by Gina Wilkins
“For everyone else to do the legwork for you? I guess it would make it easier for you,” Kelly gibed teasingly.
“Hey, give me a break, okay? I haven’t even started on the D’Alessandro family yet. They buy for everyone. I’m making Joe help with that undertaking.”
“And so you should.”
“At least I don’t have to worry about what to get for his parents. Joe, Tony and Michael are chipping in to send their parents on a cruise after the first of the year.”
“Carla will love that,” Kelly commented, picturing Joe’s mother. A recently retired judge, Carla was still beautiful at seventy-one, and one of the most truly gracious women Kelly had ever met.
“So will Vinnie, though he probably won’t admit it,” Brynn said wryly, obviously very fond of her gruff but good-hearted retired-P.I. father-in-law.
Kelly reached for her purse and the package containing the new red dress she had not bought to impress anyone in particular. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go shop.”
Brynn drew an exaggeratedly deep breath, as if for fortitude, and then stood. “Look out, bargains, here we come. And Kelly, if you see anything Shane might like, be sure and point it out.”
Kelly reached up to ruffle her short, wispy blond hair, using the gesture as a ploy to avoid her friend’s eyes. “I don’t know why you think I’d know what Shane likes, but I’ll let you know if anything grabs me.”
“You want another soda?” Shane asked Cameron as they lounged side by side on Shane’s couch, their eyes focused on a televised football game.
Without looking away from the screen, Cameron replied “No, I’m—damn, an interception!”
“Oh, man. He threw it right to the guy,” Shane said in disgust.
They watched the resulting touchdown in glum resignation. All in all, they were having a great time, Shane thought with a wry smile.
The fishing trip hadn’t lasted long. It had been quite cool that morning and the fish hadn’t been in the mood to be caught. After a couple of hours, Shane and Cameron had returned to Shane’s place, pulled out lunch meat, bread, chips, pickles and sodas, and had settled in front of the TV for an afternoon of food and football.
Lounging back against the couch cushions, Cameron laced his hands behind his head. “When is it you’re supposed to baby-sit your kid sister?”
“Dad and Cassie are leaving the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and Molly’s staying here with me for the next ten days.”
Cameron shook his head. “I can’t believe you volunteered for that. What do you know about taking care of little kids?”
“Molly’s hardly an infant. She turned twelve a couple of weeks ago.”
“Even worse.” Cameron shuddered. “Hormones and stuff. I’ve heard of twelve-year-old girls getting pregnant.”
“Not on my watch,” Shane answered flatly. He’d pound any randy kid who came sniffing around his pretty seventh grade sister, he vowed. Actually, that sounded like a pretty good plan to follow for the next ten years or so.
“Okay, so maybe that was kind of extreme,” Cameron admitted. “But you’ve got to admit you haven’t had a lot of experience with kids.”
“Molly and I lived in the same house from the time she was born until I left for college four years later. I’ve lived right next door to her since I built this house almost six years ago. I think I know her as well as anyone does. She’s never given my folks a day of trouble.”
“Yeah, well, who would give Jared any trouble? I still call him ‘sir’ and I don’t even say that to my own father these days. I doubt that the kid is as intimidated by you as she is by your dad.”
“Molly’s hardly intimidated by Dad. She’s got him wrapped around her little finger and she knows it.”
“Yeah, but I bet she never gives him any back talk, either.”
Shane had to concede that. As much as Jared doted on his little girl, he could be a stem parent when necessary. It had generally taken only a warning look to bring Shane in line, and the same held true with Molly.
Maybe Shane should be practicing some of those looks in the mirror.
Cameron glanced at the TV again. “Game’s over. I lost twenty on it to a guy at work.”
“Serves you right for taking a sucker bet.”
“Thanks for the moral support, pal.”
“You’re welcome,” Shane answered equably.
Cameron checked his watch. “I guess I should head home. You probably have some cowboy chores to do.”
