open swinging door, half in, half out of the kitchen, and shut his eyes for a moment. She’d left more than a set of bruises behind. Her scent, damp and natural, lingered in his nostrils. And the effects of her body pressed against his still lingered below his waist. Although, lingering wasn’t perhaps the most accurate description….

“Well, just don’t stand there like a lump, boy. Get your butt in here.”

With a slight start, Dean shifted his attention to Sarah’s mother, who was toweling off her hair, having already changed into dry jeans and another loose shirt. Dean couldn’t remember ever seeing the statuesque woman in anything fitted, even when he was a kid.

But when would she have changed clothes? His brow wrinkled as he obeyed, letting the door swing to a close behind him. Vivian apparently picked up on his confusion, answering with a loud laugh.

“Laundry day. Seemed to make more sense to pull dry things out of the basket right here than tramp all the way upstairs. Besides, gives me two less things to put away, right?” She tossed the damp towel out into the laundry room, then haphazardly braided her long hair in a single plait at the nape of her neck as tangential strands curled around her broad face. “So tell me…” Yanking open a small drawer next to the sink, she poked around in the jumbled contents until she found a rubber band, with which she tidily finished off the braid. “How’s life in Atlanta?” She settled back on a stool, crossed her arms. “Must make this place look dull as Luke Hanover’s old bloodhound.”

“Sometimes, dull is good,” Dean admitted, not missing the merest hint of a hitched eyebrow. He decided to let Sarah’s mother come to her own conclusions, which she undoubtedly would.

Vivian simply studied him for a long moment, a half smile lifting her full, round cheeks, those gray eyes searing right into his brain. Other than that, she had no reaction. Whatsoever.

Dean leaned back against the counter, his hands gripping the edge. Woman was making him nervous as a cat watching a frog. This prodigal son business was not what he’d expected. Sarah’s mother could just as well run him out of her house with a shotgun at his backside for leaving her daughter like that. Considering Sarah’s devastated expression when she’d fled his room that day, it was a miracle he was still in one piece. That Vivian Whitehouse was actually being friendly was an even bigger miracle.

If not downright weird.

After a few seconds, the smile blossomed. “Still know your way around a bag of briquettes, boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“That no-count brother of yours can’t barbecue worth beans. But I seem to recall your daddy and you used to cook up a storm.”

The knot in his stomach began to ease a little. “Yes, ma’am, I guess so. But…well, I don’t mean to be rude, but…speaking of storms?”

“Shoot…this’ll be over before Katey’s finished shucking the corn. Grab a Coke out of the fridge and take a load off. I’ll be right back.”

Katey sat at the kitchen table in front of a pile of corn large enough to feed the whole county, shucking it so slowly there was no doubt Vivian was right. The child offered him a doleful expression and a put-upon sigh and tugged off another handful of husk.

Dean nodded toward the corn, his brow creased in sympathy. “Think your Mama would mind if I helped?”

“Yes, I would” came the stentorian voice from the pantry. “That’s her job. You just let her be.”

Katey screwed up one side of her mouth. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Sorry, honey,” he said, briefly touching her shoulder. “I tried.”

He pulled a Coke out of the refrigerator and popped the top, surveying the enormous kitchen appreciatively, a room that had always represented love and warmth and security when he was growing up. Even as the angry storm slashed against the windows, this room was bright, inviting, safe. He sagged against the counter and took a swig of the soda, only half listening as Vivian chattered to him from the other side of the door.

The all-white room hadn’t changed much since he’d last seen it. The same handpainted porcelain plates marched across the soffit over the light oak cabinets his father had put in—as well as the butcherblock countertops—when the Whitehouses had first bought the old place almost twenty-five years ago. He’d only been five at the time, but he still remembered coming over and “helping,” and how Vivian had fussed and clucked over him and fed him enormous chunks of hot corn-bread dripping with butter or still-warm peanut butter cookies or that last piece of chocolate cake that “was just going to go stale if someone didn’t eat it real soon,” all of which were courtesy of the enormous converted cast-iron stove, which still took up a good chunk of one wall like a giant sleeping bull.

His focus shifted toward the sink, where he could almost see a teenaged Sarah, like a hologram or something, standing with her hand on her slim waist and a teasing smile on her lips, her long hair rippling like a waterfall over her shoulders as she’d throw him a towel to dry so they could go riding their bikes up to the lake before it got dark.

