She extended one foot wearing sparkly nail polish and a silvery flip-flop. Bowie’s sudden wild desire to grab her foot and kiss each glittering toe seemed wholly inappropriate with his brother sitting next to him.
He and Katrina had taken great care to stay out of each other’s way the previous week, since that stunning kiss in this very kitchen.
Though he tried to convince himself of all the reasons he shouldn’t be attracted to her, he still went to sleep each night aching with desire and haunted by the knowledge that she was sleeping only steps away. He had grown to crave the few moments in the morning and evening when he could see her and talk to her before one or the other of them would find a reason to escape.
“Shoes. Right,” he managed to say now. “I can grab them for you.”
She shook her head. “I’m going to have to find them, since I can’t tell you exactly where they might be. I thought they were in my bag, but somehow they didn’t make it to my mom’s house. I must have left them in my room.”
She hurried down the hall, and Milo, clearly delighted to see her, jumped up and raced after her. Though he still didn’t give a full-fledged smile, his eyes had a brightness to them that hadn’t been there since she left that morning, even when he was busy with the marshmallow and pretzel stick creations.
Bowie was aware of a pang of misgiving as he slid his chair away from the table and followed after the two of them. He wasn’t the only Callahan who was crazy about Katrina. Milo adored her. He hung on her every word and had worked incredibly hard at whatever she asked of him.
Katrina had been tireless in working with him, with a deep patience Bowie could only envy, and she deserved every bit of credit for any progress Milo might have made over the last week.
What would his brother do when Katrina returned to South America to finalize her adoption? Her time in Haven Point was drawing to a close. She was supposed to be leaving in only a little more than a week, and the thought of her leaving filled him with dread.
Bowie worried that Milo had become so attached to Katrina that he would revert back to his old withdrawn self after she left. He had to hope his brother would respond just as favorably to the autism specialist Debra Peters when she arrived a few days before Katrina was set to leave Haven Point.
He had a few days to worry about that, Bowie decided. Better to focus now on the problem at hand. He followed after both of them, on the off chance that he might be of some help finding her shoes. When he reached the doorway, he spotted Katrina bent down, shapely rear end in the air as she dug through her closet.
“They were here,” she wailed. “I swear they were right here! I picked them up out of the closet and placed them in the bag. So why weren’t they inside when I got to my mom’s place?”
“Are you sure? Maybe you set them down somewhere there.”
“I looked everywhere. And to be honest, I have no memory of seeing them again after I set them inside the bag this morning.” Her eyes were wide with panic. “Where can they be?”
“They’ve got to be here somewhere. Milo, help us look. Katrina needs her shoes. Shoes.” To reinforce the point, he pointed to her flip-flops.
If he hadn’t happened to glance at his brother at that moment, he might have missed the odd look that flashed in Milo’s eyes, a mixture of understanding, wariness and something that looked suspiciously like guilt.
Bowie suddenly had a random memory of something that had happened earlier in the day, before he had come up with the marshmallow construction idea, when he had gone looking for a too-quiet Milo. He had walked into his brother’s bedroom in time to see Milo shove something under his bed.
He should have investigated then.
“Milo,” he pressed, “do you know anything about Katrina’s shoes?”
His brother looked down at the floor and refused to meet his gaze. That was nothing unusual, but there was something different in this particular evasion.
“What would he know about them?” Katrina asked, looking as if she were about to cry.
Bowie decided to go with his sudden hunch. “You’re not in trouble, Milo, but if you know where they are, you need to tell us,” he said firmly. “It’s important. She needs her shoes so she can go to her sister’s wedding. Can you help her find them?”
Milo looked down at the floor for a moment, then at Katrina in her flouncy, swirly plum dress. Bowie briefly thought maybe he had been imagining his brother’s initial reaction until Milo brushed past him through the doorway and went into his own room.
Bowie followed him and entered the room in time to see Milo pull a bundle the same color as Katrina’s dress from under the bed.
Her shoes!
That must have been what he shoved down there when Bowie came in first thing that morning.
“You knew those weren’t yours, kiddo. Go give them to Katrina.”
Milo looked reluctant, but he slowly walked over to her and held out the shoes. Katrina took them, her expression baffled but grateful. “Thank you so much, Milo.”
She grabbed the shoes from him and kissed the boy on the top of his head. “I’ll see you later tonight, okay? Promise you’ll save me a dance.”
He didn’t say anything, just headed back toward the kitchen. By tacit agreement, Bowie and Katrina both followed him and found Milo back at the table with the marshmallows and pretzels, acting as if the last few moments hadn’t happened.
“That was odd,” she said, brows furrowed as she gazed at the boy.
“Not really.” He didn’t want to tell her that this he understood too well, the chaos of not knowing what or who might be a constant in his life and what might be gone the next day. “This is a kid who has lost everything, who has never had a single safe, secure thing to hold on to. Stella isn’t the mother I would have chosen for him, but she was all he had, and now she’s gone, too. I would guess he wasn’t sure you were coming back. Maybe tucking your shoes under his bed was simply his way of hanging on to a piece of you.”