Chuckling at the wording, Shane shrugged. “I’ve got a few things to take care of. Why don’t you hang around and help? I’ll teach you how to milk a bull.”
Cameron grunted. “Real funny, Walker.”
“I suppose you have plans with Amber tonight.”
“Er—no, actually. I told her I’d probably want to crash after getting up so early for fishing. I need a night off.”
Shane didn’t know quite what to say to that. He’d heard that note in Cameron’s voice before—every time Cameron got tired of his latest girlfriend. When it came to women, Cameron had a very short attention span. He generally made an effort not to leave a string of broken hearts behind him, and had somehow managed to remain fairly good friends with most of his former lovers. But Shane wasn’t sure that was going to be possible this time. Amber was so obviously besotted—and had been for a long time, even before Cameron had noticed. He had an unpleasant premonition that the affair between Cameron and Amber was not going to end as amicably as Cameron’s previous liaisons.
“You’re worried about Amber, aren’t you?” Cameron asked, correctly interpreting his friend’s silence.
He cleared his throat. “Well...maybe a little. She’s been a good friend. I wouldn’t want to see her hurt.”
“Neither do I. I wish I could promise you it won’t happen.”
Shane studied his friend’s face. “You’re going to end it, aren’t you?”
Squirming on the couch, Cameron looked away. “I haven’t said that.”
“Cam, think about who you’re talking to. I was around for your first girlfriend, remember? I’ve been here for all of them since. I know when you’re getting restless.”
Cameron sighed. “It isn’t working out. Amber’s starting to hint about marriage and kids and, damn it, Shane, I’m just not ready for that. At first I thought maybe there was a chance...but I was fooling myself. And now it looks like I’ve gotten myself into a situation where I’m going to hurt her, no matter what I do.”
Shane winced. He’d known from the start that Amber wanted more than an affair with the man she’d been not-so-secretly in love with since she was a teenager. That had been back when Shane, Cameron, Scott and Heather had been in high school. Amber, a couple of years younger, had become a member of the group by being a friend of Heather’s on the cheerleading squad. Her crush on Cameron—one of the “coolest” guys in high school—had been no secret to anyone except Cameron. Until recently.
It was going to be devastating for her to have come so close to her longtime dream, only to lose it again.
Shane couldn’t even be angry with Cameron about it. He thought Cameron had really tried this time. He knew Cameron would rather cut off an arm than cause Amber pain. But the match had been ill-fated from the start, and unfortunately Cameron and Amber had been the only two involved who hadn’t realized that until too late.
“I’m not going to break it off today,” Cameron said in a feeble attempt at reassurance. “I’ll try a little longer to make it work. Maybe if I just give it a little more time...”
“Yeah,” Shane said, aware that there was little confidence in his reply. “Maybe so.”
Putting Cameron’s problems out of his head, since there was nothing he could do about the situation, he changed the subject and Cameron gladly went along. Whatever happened, this friendship was solid, and neither of them could imagine anything that would bring it to an end.
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Kelly was invited to a D’Ales
sandro family gatherings. Vinnie and Carla D’Alessandro were delighted to have their entire family under one roof for lunch. Tony was there with his wife, Michelle, and their four children. Michael, an attorney who lived in Austin with his wife and daughter, had brought his family for the weekend, and would be staying through the holiday. And the youngest D’Alessandro brother, Joe, was spending his second holiday season with Brynn as his wife.
It was because of her close connection with Brynn that Kelly had been invited to the family gathering. The D’Alessandros were aware that Kelly had no family of her own with which to spend the holidays. For the same reason, the gregarious Walker clan was expecting her to join them for several holiday celebrations.
Because she had always been welcomed warmly and sincerely by both families, and had never been made to feel intrusive, she often accepted their invitations. It was so nice to feel as if she had family for the holidays, even if the connection was only an honorary one.