He swallowed hard, then his eyes wandered back to the pine table where Katey sat at her task, her tongue stuck out in concentration. The table had also been his daddy’s handiwork, and he noted underneath the growing pile of husks it was still adorned with familiar handmade rag placemats and a pot of fresh flowers in the center. He thought of all the dinners and all the jokes and all the laughter he’d shared at that table. And how much he’d missed all that.

And how, if he hadn’t panicked, believing other people knew more than he did, maybe he wouldn’t’ve had to.

He realized his eyes were moist, about the same time he caught Vivian standing in the pantry door, a bag of briquettes in her arms. Conspiracy lighting up her dove-colored eyes, she walked heavily across the old wood floor and shoved the bag into his arms.

“You have one week,” she said in a low voice. So the child wouldn’t hear, he presumed.

“I don’t…” He frowned. “Huh?”

Vivian sighed, then leveled him with a piercing look that could have converted rocks into diamonds. “To win her back, you fool.”

This time he did jump, just as if the frog had sprung into his face. But her earnest expression stilled him immediately. Worried him, too.

“Look, mistakes get made,” she said in a low voice. “And you can either learn from them and try to fix them, or you can give up and be miserable for the rest of your life. So…there’s your choice. Don’t screw it up.”

Before Dean could protest that he seriously doubted whether winning back Sarah’s affections—even if he’d wanted to—was either reasonable, possible, or the best choice for anyone concerned, the kitchen door swung open and the lady herself appeared. She’d showcased those long legs in a pair of white shorts, topped by a blousy white cotton shirt with the top two buttons left intriguingly undone. Whiskey eyes flashed from her mother to Dean and back again as she stood with one hand on the side of the door, the other on her hip.

Leading Dean to wonder exactly how long she’d been standing on the other side of the door.

Chapter 3

Judging from Dean’s furtive expression, she’d been the topic of conversation. Judging from her mother’s, by Vivian’s, choice.

No way was she going there.

So she went instead to the refrigerator—acutely aware of Dean’s appreciative scrutiny of her legs as she passed—pulled out a Coke, then returned to the living room to check out the wedding gifts, leaving her mother and Dean to think whatever they liked.

Played it pretty cool the rest of the evening, too, if she said so herself. Whenever she caught Dean watching her at supper, she rearranged her features into what she hoped was an expression of aloof nonchalance.

Not that the rest of her would cooperate. She forced herself to eat—otherwise four people would have jumped on her case—but the corn and burgers and salad and watermelon and apple pie felt like wet sand in her stomach.

Dean’s own peculiar expression didn’t help matters, a look which she caught far more often than she liked simply because the man would not take his eyes off of her. They didn’t exchange as much as a dozen words during the meal, which nobody noticed what with Jennifer and Katey and her mother all holding forth about the wedding, but she felt as if he was trying to absorb her through his eyes. Just as she was fixing to tell him to perform some physiologically impossible feat, Jennifer came to the rescue.

“So, c’mon, Dean,” her sister wheedled as only she could. “You’ve just gotta tell me what this wedding present is.”

Dean finally tore his eyes away from Sarah and contemplated her sister with an oblique smile. “Oh, I’ve gotta tell you, huh?” he said, winking at Katey. “And why is that?”

“Oh, boy,” Lance interjected with raised hands and a laugh. “You do not want to know what this woman is capable of once she sets her mind to something. Might as well give it up now, while you still have all your toenails.”

“Lance!” Jennifer slapped him with her paper napkin. “You make me sound like Attila the Hun or something. I’m not that bad—”

“Yeah. You are.” Lance caught his fiancée in his arms, eliciting a tiny squeal. “That’s why I love you so much.” He sealed his left-handed endearment with a smacking kiss on her lips.

Jennifer tenderly grazed his cheek with two fingers, then faced Dean again. “So? You gonna tell me or sacrifice your toenails?”

Chuckling, Dean wiped his mouth and hands on his napkin and stood up. “It’s in the truck.”

“The truck!” Jennifer’s eyes grew wide as the watermelon rounds stacked on the plate in front of her. “You left my wedding present out in the rain?”

“Trust me,” Dean said, backing toward the driveway, “when I pack furniture, nothing short of a nuclear disaster is going to harm it.”

“Furniture?” By now Jennifer had jumped up from the table and zipped past Dean on the way to the Dakota, followed one by one by the rest of the family. “Lance said you had enough orders to keep your shop busy through Christmas…” She’d reached the truck and now danced with impatience. “But you found the time to make something for us?”

