If this was a hallucination, she would be more than happily willing to continue existing in this Mad Hatter world. There was nothing in her own, even-paced world worth going back for.
Nothing at all.
Except maybe for Wendy, a tiny voice from somewhere on the perimeter of her consciousness whispered. Wendy, who needed her. Who needed a friend to hold her hand while she dealt with the complications of her first pregnancy.
With a superhuman effort, something she’d never even suspected she possessed, Katie drew on all her strength to move her head back a fraction of an inch. Just enough to create a tiny bit of space between them. A tiny space that had all the characteristics of a huge, cold chasm.
The first words out of Blake’s mouth made the temperature of that chasm even colder.
“I’m sorry.”
She could feel her heart pulling into itself in her chest. Standing outside of herself, she heard this disembodied voice—hers?—ask, “For?” The single word came out as an all but inaudible whisper.
He read her lips more than heard her voice. Feeling incredibly alive and yet incredibly confused at the same time, Blake tried to give substance to his apology. Because what he’d done was take advantage of both Katie and the situation.
That just wasn’t like him.
Was it? he wondered uncomfortably.
“For kissing you,” he said out loud.
Stung by his apology, Katie did her best to appear unaffected and pretended to just shrug off the entire incident, which would be forever and indelibly burned into her soul from this moment forward.
“It’s not like you branded me with a poker,” she told him flippantly.
Except that in reality, that was exactly what had just happened. His kiss, the kiss that she had dreamt about for half her lifetime, had turned out to be a hundredfold better than anything she could have remotely imagined. Time had stood still while the earth moved and, as incongruent as that might have sounded to anyone, that was the only way she could even begin to explain what had just happened to her.
The last thing she wanted was to have him marring this for her with a stupid apology that was heavy with his regret. Maybe he was sorry about what had just happened between them, but she wasn’t.
“Besides,” she continued with studied nonchalance, “it happens. Don’t give it another thought.”
But I will, Blake realized. That’s just the problem. I will.
Needing some distance, however minor, between them, she went over to the side table where she’d set up her iPod and the speaker, and shut them both down. As she deliberately kept her back to him, Katie did her best to sound chipper and completely in control—even though her knees still felt watery.
“I think that was enough of a dance lesson for one day.”
“Yeah. Yes,” he amended, then echoed, “Enough,” much the way someone else might have cried, “Uncle!” Though he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, he was still not quite able to focus on anything. His brain felt incredibly fuzzy. Feeling adrift, he grasped onto the one thing that had been established: their routine. “Um, why don’t I drive you back to Wendy’s place?”
Turning around to face him, Katie glanced at her watch. It was only a few minutes after three in the afternoon. Way before the end of an actual workday. He really was eager to get rid of her, wasn’t he? she thought with a bitter pang.
“I could stay and do some actual work,” she volunteered. “Something that I would get paid for during a normal day,” she clarified.
There was no way he could get his mind on work, not immediately. Not after what had just happened. Why did he feel as if he’d just fallen out of a twenty-foot tree, while she was acting as if nothing had happened? Hadn’t she been on the other end of that kiss?
Maybe he underestimated Katie’s experience level, he mused.
“No, I think you earned the rest of the afternoon off,” he insisted.
Definitely eager to get rid of her, Katie thought again. And then more thoughts—questions—began to assail her. Had the kiss been that bad? Or that good? She suddenly caught herself wondering. Because heaven knew that kiss had just knocked the foundations of her world out from under her.
Maybe, just maybe, he’d experienced a slight setback in his plans, as well. Why else would he send her away in the middle of the day?
The more she thought about it, the more it heartened her. Finally, after all this time, a toehold.
“All right.” She gathered together the iPod and its accompanying speaker, depositing them both back into her briefcase. “If you don’t mind driving me back, I’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.”
Finally looking at him again, she felt another shiver dancing up and down her spine. God, but the man was just too damn handsome for her own good.
“You might want to stay and have dinner with Wendy once we get there,” she suggested.
“Won’t that be hovering?” he asked, thinking of what Wendy had accused him of doing. That was still a very sore point with him.
Her mouth curved in a grin. “No, I’m pretty sure that’s just called dinner.” And then she grew a little more serious as she crossed back to him. “Wendy’s very grateful that you rearranged your life so that you could be here for her while she’s going through this trial-by-baby ordeal.”
He checked his pockets for keys to both Scott’s place and the rental he was driving. Right now, he wasn’t all that certain about anything, but thankfully, the keys were in his left pocket. Taking them out, Blake led the way out of the house.
“She looked pretty annoyed with me the last time I saw her,” he remembered.
Actually, Katie knew that Wendy had been downright angry because Blake was so consumed with the idea of going after Brittany, but Katie tactfully smoothed that over. “That’s because she’s worried about you.”
“Worried?” he repeated incredulously. “Why would she be worried about me?”
Wendy was right, she thought. Men could be so thick sometimes.