She returned to her apartment late that afternoon with a container of leftovers Carla had insisted she take home and a glow of contentment deep inside her. She’d had a lovely time with the D’Alessandro family, enjoying the noise and cheerful confusion. She’d been the first to slip away, claiming truthfully that she had several chores to attend to that evening. It was barely 6:00 p.m. when she pulled into her parking lot, but already quite dark. The night air chilled her as she climbed out of her car, reminding her that winter was just getting started.
She was still smiling to herself when she locked her faithful, no-frills little car. Her purse and the container of leftovers were tucked beneath her left arm. Her smile changed to a gasp of alarm when a hand fell on her shoulder. She came very close to dropping everything she held.
“I’m sorry. Did I startle you?”
Kelly put her right hand over her racing heart as she stared up at Shane. “No, you didn’t startle me. You scared the spit out of me. What are you doing here?”
He smiled apologetically. “I brought your VCR. I figured out what was wrong with it and I think it will work fine now.”
“Shane, you didn’t have to come all the way in from the ranch just to return my VCR. I could have gotten it from you Thursday when we all come to the ranch for Thanksgiving.”
He shrugged. “I had to come into town anyway. We had a water pump go out this morning and I had to find a part for it. I figured I might as well bring your VCR while I was at it.”
She smiled weakly as her pulse rate slowly returned to normal. “Now that I’ve recovered from my heart attack, why don’t we go inside?”
He squeezed her shoulder comfortingly, then released her. “I’ll get your VCR out of my truck.”
Shane carried the VCR into her apartment beneath one arm. He set it on its shelf next to her small TV. “It’ll just take me a minute to hook this back up.”
“I really appreciate this.”
“No problem,” he said, fiddling with cables.
“I’d like to repay you for the favor. Are you hungry? Will you stay for dinner?”
He gave her a lazy grin over his shoulder. “I’m always hungry. I would love to stay for dinner.”
Something about that dimpled smile of his always made her insides quiver. During the past year, she’d become an expert at hiding that disconcerting reaction. She was able to respond with a suitably casual tone. “I’ll get something started. Make yourself at home.”
She didn’t have to spend much time debating over what to make for dinner, both because there wasn’t a lot to choose from in her sparsely furnished kitchen and because she knew what Shane liked. Pasta. The man would be perfectly content to eat pasta three meals a day—especially if he had something sweet to eat afterward.
She pulled a package of whole-wheat pasta out of the pantry. It wouldn’t take her long to come up with a meal Shane would enjoy. She found herself humming softly as she started her cooking, aware of Shane moving around in the other room.
Half an hour later they sat at her table, plates of pasta with pesto sauce in front of them, a basket of crusty rolls between them. She’d found an apple pie in the freezer; it was in the oven now. The scent of apples and cinnamon wafted enticingly from the kitchen, and she noticed that Shane occasionally looked that way with a greedy gleam in his eyes.
As they ate, they talked about the day she had spent with the D’Alessandro family, all of whom Shane knew well. They talked about their friends and the ranch and Kelly’s classes. They discussed the slate of offerings in the local movie theaters that weekend, a new country album they both liked, and the usual mess in Washington, D.C.
Chatting with Shane had always been easy for her. As a girl, she had often fantasized about having an older brother. During the past year and a half, she had tried to think of Shane that way—or maybe as a favorite cousin—but she couldn’t quite pull that off. She thought of him, instead, as a very special friend.
They ate dessert in front of the TV. On the pretext of making sure the VCR was working correctly, Shane had brought a video along. It was one he knew she hadn’t seen, an action-packed “buddy film” not usually to her taste. Shane had assured her several times that she would like this one, and she did...until the end, when one of the two dashing heroes died heroically and, for Kelly, unexpectedly. She sniffled through the remaining minutes of the video, which ended happily for the other hero and his love interest.
When the credits began to roll, Shane pushed the stop button and started the rewind process. And then he looked at Kelly and chuckled. “You’re crying.”