“Sure did.” Dean swung down the tailgate and hopped up into the bed where a lumpy, canvas-wrapped object nestled near the cab. After several minutes of peeling away layer after layer of protective covering, he picked up the object—which still wore its last layer, like a chaste slip—and jumped down off the truck with it. Now everyone followed Dean and the object up onto the porch, where he set it down and stepped away, nodding toward Jennifer.

“Be my guest.”

Jennifer hesitated, then slowly drew off the last layer of canvas. “Oh!”

The fine handrubbed finish of the mahogany rocker glowed in the last rays of the setting sun like the embers of a dying fire. A Windsor design, with delicate, smooth spindles splayed upward from the seat, the arms were gracefully curved, the rockers perfectly balanced. But everyone there knew just how difficult such a deceptively simple-looking object can be to make, because there was no room for the slightest imperfection.

Sarah blinked, then swallowed. She’d always known Dean was talented, remembering the beautiful pieces he’d build in his father’s workshop. But the care and attention to detail in the chair said it all. She’d always said he’d make something of himself. Never doubted it for a single second.

And would he have gotten as far as he had if he’d stayed? If he hadn’t gone to Atlanta, his talent would have withered like a seedling not given the proper light or food or water. As would have their love, eventually.

It all made sense. Now.

“That is the loveliest rocker I have ever seen,” Vivian, never one to flatter, allowed, and the smile that lit up Dean’s face was nearly Sarah’s undoing.

“Thank you,” he said softly, then addressed his brother and Jennifer, who stood with their arms around each other’s waist. “I just hope the two of you enjoy using it half as much as I enjoyed making it for you.”

“Oh, Dean…” Jennifer slipped away from Lance and took Dean’s hand, stretching up to kiss him on the cheek. “It’s absolutely gorgeous. Thank you.” She giggled and gestured toward the chair. “Can I?”

“Well, ma’am, chairs aren’t meant to be looked at, now are they?”

With another giggle, Jennifer slid into the chair, sighing in contentment. “It really is perfect.” Sarah saw Dean lean over and whisper something that brought a flush to Jen’s cheeks and a hand to Dean’s wrist as she nodded and smiled. Then Dean skipped down the porch steps and back out into the yard, where he was accosted by a vociferous little girl who just had to show him around the property before it got any darker. Vivian then dragged Lance off to help her with some chore or other, leaving the two sisters on the porch.

“So.” Sarah leaned against the railing, arms crossed. “What did he say?”

Her sister went crimson.

“Good Lord, Jennifer—what did he say?”

“Promise you won’t say a word to anyone? Not even Mama?”

“What on earth…?”

Jennifer cleared her throat, stroking the satiny arms of the chair with her fingertips. “He said that…he hoped I’d get to rock our babies in this chair.”

Sarah let out a whoosh of air. “Is that all? Perfectly understandable, considering the nature of the present—”

“Sarah. You don’t understand.” Jennifer leaned over and pulled her sister closer. “I’m late.”

“For what?”

“Sa-rah…” Jennifer waited. Expectantly, as it were.

Sarah’s mouth fell open. “You’re preg—?”

“Shh!” Jennifer madly flapped her hands. “Nobody knows. Not even Lance. It’s only three days. It may be a false alarm.”

Sarah squatted in front of her sister, grabbing her hands. “You little minx!” With a throaty chuckle, she added, “You ever been late before?”

“Not even ten minutes.”

They both dissolved into giggles.

“What’s going on?” Lance asked behind Sarah, making them jump.

“Oh, nothing. Just girl stuff.” Sarah got to her feet with her back to Lance, winked at Jennifer. “You going to tell him?” she mouthed to her sister, who gave a twitch of a head shake in response.

“Saturday,” she said, and Sarah understood.

What a wedding present, she thought as she made her way back to the picnic table. She rifled through the leftovers as if checking out the goods at a yard sale, finally plopping down on the bench with the last piece of apple pie. A pair of thin arms threaded around her neck. “C’n I show Dean the kennels?”

Her mouth full of pie, Sarah twisted around to Katey. And Dean.

“Ob cos,” she mumbled around mashed apples and piecrust, then swallowed and thought probably a smile was in order. For Katey, at any rate. “Of course,” she repeated. “Just don’t bother Mariah if she’s nursing, okay?”

“I know,” Katey said with a tolerant sigh, then took Dean by the hand.