“She doesn’t want to see you hurt and she thinks that Brittany will rip your heart out and use it for a coaster.” She paused for a moment, weighing the wisdom of saying the next part. She decided to plunge in. “The way she did the last time.”
“No, she didn’t,” Blake protested, instantly coming to the absent woman’s defense. “We broke up because of a misunderstanding.”
Katie looked at him innocently as she asked, “You misunderstood why she was lip-locked with another man when you’d brought her to the party as your date?”
He was far from happy that had gotten out. Annoyed, he asked, “Has Wendy been talking to you?”
Katie pressed her lips together. She recognized her misstep the second she’d made it.
Holding up her hands in surrender, she gingerly backed away from the topic. Men, Wendy had told her, didn’t like having their faults and mistakes pointed out to them. Even the big ones. Especially the big ones. Having grown up without any siblings and not really having any sort of a dating life to speak of, her experience when it came to the games people played with one another was severely limited. She believed in honesty, but obviously not everyone always saw it as the best policy.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Not my business.” She lowered her hands. “Maybe I just got my details wrong.” She had almost said “facts” instead, but that too would have wound up bruising Blake’s ego.
He was too good for the likes of Brittany, but she couldn’t say that, either. All she could do was hope that Wendy’s plan for her to distract Blake while supposedly teaching him how to win Brittany would ultimately work.
And if it didn’t, if she did too good a job and actually helped him with this pursuit, well, at least she was going to have a wonderful time as the understudy.
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It wasn’t much, but then, she’d never really asked for very much, she thought as she got into the passenger side of Blake’s car.
Glancing in her direction, Blake waited for her to buckle up, then took off.
There wasn’t much conversation to speak of.
The moment Wendy saw her brother and Katie walking into her bedroom, she knew something had changed. She could see it in their body language. It was there, in the expression on her friend’s face and definitely there in the rather shaken look in her brother’s eyes.
Something had happened and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to find out what until she could get Katie alone to question her.
And that, apparently, wasn’t going to happen until after they had dinner. Blake, once he started talking to her, gave every indication that he was more than willing to stay until long after the cows came home.
She couldn’t chase him off without really alienating him. Frustrated, Wendy struggled to find some kind of compromising middle ground. It was everything she could do not to burst while holding her questions in check.
So, the three of them had dinner in the room that now held her a prisoner day and night. Because of her condition, Marcos had hired a housekeeper, a pleasant-faced older woman named Juanita, and the woman had served them a dinner that had come straight from the kitchen of Red, the restaurant that Marcos managed. Marcos himself was there now, which meant there were only the three of them for dinner.
Less than halfway through the meal, Wendy began to give the performance of her life, murmuring about how fatigued she’d felt all day, but, as sometimes happened because she was “stuck in bed,” she’d been unable to really sleep.
“But now, after having this meal that my loving husband sent over from the restaurant,” she said, pausing to stifle yet another yawn, “I think I’ll probably be able to drop off like a brick.” Her eyes shifted toward her brother. “If I fall asleep midsentence, you’ll forgive me, right, Blake?”
“Better yet,” Blake told his sister, shifting out of the way as the housekeeper collected the last of the dishes and cleared them away. “I’ll get out of your hair and let you go to sleep.” Leaning over the bed, he kissed Wendy on the cheek. “You get some rest and I’ll see you in the morning when I swing by to pick up Br—eh, Katie.” He looked at the woman who had unexpectedly set off such a chain reaction within him this afternoon. He was still trying to sort out just exactly what had happened and what it all ultimately meant. For now, he nodded at her as if everything was still the same as it had been just this morning. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Katie.”
Katie returned the nod, debating whether or not to walk him out, then deciding it was best if she didn’t. The drive here from Scott and Christina’s ranch had been a little awkward and forced. Both of them were careful to tiptoe around the elephant that was stuffed into the car with them. They both needed a little break to regroup, she thought.
Maybe by tomorrow, things would get back to normal—whatever that was now.
“Right, tomorrow.” Even as she said it, she could feel her lips tingling ever so slightly from the memory of this afternoon.
As both the housekeeper and Blake walked out of the room, she turned to look at Wendy. Giving her a quick, preoccupied smile, she told her best friend, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Turning to leave, Katie was surprised to hear her exceptionally sleepy friend declare in a firm, emphatic and no-nonsense voice, “You get back here, missy. You’re not going anywhere until you tell me absolutely everything.”
Turning around, she stared at Wendy. Three minutes ago, the woman had been all but wilting. “What happened to being so tired you were afraid you were going to fall asleep midsentence?”
Wendy laughed, clearly surprised that Katie hadn’t seen through the act. “And you believed me?” she asked, amused. “I said that for Blake’s benefit. I mean, I can’t ask you questions about what’s going on with him sitting right there, so I wanted him to leave. But I knew that if I asked him to, he’s so sensitive, his feelings would really be hurt.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Blake still brings up the fact that I said he was hovering every chance he gets.” She shifted her attention back to Katie, whom she had expected to see through her little act immediately. “God, Katie, aren’t you paying attention?”