She dashed at her face with the heel of her hand. “I am not.”
Smiling indulgently, he slung an arm around her shoulders and used his other hand to wipe a tear from her cheek. “It was only a movie, Kelly. Nobody really died,” he teased.
“I’m aware of that,” she replied with as much dignity as she could summon considering that she was practically in his arms, her eyes still moist from her emotional response to the video. “It just got to me a little, that’s all.”
He used his fingertips to brush away the last remaining traces of her tears. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a marshmallow, Kelly Morrison?”
Since she’d always been embarrassingly sentimental, tearing up over sad movies, sweet love songs, mushy greeting cards and even sappy television commercials, Kely had to confess ruefully, “Yeah. More than a few times.”
“It’s one of the things I like best about you,” he assured her, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. Somehow the kiss went astray, landing at the corner of her mouth instead.
She felt her eyes widen, felt her breath lodge somewhere deep in her chest. Shane drew away only a fraction of an inch, his gaze locked with hers, a startled expression in his eyes. And then his mouth was on hers, and he was kissing her in a way he had never kissed her before.
There was nothing familial about this kiss. Nothing brotherly or even cousinly. It was the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he finds attractive.
Kelly’s first reaction was sheer pleasure. This, she thought dazedly, her hands settling tentatively on Shane’s shoulders, was one amazing kiss.
Her second reaction was pure panic. What on earth was Shane doing?
Chapter Four
The impulsive kiss didn’t last very long. Kelly ended it almost as soon as it began, breaking away with a jerk and a loud gasp.
Shane might have predicted surprise from her. Even displeasure, perhaps. What he had not expected to see in her eyes was fear.
Typically his first impulse in response to an uncertain situation was to make a joke. “Well, that was—”
Kelly jumped to her feet as if the sofa cushions had suddenly burst into flames. “It’s late,” she said, her voice a half octave higher than usual. “You’d better go.”
Rising more slowly, he reached out a hand, intending to give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Kelly...”
She flinched away as if he had threatened to strike her. Before he could ask what on
earth was wrong with her, she snatched his jacket from the coat rack and practically threw it at him. “Thanks again for fixing my VCR. Tell your parents and Molly I said hello.”
There was an odd edge to her babbling. In anyone else, Shane might have called it hysteria. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Avoiding his eyes, she reached for the doorknob. “I’m tired. And I have an early class tomorrow. I need to...”
“Kelly.” He covered her hand with his before she could open the door. “It was only a kiss.”
He felt a tremor go through her. “I know. It shouldn’t have happened.”
He frowned. He hadn’t planned to kiss her, it had just happened somehow. But she didn’t have to act like it was such a terrible thing. “It was only a kiss,” he repeated a bit lamely.
She shook his hand off hers and opened the door. “Don’t do it again,” she muttered, still without looking at him.
A minute later, he found himself outside her apartment, blinking at the door she had just closed between them. “That,” he said to the darkness around him, “was just weird.”
He thought about that kiss, and Kelly’s overreaction to it, during the entire drive home. Sure, the kiss had been unexpected. An impulse he couldn’t explain even if he were to try. They’d been having such a warm, pleasant evening and she had looked so sweet and pretty with her sentimental tears on her cheek, and she’d felt so good in his arms and...well, things had sort of gotten out of hand. But it hadn’t seemed so bad to him—in fact, it had been a great kiss while it had lasted.
Funny. Had he thought about kissing Kelly before, he might have imagined it would be something like kissing one of his cousins. Or one of the women in his circle of pals. He hadn’t thought it would make his blood pump faster or his head start spinning.
No matter how great a kiss it had been—or might have been had it lasted a bit longer—it wasn’t something he intended to repeat. For one thing, it was simply too awkward, considering their family connections. And Kelly had made it clear enough that she had no intention for it to happen again. She had made that very clear, he thought, frowning as he remembered the way she had practically kicked him out of her apartment.