Sarah’s heart wrenched when she saw Dean’s strong, callused fingers close so carefully around the little ones trustingly placed in his. Unthinking, she looked up, and found her eyes caught in his much the same way his hand held Katey’s—with a tenderness that spoke of trust and loyalty. And unbroken ties.

It had been a long, long time since she’d seen that look in his eyes.

She didn’t want to see it now.

“Come on, Dean.” Katey tugged at his hand, leaning all of her sixty-five pounds away from him. “It’s getting dark. Let’s go.”

“Okay, honey, I’m coming,” he drawled, turning to her with a wide smile. “Let’s go see those beautiful dogs your Mama’s raising.”

Dean shared the smile with Sarah as he swung Katey up on his back for a piggyback ride, then loped off toward the kennels, the little girl dissolving into uncontrollable giggles when he broke into a gallop. Sarah simply sat and watched, her chin sunk in her hands, as the glue holding together her broken heart disintegrated a little more.

Lance straddled the seat beside her and followed her gaze. “They sure hit it off,” he said.

With a little start, Sarah straightened up, nodded. “Yeah.” She swung her legs to the outside of the table and rested her elbows on the top, staring back at the house. Away from the kennels. As if cued, hundreds of fireflies began looping in and out of the bushes and long grass, reminding Sarah how she used to pretend they were actually tiny flashlights carried by a band of invisible little people who lived under the porch. When had she stopped believing in magic?

Stupid question.

“Where’s Jen?” she asked Lance.

“I don’t know, exactly. She disappeared inside to look for your mother. Had the oddest look on her face, too.” He turned worried brown eyes to her. “You think everything’s okay?”

Sarah fought to keep a straight face. “She probably thought of something she had to tell Mama that couldn’t wait one second longer. You know Jennifer.”

“All too well,” he said with a half laugh, then immediately frowned. “But what’s up with you and my brother? Is somebody going to fill me in as to what exactly’s going on here?”

Sarah peered from underneath her lashes at Lance, whose only resemblance to Dean was the same slanted smile. Dean favored his father; Lance had clearly inherited his mother’s delicate features and dark hair. “That depends,” she hedged, “on how much you already know.”

“Shoot, Sarah…I don’t know enough to fill a postage stamp. Other than remembering you two hanging out a lot when you were kids. I mean, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, but I thought you were close. What happened?”

Sarah sighed, plucking an acorn the wind had deposited in her lap and pitching it back at the tree whence it came. She liked Dean’s brother a lot. At twenty-three, he’d gotten his accounting degree and even started his own fledgling practice, mainly trying to help the outlying farmers understand the concept of cash flow and credit so they didn’t keep getting screwed in the middle of planting or lambing or harvest season. No way to get rich, but he wouldn’t starve. Besides, he was acquiring enough clients with actual money here and there that in a few years he’d probably do pretty well.

And he was crazy about her sister. Jennifer could have done far worse than Lance Parrish, that was for sure. The young man doted on her but never let her take herself too seriously. And Jennifer kept him from getting buried in his facts and figures, kept his sense of humor fine-tuned so he never took himself too seriously, either. They were a good match. And they’d make great parents.

A hand waved in front of her face. “Hello?”

“What? Oh…sorry.” She shifted slightly on the bench to restore circulation to her posterior, looking just past Lance toward the back pasture, quickly being swallowed up in darkness. “Yeah, your brother and I go way back. And we went together for a while. But we broke up. He went to Atlanta. I stayed here.” She rolled her shoulders. “End of story.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s why he kept staring at you all through supper with that stupid expression on his face.”

Sarah felt her own face tingle. “It’s the hair,” she parried, ruffling it. “He just can’t get over the fact it’s not there anymore.”

“And if you believe that…” Lance shrugged and let the sentence hang like smoke in the air.

With a brisk shake of her head, Sarah said, “Look, I’ll be completely honest, okay? Just so no one starts imagining things that aren’t there.” She hooked one heel up onto the bench, laced her hands around her knee. “Your brother hasn’t set foot in Sweetbranch since he left, has he?”

“Well, no…”

“Doesn’t that tell you something? Honey, Dean obviously wants the big-city life, the big-city glitz and glamour and excitement. He made that more than clear to me the day he told me it was over between us. There was nothing here to hold him then, and nothing has changed on that score.” She stood up, stretched out her legs. “He’s made his life. I’ve made mine.” One shoulder hitched. “We live on different planets, Lance. What I guess I hadn’t realized was that we always had—”

“Sarah! Josh Plunkett’s on the phone!”

