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