She gave him a careful look, and he instantly regretted saying anything. He should have kept his big mouth shut. Would she guess that Bowie also had been a pack rat when he was a kid, had cached everything from flashlight batteries to quarters to sleeves of saltine crackers, just in case he needed them?
“You should probably slip those on your feet now, Cinderella, and hurry to the ball,” he said quickly. “You don’t want to be late for your sister’s wedding.”
It was true, but he was also hoping to divert her attention. To his relief, the transparent tactic worked.
“You’re right. Wyn would kill me if I made everybody wait for me.” She looked over at Milo, who wasn’t paying them any attention. “I guess I’ll see you later, then. You’re still coming to the reception?”
“We’ll stop there, but I doubt we’ll stay long,” he said. This probably wasn’t wise either, but he couldn’t resist adding it anyway. “Save me a dance, too, would you?”
Her gaze met his, and he saw heated awareness flash in her eyes before she looked away.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “My dance card is already pretty full, what with two older brothers and uncles and assorted preadolescent cousins vying for my hand. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Shoes dangling from one hand, she wiggled the fingers of her other hand in farewell and hurried out of the room. As soon as he heard the outside door close, he let out a breath, feeling as if she had sucked all the oxygen from the room with her.
“Kat,” Milo said. He pointed to the flat creation he was making, a smiling face with pretzels laid end to end for the face and hair, marshmallows for eyes and more stick pretzels for the mouth.
Milo never gave a full-fledged smile, but he lifted his mouth in as close an approximation as he could manage.
“Yes. Kat,” Bowie answered as worry pinched at him a
gain. His brother adored Katrina. She had brought laughter and joy and fun to his world, and Bowie didn’t want to think about how empty and colorless it would seem when she left.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“YOU’RE POSITIVE HE’S COMING?” Samantha kept her gaze glued to the garden gate on the side of the house that had been festooned with flowers and ribbons by McKenzie and her little squadron of decorators armed with florist wires and ribbons.
Katrina really didn’t want to talk to Sam about Bowie, but she didn’t know how to tell her friend the topic made her uncomfortable. She shifted, searching her mind for a way to change the subject, but nothing came to her. She didn’t know how to avoid answering a direct question, anyway.
The awkwardness of it was becoming overwhelming. Sam had a serious thing for Bowie, which left Katrina with a hollow feeling in her gut she wasn’t sure she wanted to examine too closely.
She had told him he should date Samantha, had extolled her friend’s many virtues to him. How would Katrina react if Bowie actually took her up on that suggestion? Would she be able to bear seeing the two of them dating?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to examine the answer to that too closely.
“He said he would stop in briefly,” she finally answered, “but maybe he changed his mind. Maybe Milo wasn’t feeling well. Or maybe he was having a bad evening and Bo didn’t want to risk behavior issues in the middle of a crowd.”
Sam’s features fell. “Oh, I hope he makes it—for Wyn and Cade’s sake, I mean.”
“Of course you do,” Katrina murmured. “Oh, look. There’s my cousin Josh from Idaho Falls. You had such a crush on him in junior high, remember?”
Sam whirled around to where Kat’s tall, good-looking cousin on her mother’s side was talking to Marshall and Andie. “Is he still dating that dental hygienist?”
“Last I heard from my mom, they broke up. I think he was ready to settle down and she wasn’t. I know he didn’t bring a date to the wedding. Let’s go talk to him.”
It was a fairly obvious ploy, but Sam didn’t seem to notice. “How’s my breath?” her friend asked.
Katrina sniffed the air when Sam breathed in her face. “Fine.”
“I’d better pop a mint anyway.”
She opened the tiny jeweled purse that dangled from her wrist and pulled out a Tic Tac container, then shook out a couple of mints and handed one to Katrina.
When she reached in again to pull out a compact and started rubbing her tongue over her teeth to clear away any stray lipstick stains that might dare cling, Katrina had to roll her eyes. “You look beautiful, as usual. Let’s hurry before my mom matches him up with one of Barbara Serrano’s nieces who are in town to work the restaurant summer crowds.”
As she hoped, Sam let herself be distracted. They went over and struck up a conversation with Josh, who ran a fairly lucrative outdoor clothing store, and within a few moments, Josh was asking Sam to dance.
When he led her out to the dance floor set up on Cade’s large patio, Katrina sighed with relief—and maybe a little sadness. Sam could be exhausting. She adored her friend, but it was becoming painfully clear that their paths in life had begun to diverge.
With Samantha busy for now, Katrina grabbed a little cheesecake bite from a passing waiter and a flute of champagne from another and made her way under the globe lights strung across the backyard. As maid of honor, she should probably check to see if the bride needed her for anything.
Her sister stood beside a gloriously gorgeous Cade, dressed more formally than Katrina had ever seen him in a black tux he wore with polished cowboy boots.
Wyn looked radiant as the two of them talked and laughed with guests, and the happy glow surrounding them made Katrina feel almost weepy.
Wynnie didn’t need her. Why would she? Her sister had Cade at her side now.
Oh, that sounded pitiful. She was a terrible person, Kat decided. Bad enough that she was being dishonest with her best friend by withholding the fairly pertinent information that she had kissed the guy Sam had a crush on—twice—and desperately ached to do it again.