She swiveled toward the house. “What’s he want?” she called back to her mother.

“Says one of the lambs got out during the thunderstorm. Dang mule somehow stepped on it, broke its leg. The boy’s next door to hysterical.”

“Tell him I’ll be right out, to keep the lamb still and himself calm.”

Sarah started for the house to get her shoulder bag and car keys when Lance called after her. Eyebrows raised, she looked back over her shoulder.

“What you said about you and Dean being from two different planets? They’re making remarkable strides in space travel these days, you know.”

Sarah allowed a half smile for the young man, not having the heart to point out that Dean’s planet was probably in another galaxy. Billions and billions of light years away. And she drove a Bronco, not the USS Enterprise.

A couple minutes later, as she steered the car out onto the road and headed north toward the Plunkett farm, she saw Katey and Dean come out of the kennel, easily visible thanks to the sensor light over the kennel door. As Sarah acknowledged Katey’s exuberant goodbyes with a wave of her hand, she couldn’t help but see Dean still wore that whipped-dog expression. Frowning, she concentrated on the twin beams of light in front of her.

And ignored the panic threatening to choke her.

Even though Dean had left the Whitehouses’ hours ago, he still couldn’t get the image of a pair of endless legs out of his head.

No. It was more than that, he thought, scrunching his pillow under his head. There were plenty of long legs in Atlanta. None of them, however, belonged to Sarah Whitehouse.

And there were other images, like specters, determined to plague him that night: Sarah’s brilliant smile and quick laugh and gentle, loving teasing; Sarah sitting with one long finger tucked under her chin as she concentrated on some convoluted explanation of Katey’s; Sarah head to head with Jennifer as they shared sisterly secrets; Sarah joking with her mother, their laughs blending in the sweetest harmony heard this side of the Robert Shaw Chorale.

The way that laughter died whenever she caught him looking at her.

Finally, tired of flopping around in bed like water on a hot skillet, he sat up and perched on its edge, raking both hands through his hair. Too many Cokes, he thought.

Too many memories.

He fumbled for his Timex on top of the nightstand, waiting a moment until the tiny phosphorescent green numerals came into focus. Twelve forty-five. He’d been in bed for nearly two hours and hadn’t been to sleep yet. Didn’t look as though the sandman was going to pay him a visit anytime soon, either.

The old floorboards protested when he stood and crossed to the open window. He leaned against the sill, curtains of some diaphanous material—his aunt had redone his old bedroom immediately after he’d left, Lance had told him—brushing against his bare shoulders, making him shiver. The moon was full; stark, deep shadows carved the front yard and road beyond, between patches of silvery light bright enough to read by.

He needed a walk.

Thirty seconds of blind rummaging through his soft-sided suitcase yielded a pair of clean jeans and T-shirt. He stumbled a bit in the dark as he pulled them on, the harsh grating of the zipper magnified in the deep middle-of-the-night country silence. Seconds later, he was out the back door.

The only sounds he heard as he ambled down the road in the general direction of Sarah’s house were the occasional chirping of an insomniac cricket and the murmurings of leaves as the night breeze disturbed their repose. The navy blue sky, punctuated with too many stars to take them all in, showed no signs of the earlier storm, but the air was cool and clean and fresh, the hems of his jeans soon soaked from the dampness leeching from the ground.

He passed the row of cypresses bordering the west edge of the Whitehouse property and stopped, staring at the house, wondering what the general reaction would be if he just walked up and knocked on the door. Took all of two, maybe three seconds to decide there were easier ways to commit suicide.

Then he noticed her car wasn’t in the driveway. Concerned, he checked out the back…nope. She’d left on her call at nine-thirty. Where the hell could she still be at 1:00 a.m.?

He stood, hands on hips, mouth drawn. Okay, so whatever he and Sarah had once had was shot to hell. He knew that. He also knew—for the sake of family harmony, if nothing else—he owed it to both of them, to everyone, to at least try to salvage something of the present.

Otherwise, he might never be able to sleep again.

He settled himself into an Adirondack chair on the front lawn, and waited.

Nothing was ever simple. The lamb’s leg had refused to respond to her normal manipulative techniques, so she had to load the eighty-pound animal into the Bronco and take him into the clinic where she could do a radiograph and see exactly what was going on. Turned out the joint had been sheared in half right at the growing cartilage, with the farthest piece displaced sideways. That meant sedation—at one point, Sarah wondered if the thirteen-year-old Josh would need it more than the lamb—and some careful pulling and twisting until everything was lined up and she heard that reassuring “click” that indicated the joint had slipped back into place. If the animal managed to keep on the splints, with some careful tending he’d be just fine.