Second-guessing was just not the way she usually operated. “I thought I was, but I guess that I obviously wasn’t.” Katie shrugged. “Sorry.”
Wendy waved away the apology as she shifted closer to the edge of her king-size bed. She wasn’t interested in apologies, she was interested in why both her friend and her brother had looked off center when they’d walked into her room.
“Okay,” she declared, then ordered, “give.”
Katie stared at Wendy, confused. “Give?” she repeated.
“Yes.” Suppressing an exasperated sigh, Wendy carefully enunciated her request. “Give me the details. Tell me what happened.” When that didn’t prompt an immediate outpouring of information, Wendy elaborated. “You and Blake both walked in with really weird expressions on your faces, like you’d both been standing on a mountaintop, watching a sunrise when you clearly were expecting to see was a sunset. What happened between the two of you?” she repeated, this time in a far more firm, demanding voice. “Spill it. All of it.”
Her eyes all but pinned Katie in place, where she was going to remain until she told her what she wanted to hear.
“I took your advice,” Katie began slowly. “I started to teach Blake ballroom dancing.”
Wendy winced a little at the image that conjured up. “Blake has two left feet.”
“So he said. Actually,” Katie admitted, “given what I thought was going to happen, he wasn’t all that bad.”
Wendy was still waiting impatiently for something that would explain the dazed expressions she’d seen.
“Okay, well, it wasn’t his feet that put that stunned expression on your face,” Wendy concluded. Her eyes narrowed. Her hormones had her emotions all over the map and patience was in very short supply. “Are you going to make me beg?” she wanted to know.
“Of course not,” Katie protested.
“Then tell me!” Wendy ordered, surrendering the last shred of her quickly failing patience.
Part of Katie felt almost silly saying this at her age. The other part felt almost as if she was betraying Blake by telling tales out of school. It took her a moment to calm herself.
Then, taking a deep breath, Katie said, “He kissed me.”
Wendy’s eyes almost fell out of her head. And then, the next minute, she was grinning so hard her face looked as if it ran the very real danger of splitting completely in two.
Chapter Seven
It took Wendy a second to collect herself. Her excitement over what was clearly a significant break-through for Katie and Blake was having an unexpected—and unsettling—side effect. She felt twinges, strong twinges that were reminiscent of what she’d experienced when she’d suddenly gone into premature labor.
Taking a breath in slowly, Wendy grasped the blanket on either side of her and offered up a silent prayer as she waited for the sensation to pass. Less than two minutes later—it felt like a lifetime and a half—it finally passed. But by then, she was perspiring and feeling somewhat light-headed. It took concentration on her part to keep the large room from spinning around wildly.
The next moment, she saw Katie peering at her face uncertainly. “Wendy, are you all right?”
Katie’s voice seemed to echo in her head as she heard her best friend ask the question.
Wendy took another second before she answered. She didn’t want to alarm Katie by sounding out of breath when all she was doing was lying here.
“I’m fine, Katie, just really excited about that kiss,” Wendy lie
d. Wanting to get the focus back where it belonged, she pressed for some kind of details. “All right, Blake kissed you. Then what?”
Katie wasn’t sure just what it was that her friend wanted to hear. “I kissed him back.”
The contractions, now gone, took a backseat to impatience. “And?”
“And it was wonderful,” Katie confessed wistfully. Her words were accompanied by a heartfelt sigh.
Wendy knew Katie too well to think her friend was trying to be coy or draw things out. Katie obviously didn’t understand what she was asking her. So Wendy verbally sketched an outline and waited for her to fill it in. “And what happened after he kissed you and you kissed him back?”
The rise and fall of Katie’s slender shoulders was guileless. “We came here.”
Wendy enunciated each word through gritted teeth. “And nothing in between?”
“Well, yes,” Katie conceded. It was a given, since she hadn’t rented a car here, but nonetheless she added, “Blake drove.”
Wendy pressed her lips together, suppressing a guttural sound of pure frustration. Pinning Katie with a look, she knew very well that her best friend wasn’t teasing her—she was dead serious in her recitation. Clearly there were some things missing from Katie’s education, despite her graduation from a top university with honors.
There was no delicate way to ask, so she didn’t bother trying. Instead, Wendy bluntly asked, “Katie, do you know how to flirt?”
A defensive look crept into Katie’s normally warm brown eyes. “Flirting wasn’t a prerequisite for my degree.”
Well, that answered that, Wendy thought. She’d thought that perhaps, because it had been a while since she and Katie had seen one another and people did change—she was living proof of that, transitioning from a party girl to a doting homebody—that Katie had developed some feminine wiles. Obviously she hadn’t, but that was okay. That was what Katie had her for. “So the answer’s no.” Wendy shook her head and struggled to suppress a sigh. “Settle in, Katie,” she instructed, pointing to the edge of her bed. “You and I have work to do.”
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