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 ke
nnel 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. “Ta
lk.”
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?”
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