She hoped her own prognosis was as good.

As she pulled into the driveway, she muttered a prayer of gratitude that the Bronco wasn’t a real horse that needed stabling. Cut the engine, go to bed…the day was over at last—

“What took you so long?”

With a little scream, she banged into the open car door, scraping her arm.

“Lord Almighty, Dean! You scared the hell out of me—”

“What took you so long?” he repeated.

“The call was more complicated than I expected, what do you think?” she lobbed back, rubbing her whacked arm. “That happens, far more often than I usually admit. And what on earth are you doing here at—what time is it…?” she tilted her watch up to the moonlight, squinted at it “—one-fourteen in the freakin’ morning?”

She could make out broad shoulders lifting and falling, delineated by a thin outline of moonlight. “I couldn’t sleep. So I took a walk, ended up here, saw you weren’t and got worried.”

“Well, here I am, nothing ate me on my way home, and I’m about to drop in my tracks.” She slammed shut her car door. “I’m going to bed, if you don’t mind.” She started up the driveway toward the house, spinning around in shock when Dean grabbed her arm.

“We need to talk.”

Oooh, no, she thought, smelling danger like a wolf. She was exhausted, and vulnerable, and the damp night hair had heightened Dean’s scent far more than she knew she could safely handle.

“Look—if I don’t want to talk to you when I’m awake, it’s a sure bet I don’t now.” She jerked away from him and continued toward the house, awake enough to notice even that brief contact had sent a wave of shivers skittering over her arm. “Good night, Dean,” she tossed over her shoulder.

She should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

“Sarah, I’m sorry—” she heard behind her “—I know it’s way overdue, but I feel terrible about what happened between us.”

Ignoring the little voice that said keep walking, don’t respond, don’t get into it, she whipped around. “And that’s supposed to mean something to me? Please don’t tell me you’re that naive.”

“I’m just trying to apologize here, if you’ll give me half a chance—”

“You are that naive!” she countered, incredulous. She crossed her arms across her ribs so tightly it hurt. “Here’s a flash for you, Parrish—apologies are what people do when there’s some chance of making things better again. You could apologize for, maybe, being late for a date, or dialing a wrong number, or forgetting a birthday, even. There’s no apology for what you did to me—”

“Give me a break, would you?” he shot back, his voice tight with restraint. “I was twenty years old and confused and stupid, all right?”

Her hands flew into the air as she backed away, shaking her head. “I don’t want to hear this, Dean—”

She stumbled over something, which slowed her down enough for Dean to snag her wrist. “Well, too bad, because you’re going to. You don’t think I saw the hurt in your eyes tonight, every time I looked at you? You don’t think I know why you took off before dinner? For God’s sake, Sarah—this is me. Maybe it’s been nine years since we saw each other, but I can still see inside your head better than anyone else.”

He dropped her wrist; she stayed put, pinned by the electricity in his gaze.

“Running away isn’t going to change anything, and you know it,” he said, more softly. “And I don’t think either one of us wants this crap hanging over our heads on Saturday. So let’s have this out, right now, right here, so we can get on with our lives.”

She hesitated another few seconds, realized he’d just pester her to death until he had his say. “Okay.” She let out on a short breath. “Talk.”

A ragged sigh of relief floated over her head, but remorse flooded his features. “My aunt kept hammering away about how different we were, how you had all these goals, and I didn’t. And your folks…I knew they liked me and all, but when things started to get serious between us, you don’t think I knew what they were thinking, too?”

Before she could even think of what to say to that, he went on.

“And eventually, I thought, yeah, they were right…if I stayed around, if we got married, you probably wouldn’t finish college, we’d end up having a couple of kids, and a few years down the road you’d realize you’d thrown your life away for some worthless high-school dropout with no future. I couldn’t let that happen to you. So…I decided the best thing was to leave, to get away so you could do what you needed to do and I wouldn’t get in your way. Especially…” He pinned her with tortured eyes. “Especially after we made love,” he said, his voice low, the words arcing dangerously between them.

She went very, very still.

“No comment?”

All she could do was shake her head.

