Kara (Starkis Family #4)

by Cheryl Douglas

  I tipped my beer back, taking a moment to process my thoughts and feelings. “I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t let myself go there in years. I shut down for a long time after your sister dumped me, just focused on work, you know, building my business, my reputation.”

  Darius laughed. “I’d say you’ve done a hell of a job of that. You’re one of the best architects in the world.”

  I’d worked on a lot of high profile designs, but architecture was subjective. I would never consider myself better than any other architect, just different. “You know how it is—having the right connections helps when you’re starting out.” My father had followed in his father’s footsteps, making a fortune manufacturing automotive parts, and his impressive business connections had opened a lot of doors for me.

  We worked in silence for a few minutes, taking the cover off my parents’ boat.

  “This takes me back,” Darius said. “I haven’t been fishing since Kara’s boyfriend—”

  “Kara has a boyfriend?” I didn’t know why I was shocked. Maybe because I hadn’t seen any pictures of her with anyone on her social media pages.

  “She did,” Darius said. “I’m not sure what happened though. She didn’t really want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to press. Anyhow, he was a professional fisherman, if you can believe that.” He laughed. “He’s a pretty big deal on the circuit, makes a lot of money, especially from his endorsement deals.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy Kara would go for,” I muttered.

  “That’s what I thought too, but he definitely brought out the best in her.”

  Ah hell, I didn’t want to hear that. Yet, I asked, “How so?”

  “Turned her into a pretty good angler.” He grinned. “I know you probably don’t believe me, but I’ve got the pics to prove it.”

  I did believe him, but I didn’t want to see proof that Kara had stepped out of her comfort zone with another man when she’d never been willing to do that for me. For years, I’d tried to get her to try water-skiing, skydiving, and zip-lining, but she wasn’t interested.

  “Sorry,” Darius said, slipping his phone back in his pocket.

  “No, it’s okay.” I shook my head when I realized I was scowling. “I’m being stupid. Of course she got on with her life; so did I.”

  “I really like this guy. I think he’s good for her.”

  “So you said.” I turned the boat on, checking all the gauges. I still had to go up to the bunker to grab my gear, but I needed a distraction from our conversation, and for now, the boat provided it.

  “I think you both being here at the same time is a good thing. Maybe it’ll help you get some closure. I know you’ve moved on, but I’m not sure my sister has. I think she still feels guilty about the way things went down between you two. I was hoping maybe you could talk to her, you know, let her know that you forgive her, that you think she made the right call, calling off the wedding.”

  I thought about our heated conversation earlier. I didn’t know how I could convince her I was over it when I wasn’t even sure of that myself. “I don’t know why you think anything I say to her will make a difference.”

  “This guy, Jake, he really loves her, and I know she has feelings for him. If she could get past what happened between you, maybe she’d give him a chance.”

  “How the hell do you know how he feels about her?” I set my beer in the holder on the console. I couldn’t finish it now that my stomach was churning.

  “He told me. Like I said, we used to fish together sometimes. All that time on the boat, we talked about his feelings for Kara. He knows about you—”

  “How?” I asked, suddenly more interested. “Did you tell him or did Kara?”

  “He said Kara mentioned you on their first date.”

  “Really?” Yet I still hadn’t told my fiancée about my relationship with Kara. What did that say about me?

  “Yeah.” Darius rested his foot on the ledge of the boat. “He thinks that’s the reason she won’t marry him, because—”

  “Hold on a second,” I said, raising my hand. “This guy wants to marry her?”

  “Yeah. He proposed after they’d been dating a few months, but she said it was too soon, she wasn’t ready. He thinks she’s just nervous to make that kind of commitment again.”

  “Who the hell proposes after a few months?” I knew people did that all the time, but Kara and I had talked about marriage for three years before I finally slipped a ring on her finger. Sure, we were just kids, but I knew what I wanted, and I’d believed she did too.

  Darius perched his sunglasses on the rim of his baseball cap. “I don’t think that’s the point. The point is I was hoping you’d do this as a favor to me. Talk to her this weekend, bury the past, so you can both move on.”

  “I have moved on.”

  “Have you?” When I didn’t respond, Darius said, “Fine. Let’s assume you have moved on. Let Kara do the same.”

  Chapter Three

  Kara

  I really didn’t want to be there, babysitting my brother’s drunk friends to make sure they didn’t destroy the place, but if I left now, it would look like I was just trying to avoid Dustin and his fiancée. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking he drove me away. I was talking to one of Darius’s friends, Bobby, when I spotted Dustin walking onto the deck alone. Interesting. I wondered if he and Jana had had a fight, then I scolded myself for being so petty.

  “I don’t drive stick,” I said in response to Bobby’s offer to drive his new Porsche.

  “You sure about that?” he asked, leering at me. “I’m willing to bet you ride stick like a pro, sweetheart.”

  Ugh. Disgusting. I was just about to tell him that when a big hand clamped down on his shoulder, surprising us both.

  “I ever hear you say anything like that to her again,” Dustin said, leaning in as he lowered his voice so we were the only ones who could hear him, “and you’re gonna lose a few teeth.”