Now she was feeling sorry for herself that her sister had found love with her onetime boss and best friend.
Needing to distract herself now, she spotted McKenzie talking to her sister Devin and Dev’s family—her husband, Cole, and his two children.
On impulse, Katrina set her half-empty flute on a tray and hurried over to their group. “You have completely outdone yourself, my dear,” she said, hugging the mayor hard. “I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you and the Helping Hands have taken a lovely but average backyard and made it spectacular. Magical. I want to kiss every last one of you.”
McKenzie puckered her lips up and made a smacking noise that made Cole—an ex-con former rodeo star—give that slow, sexy cowboy smile that once had the power to make Katrina’s knees wobble.
“It’s beautiful out here, that’s for sure,” he said.
Yes, Katrina once had a crush on Devin’s husband. And she’d had a crush on Eliza Caine’s husband, Aidan. And she’d once had a crush on Ben Kilpatrick, McKenzie’s husband.
Probably about the only male not related to her in town she hadn’t had a crush on was Cade, but that was because unlike Wynona, Kat had considered him in the same category as their brothers.
“You look like a princess, Miss Bailey,” Cole’s daughter, Jazmyn, exclaimed. She had been in Katrina’s class when she first came to Haven Point a few years earlier, after her father obtained custody of his two children, Jazmyn and her brother, Ty.
“Why thank you, Jaz. I could say the exact same thing to you.”
The girl twirled around, showing off an adorable sleeveless pink dress embroidered with white daisies. “My grandma Anita sewed me this dress. She’s teaching me how to sew pillowcases, too.”
Anita, Cole and Devin’s onetime housekeeper and nanny, had married Cole’s father the previous year and lived in a lovely house they had built just down the road from Evergreen Springs, Cole’s ranch.
“Sewing is an excellent skill that will definitely come in handy, trust me. Just ask my friend Samantha. She sewed Wynona’s beautiful wedding dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses, too.”
“She’s really good,” Jaz said, eyes wide as she looked more closely at Wyn’s elegant dress.
“She is, indeed.” Katrina was horrible at sewing. Maybe she could take sewing lessons together with Gabi once they moved back to town for good.
“Hey, are you coming back to school this year?” Jazmyn asked. “Ty really, really, really wants you to be his teacher when he’s in second grade.”
Her brother nodded his head with all the energy and enthusiasm of a bobblehead stuck to the dashboard of a pickup going down a bumpy mountain road. She had to smile. “Not this year, but maybe the one after that.”
He pouted with gratifying disappointment. “By then it will be too late! I’ll be in third grade. I won’t need a second-grade teacher.”
She smiled. “Sorry, kiddo. I’m sure you’ll have a great teacher and a great year anyway.”
He didn’t look convinced, but Devin distracted her stepson by asking if he wanted to dance with her.
Katrina was chatting with McKenzie and Cole, shifting her weight in the beautiful but uncomfortable shoes and wishing she still had on her flip-flops, when Charlene hurried over with a hot guy in a well-tailored gray suit.
“Katrina, darling, you remember Jamie Caine, Aidan’s brother.”
How could any woman who had ever met Jamie Caine possibly forget him? “Of course. Hey, Jamie.”
Aidan’s brother, a former military pilot who now owned his own corporate charter business, gave his charmer of a grin and leaned in to kiss her cheek.
“You look stunning, as always,” he said, which made Charlene beam.
“I was just telling Jamie what a great dancer you are,” her mother said. “Two seconds later we saw you standing here alone. The opportunity was just too good to pass up.”
“No doubt,” she said drily, which made Jamie grin.
“May I have the pleasure?”
She wanted to tell him her feet hurt too much, but her mother was looking so pleased with herself that Katrina didn’t have the heart to disappoint her.
“Sure,” she answered and let him lead her out to the dance floor.
The band chose that moment to shift to a slow song, naturally. The year before, she would have considered this the luckiest night of her life, the chance to be this close to one of Haven Point’s sexiest and most eligible bachelors. Now she just wanted to kick off her shoes somewhere and eat a little more bacon-wrapped shrimp.
“How is my favorite elementary teacher?” Jamie asked. “Eliza tells me you’ve been teaching English in Colombia. That must be incredibly rewarding.”
One thing about Jamie, he knew how to make every woman he talked to feel like the most important one in the room.
“It is,” she answered. She launched into a story about a couple of her students, happy she could make him laugh in all the right places.
Why couldn’t she feel all the feels for somebody like Jamie? He was sexy and funny and gratifyingly attentive—but even as she flirted right back, she thought he could tell that her heart wasn’t in it.
The song was drawing to a close when she suddenly heard a loud “Kat. Kat. Kat.”
She turned just in time to see Milo barreling toward her. He didn’t slow his momentum, crashing into her at full speed and throwing his arms around her waist, which pushed her back into Jamie’s muscled chest. His arms tightened around her to steady her until she could regain her balance. “You made it! Hi, Milo.”
The boy hugged her tightly, resting his cheek against her, and Katrina’s chest was suddenly tight and achy with emotion. So much for keeping a professional distance.
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