“Don’t you see, honey? We’d gotten in way too deep. Even as a twenty-year-old airhead, I knew that much.” He paused, still apparently expecting a reply. When there wasn’t one, he added, “I loved you so much…and I didn’t know what else to do, how to fix things.” He lifted his hands, let them fall to his sides again. “It seemed to make sense at the time.”

She stared at him for several seconds, the words not fitting together in any sort of logical order at first. Then, suddenly, they did, and her skin went cold.

“You lied to me?”

A breeze stirred the leaves overhead; something skittered underneath the rhododendrons. “Yes,” he finally said. “I lied. And what really sucks is that I can’t even say I never meant to hurt you, because I did. I had to make you hate me, or I never would’ve been able to leave at all.”

She regarded him for another moment, her hands braced on the back of her hips. Her shoulder bag slipped, the strap banging into her forearm; she let it slide down to the ground, walked away a few steps, then strode back. “All…all that business about hating Sweetbranch was an act?”

Dean ran his hand over his face, then through his hair. “I never hated my home, Sarah. I didn’t want to leave. But I thought I had no choice.”

“And this is somehow supposed to make me feel better?” As the implications began to sink in, she felt bitterness choke her heart like bindweed—invasive, profuse and virtually impossible to get rid of. “Let me get this straight—you lied to me, told me you’d never loved me, that you found everything about me and this town so boring you couldn’t stand the thought of being here one minute longer, not even long enough to take me to my prom. And you did this because you loved me?”

He looked away, a muscle popping in his jaw.

“You jerk!” she shrieked, taking a wild swing at him which he easily dodged. Tears of fury pricked at her eyes, but she would not let them come. She would not. What she did was walk away.

Twenty paces later, she found herself standing next to the forty-foot willow in the middle of the yard, one knee on the wrought-iron seat circling its base, her head and right hand resting on the trunk.

So. He had loved her, just as she thought. No—not as she thought. As he thought, in some convoluted manner unfathomable to her. She would never have just run from a problem, especially not a problem with Dean.

The suffocated laugh didn’t even make it past her lips. Yeah, right. Who was she kidding? Hell, if running from problems was on Olympic event, she’d be a gold medalist.

Suddenly, she knew nothing about anything, except she was so very, very tired.

The grass rustled softly as Dean came closer; she didn’t move. Despite the fury raging inside her, she realized how few males in her admittedly limited experience would have come clean the way Dean just had. Man had guts, she had to admit. Still, his confession wasn’t going to eradicate the past, just like that.

“I cannot believe,” she began, rocking her forehead on the top of her hand, “the only solution you saw to this so-called problem of our differences was to make me think everything we’d shared was a complete sham.”

“You had all these plans,” he said quietly, his voice as much of a caress as it had always been, “these dreams…and I let myself be convinced I couldn’t be a part of all that.” Her eyes actually hurt when she looked at him. He shrugged. “I told you…it was stupid.”

Now she turned, collapsing like a rag doll on the bench, her back against the tree. She could only see his silhouette. Just as well.

“Oh, what you did goes way beyond stupid, Dean. You didn’t care enough to even attempt to talk about what was bothering you. To see if we could work this out together. That concept completely eluded you. Instead, you made me feel like some cheap throwaway who wasn’t worth even losing a little sleep over. Do you have any idea what that summer was like for me, Dean? After you left? Do you?”

After a long pause, he said, “They told me you got sick. Mono, right?”

She hadn’t expected he’d known that. Momentarily thrown, she scrambled for her next sentence. “Before that. Of course I missed the prom, which, like any normal teenage girl, I’d been looking forward to since the first day of high school. But then, I was supposed to give the valedictorian speech at graduation, remember? I didn’t want to read from cards, ’cause I always thought that looked tacky, so I memorized the speech. Except, I blanked.” Her laugh was harsh. “Couldn’t remember one single word. I was completely humiliated.”

Even in the dark, she could see his posture turn defensive. “You blame me for that?”

“It’s a known fact that sleep deprivation causes severe loss of memory function. And I couldn’t sleep…at all…for three weeks after you left.”

He swore.

“My sentiments exactly.” Several beats passed. “I’d never planned on saying any of this to you, you know, considering I didn’t think I’d lay eyes on you again. But since we’re playing True Confessions tonight and I’m so tired I don’t give a flying fig what comes out of my mouth, you might as well know exactly how much you hurt me. And trust me, telling me nine years later that none of it was true doesn’t do a damn thing to erase what I felt during those nine years.”