  Bobby stumbled back, which wasn’t surprising since he’d been drinking all afternoon and well into the evening. Unfortunately, Darius had invited him to spend the night, or I would have had an excuse to cut him off hours ago.

  “What the hell’s it to you?” he asked, facing Dustin. When he realized Dustin had five inches and forty pounds on him, he muttered something about going to the bathroom and staggered his way to the door.

  “You didn’t have to come to my rescue.” I took a sip from my glass. “I could have handled him on my own. In fact, I was just about to put him in his place when you showed up.”

  “I guess I saved you the trouble then, didn’t I?”

  I reached into the cooler next to me and handed him his favorite brand of beer without thinking twice about it. Those little things reminded me how well I’d once known him.

  “Thanks.” He twisted off the cap before tossing it into a large plastic receptacle Darius had set out. He raised an eyebrow at my drink. “You’re sticking to water tonight? Probably smart, given the company.”

  “It’s not water,” I said before taking another sip. “It’s vodka and tonic.”

  He frowned. “Since when do you drink hard liquor?”

  “Since I turned twenty-one.”

  That was the year we were supposed to get married. No, it wasn’t a coincidence. Once I broke up with him, I started doing all kinds of things I hadn’t done before, including drinking too much to numb the pain. I’d gone back to school to get my graduate degree after we broke up, so no one batted an eye when I started partying more than I ever had.

  “Really? I don’t remember you being much of a drinker.”

  “Things change, people change.” To prove a point, I reached for the bottle I’d stashed in the cooler and added another splash of vodka to my glass.

  “Just go easy on that stuff,” he said, glancing around. “There are a lot of guys here who’d like nothing more than to get you loaded so they could take advantage of you. Then I’d have to kill
someone.”

  I was shocked that he still cared about what happened to me. “Better not let Jana hear you say that. Where is she, by the way?”

  “She had a migraine, so she went to bed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Not really. The last thing I wanted was to see him cozying up to someone else all night. Getting a taste of it this morning had been bad enough. After a few drinks, I was sure it would be even more nauseating.

  “So what’s this I hear about you hooking a fisherman?”

  He sneered, making me want to smack that smug smile right off his face. Jake was a great guy, and I’d taken enough grief from my family and friends about his profession. I didn’t need to hear it from Dustin too.

  “For your information, he’s not just a fisherman.” Not that it would have mattered to me if he was. Especially since he wasn’t even my boyfriend anymore. “He hosts a TV show and travels the circuit, doing tournaments. Makes a fortune in prize money and endorsement deals.” I wanted to bite my tongue after that last comment. A fortune to most would be pocket change to Dustin.

  “Good for him.” He tipped back his bottle.

  “How did you hear about him?” I wasn’t one to publicize my relationships. I preferred to keep things low-key so I wouldn’t look pathetic after the breakup.

  “Your brother mentioned him when we spoke earlier. He seems to think I’m the reason you won’t marry the guy.”

  “What?” I looked around the deck, but my brother was nowhere to be seen. Lucky for him. I was going to kill him when I got my hands on him. “That’s crazy. Why would he think that?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask him.”

  “I will.”

  “You wanna go for a walk?” Dustin asked, gesturing to the beach. “This music is already giving me a headache.”

  I smiled. “You must be getting old.” I remembered riding in his convertible when he couldn’t get the car to go fast enough or the music loud enough.

  “I guess I am.” With his hand on the small of my back, he guided me to the gate.

  “Hey, where are you guys going?” Catia asked, grabbing my arm.

  “Just for a walk,” I assured her. “We’ll be back in a few.”

  “Where’s your fiancée?” she asked Dustin. “Isn’t she here?”

  Catia was just looking out for me, but I wanted to tell her to back off, that I could handle myself. I knew Dustin was taken, and I wasn’t interested in resurrecting the past so much as I was in putting it to rest.

  “She has a headache,” Dustin explained, kissing Catia’s forehead. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of your sister.”

  “You better,” she said, shaking her finger in his face.

  Dustin chuckled as he opened the gate and gestured for me to precede him down the stone path toward the sandy beach. I sighed as I sank my toes into the sand. Though it was wet and cold, it still felt good.

  “What’s that about?” he asked, with a sidelong glance in my direction.

  “It just feels good to be back here. I forgot how much I’d missed it.”

  “You didn’t have to stay away on my account. You have as much right to be here as I do.”

  “I know.” I brought the plastic cup to my lips and took a fortifying sip. “But I honestly didn’t know what I would say to you. I still had a lot of guilt about ending things the way I did. It wasn’t fair to you or your family. I should have told you long before the wedding that I was having second thoughts.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I guess I was afraid of losing you.” That was as honest as I’d been with a man in a long time, and it felt good to share my feelings. “I know it seems crazy, but I was just hoping to postpone the wedding until we were both a little older and more established.”