“I didn’t think it would,” he shot back. She saw his hand snake around to the back of his neck. “But it didn’t seem to make any sense to let you continue to think it, either.” He hesitated, then sat down beside her in such a way she had no choice but to meet his gaze. She did chose, however, to ignore the pain she saw there. If she acknowledged it, she would lose her advantage. That was not an option. “I know I screwed up, Sarah. I also know, no matter what I do, I can’t turn back the clock. I’m not trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.”

Again, she had nothing to say to that.

His head fell back against the trunk. “Does it still hurt?” he asked gently. Too gently. Like the old Dean. Like her Dean, the one who’d always protected her, supported her. Loved her.

“No,” she lied. “I got on with my life. Which as you can see is going pretty well. Now, if you don’t mind…” She slapped her thighs with the palms of her hands, then pushed herself off the bench. “I really need to get some sleep—”

He’d risen when she did and spun her around so his face was inches from hers. His heat was everywhere—in his touch, in his breath on her face, in the feral glint in his eyes. Just like it had been the night they’d become lovers. She gasped, softly, from arousal, from the lingering betrayal, from a determination not to react to any of it.

“Maybe it doesn’t hurt you anymore,” Dean said in a fierce whisper, “but I can’t say the same for myself. I had no idea the pain would bounce back on me like a back draft, consuming my every waking thought. And there are a lot of waking thoughts, because you’re not the only one who lost a great deal of sleep after we broke up.”

“That’s too bad,” Sarah said, attempting to pull away. But his grip strengthened.

“Sarah, listen to me! Whether you ever forgive me or not, you will understand how much I regret hurting you the way I did. How much I regret what I lost.”

Every muscle in her body tensed, her fingers curling into fists as she resisted the urge to slug him. “And exactly how long have you felt like this?”

“Since the moment you ran out of my room, nine years ago.”

For a stunned moment or two, jubilation and fury warred in her head, only to be swiftly eclipsed by as a sense of bitter hopelessness, as it hit her, hard, just how much his confession upped the stakes. Oh, dear Lord…how different things might have been, if she’d only known, if he’d bothered to say something sooner…

“All this time…” She shook her head. “You know, Atlanta’s only two hours away. And we’ve always had a phone, even way out here in the boonies. We get regular mail deliveries, too—”

“I get the point,” he said with a sad smile. “But I figured you probably hated my guts. And…” He sighed, looking up for a moment. “I still thought I’d done the right thing, for a long time. By the time I realized I hadn’t, I figured it was too late—”

“Yes, it is,” she said, grasping at anything that would stop this, right now. She knew he was genuinely sorry, knew he meant every word he’d said. But she didn’t dare let his contrition get to her. She was only safe as long as he was still the bad guy.

“It is too late, Dean. So you know what I think? I think, if that cozy scene in the kitchen a few hours ago is any indication, what you want is another roll in the pine needles. You’ve got a first-class case of the hots, is all that’s going on here.” She planted both palms on his chest and pushed away from him. “In your dreams, buddy boy. Go on back to Atlanta and find yourself some big-city sweetie to scratch your itch. This hick ain’t puttin’ out, you hear?”

She picked up her bag from where she’d dropped it on the lawn earlier and hoofed it toward the house.

“Dammit, Sarah!” he roared, probably waking up everyone within a five-mile radius. “You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said!”

“Go home, Dean,” she called over her shoulder, praying Katey, at least, was sleeping through this. “Nothing’s changed.”

“I’ve changed, Sarah,” she heard behind her. “Hey— I can even read without moving my lips now, did you know that?”

His words slashed through her. But she didn’t stop.

“We’re going to be family, Sarah Louise,” he said, more softly but no less importunately. “For Jen’s and Lance’s sake, at least, we need to get past this.”

She’d gotten as far as the porch steps; now she turned, one hand gripping the newel post, and saw he’d followed her across the yard. He stood with his hands clenched at his sides, solid and determined and dangerous. His eyes glistened in the moonlight, and she thought once again how impossible, how easy it would be to let herself succumb to his entreaties.

And how wrong she’d been. Everything had changed between them. More than he even knew.

Dean stepped closer, his mouth drawn. “Look, I told you— I don’t expect things to get back the way they were between us, especially not after all this time. All I’m asking is for you to see me as I am now.”

She waited until the first, then the second, wave of pain passed, before she said, quietly, “I’m not sure I can do that.”

The man she once loved with everything she had in her glared at her for several seconds, then turned and strode off into the darkness.

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