  He stopped dead in his tracks. “Why didn’t you tell me that? You just said you wanted to call off the wedding. You didn’t say anything about postponing it.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance,” I reminded him. “You just flipped out and started shouting at me.” I wrapped my arms around myself when the breeze kicked up and the cool water splashed my feet.

  “I may have overreacted,” he conceded, walking slowly beside me. “But you have to understand where I was coming from. It killed me to think you didn’t want to marry me, especially since that’s the only thing I’d been able to think about for the better part of the year. I was making all these plans for us, then you just tore the rug out from under me. I didn’t know what to do, how to react. So I lashed out at you. I was hurting. I wanted you to hurt too.”

  “Believe me, I was already hurting. Calling off our wedding was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. But as it got closer, I just got more and more scared.”

  “Why?”

  “You wanted me to move to North Carolina with you, to leave my friends and family. I wouldn’t have had anyone there, aside from you and your family.”

  “And that wouldn’t have been enough?”

  I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had, but we wouldn’t find closure without complete transparency. “Building your entire life around one person is just asking for trouble, and you know it. To be in a healthy relationship, you have to be a well-rounded person first. I wasn’t yet. I was just figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. As much as I loved you, I wasn’t ready to be a wife and a mother.”

  “I guess I can understand that now. You were young. We both were.” He tipped his bottle back, taking a long pull. “But there was never any doubt in my mind that you were the woman I was supposed to spend my life with. The idea of waiting years for us to be together scared me.”

  “Why?” I’d never expected to be able to have a conversation like this with him, and now that we finally were, I didn’t intend to leave without answers to the questions that had been plaguing me for years.

  “I saw the way those guys looked at you tonight. You’re a gorgeous woman with a lot to offer. Now and then. It made me crazy, thinking about you living hundreds of miles away in Chicago, leading a life that didn’t include me. I was afraid you’d meet someone else, that you’d realize what we had was nothing more than some, I don’t know, infatuation.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. The idea of any of the guys back home holding my interest in the way Dustin had was absurd.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You have no idea how much I loved you back then, Dustin. If you had, you would have realized you had nothing to worry about. There was no one else for me, just you.”

  “You mean if I hadn’t freaked out when you suggested calling off the wedding, if I’d given you a chance to explain…”

  “I would have suggested we put it off a year or two,” I said.

  “Why the hell didn’t you try to contact me?”

  “You said you never wanted to see me again. I took you at your word.” As painful as it had been to let him go, I didn’t think I’d had a choice.

  “You shouldn’t have.” He stepped over a fallen log, offering his hand so I could do the same.

  I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to walk along that stretch of beach while holding his hand, just as we’d done hundreds of times before. But I couldn’t because his hand wasn’t mine to hold anymore. His heart belonged to someone else now.

  “I was young, Dustin. You were my first serious relationship, my first heartbreak. I didn’t know how to handle it. I’m sure I made mistakes, but I guess that’s how we learn, right?”

  “I guess.” We walked in silence for a few minutes before he said, “Tell me about this guy, the one who wants to marry you.”

  “He’s a great guy.”

  “That’s all you have to say about him? Does he make you happy?”

  “Sure.” Jake made me smile more than I had in a long time. He was fun to be with, and he talked me into trying things I wouldn’t have otherwise, like fishing. I smiled as I thought of when he’d taught me how to cast. I ended up making a mess of the l
ine—a rat’s nest, he’d called it—but he was patient with me, encouraging me to keep trying until I mastered it. “He’s divorced with a twelve-year-old son. He’s a great dad, very involved. They fish together all the time.”

  “He’s older than you?”

  “Six years. He was young when he got married. Too young, he says. They were high school sweethearts.” Maybe that was the reason Jake and I got along so well. He understood my relationship with Dustin because he’d had a similar experience.

  “Do you get along with his kid?”

  “Yeah, he’s great.”

  “So why don’t you want to marry him?”

  It seemed strange having this conversation with Dustin, but I didn’t want to shut him down. If possible, I hoped we could walk away from this weekend respecting each other’s decisions and wishing one another well. “It was just too soon. We’d only been dating a few months.”

  “You’re right. That is too soon.” He polished off his beer. “You think you’ll get back together?”

  “He’d like to,” I admitted. “In fact, he’s on his way back from Ontario this weekend. He was fishing a tournament there and said he might stop by here to see me.”

  “He’s coming here?” Dustin asked, sounding annoyed.

  “Yeah, why? Do you have a problem with that?”

  He stared straight ahead, but the full moon allowed me to see his clenched jaw and how he was gripping the empty bottle a little too hard. “This was our place. It’d be weird for me to see you share it with some other guy.”

  I appreciated his honesty, but I couldn’t pretend it didn’t piss me off. “How do you think I feel seeing you here with Jana?”

  His expression softened when he looked at me. “If I’d known you were going to be here, we never would have come. I wouldn’t have done that to you on purpose.”

  I believed him. Dustin had never been a vengeful guy. “Maybe it worked out for the best. I got to see that you’re happy with someone else. Maybe that’ll help me to move on too.”

  “With this Jake guy?”

  “Maybe.”