Her Sister's Fiancé. Teresa Hill
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me what’s going on!”
“Okay, okay,” her brother said, putting the rice back down. “She might be…a little upset.”
Kate arched a brow. “Because…”
“She might be…a little mad,” Ben said.
Kate tried again. “What did you two do, kidnap her?”
“No,” they insisted.
“Because I know Joe wouldn’t kidnap her.” He would never force anyone to do anything against their will.
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t anything like that,” Ben said. “She just…well—”
“Okay, she might be leaving again,” Jax said, his expression bland as could be.
Oh, this was bad.
Bad!
“And why would she be leaving, when she just got here?” Kate asked.
“We’re not sure,” Ben said. “Maybe…because we sent Joe to get her? Was it really that bad? Sending Joe?”
“That depends,” Kate said, thinking she could imagine scenarios in which that would be very, very bad, depending on how her sister now felt about Joe. Then she thought of something else. “Exactly how did you send Joe to get her?”
“We might have…threatened him,” Ben said, stripping off his clerical collar as he said it. He always got rid of it when he’d done something decidedly unministerly. “Okay, I didn’t threaten him. I swear. You know I don’t do that stuff. I just…stood by and advised him to cooperate while your brother threatened him.”
“You threatened him?” She yelled at her brother, then turned to her husband. “And you went along with it?”
“Just trying to fit in with the family, you know?” Ben claimed. “Be a part of things? Make you happy, by getting your sister home. That kind of thing. That’s all.”
Kate wanted to scream, but managed not to, barely.
Poor Kathie.
She’d been through so much in the last fifteen months, starting with losing their beloved mother.
“Let me take a wild guess,” Kate said, turning back to her brother. “You threatened Joe that if he didn’t go get her and convince her to come back…”
“He’d break his jaw,” Ben said, eager to help her understand now.
“Who’s breaking someone’s jaw?” Shannon, Kate and Ben’s sixteen-year-old, soon-to-be-officially-adopted daughter showed up in the kitchen at just the right moment.
“No one broke anyone’s jaw,” Ben said.
“Your uncle just threatened to,” Kate said.
“Oh.” Shannon nodded as she opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside. “And they thought I’d be trouble.”
“Yeah, who’d have thought the adults would be the ones to make trouble?” Kate said. “Another big guess here…Kathie found out you threatened to break Joe’s jaw, and because of that, Joe went to see her and convinced her to come back, right?”
“Yeah,” her brother admitted. “Why is that so bad?”
“Ahhhhhh!” Kate did scream then. “People think you know so much about women and that you’re so good with them, but it’s just crap, Jax. It’s complete and total crap!”
Kate knocked three separate times, knowing her sister had to be there, because her car was out front. Who else drove a bright yellow bug with a rainbow sticker on the back and bumper stickers that said, Visualize Whirled Peas and, What Would Jesus Bomb? Kate had missed her sister desperately.
“Kathie, please,” Kate called out through the door. “I have dinner on the stove. I’ll go home and poison them with it, if it’ll make you feel better, promise. Just let me in first.”
That did it. The door swung open.
Her poor sister stood there with big red eyes and a thoroughly defeated expression on her face.
“Oh, baby,” Kate said, taking her sister in her arms.
“They told you what they did?” Kathie asked.
“It wasn’t easy, but I got it out of them.”
“And you’re willing to hurt them for me?”
“Sure, I will. They’ve gotten to be buddies, but they’re dangerous together. I think Jax has been waiting for years to have another man in the family, you know, so it won’t be three against one anymore. And he’s going a little nuts waiting for Gwen’s mother to get better, so they can have their wedding with her here. Ever since she broke her hip, and Jax and Gwen postponed the wedding, he’s been a little…intense.”
Kathie nodded, her head still on Kate’s shoulder.
Kate gave her a big squeeze. “How about I make them both throw up their dinner? I think I can do that with no problem. I mean…I did it by accident once, trying to impress Ben’s mother. Surely I can do it on purpose.”
And if anyone at Ben’s church heard about it, she’d never live it down.
Oh, well.
She’d tried to tell him she wouldn’t quite fit in, but he hadn’t listened.
Not that it was going badly. Her and the church ladies, as she called them. Not at all. She just kept expecting it to go badly.
Poisoning her husband would definitely make things go badly, because they all adored him. They thought he was right up there with God.
“Just don’t tell anybody, okay? I’m afraid the church ladies are watching all the time, and that they’re convinced no one will ever be good enough for Ben,” Kate said.
Kathie finally lifted her head and stepped back. She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and smiled a bit. “So…I missed you.”
“Oh, honey, I missed you so much! I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
There were more hugs, more tears, and when those finally subsided, Kate had a million things she wanted to say and no idea how to start. All the possibilities seemed fraught with red flags.
Kathie finally started things off. “So…you’re okay?”
“I’m great.”
“And you’re…happy?”
“Yes. Kim’s settled right in for her first year of teaching. Shannon is doing so well, and we just saw the baby she gave up for adoption. They named her Elissa, and she’s sitting up and babbling and slobbers on everything. Her parents have a two-year-old named Emily, and they invited us all to Emily’s birthday party two weeks ago. Ben is absolutely wonderful, until Jax comes along and talks him into doing something like this. Poor Ben, he wants to fit in so badly, he’ll go along with anything Jax says, any scheme he comes up with.”
“Well…good,” Kathie said like she couldn’t quite believe it. “That’s good. I’m happy for you, and I just want you to know, I’m here to fix everything.”
“Okay.” Kate wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she was ready to agree to most anything her sister wanted.
“At least, everything I can fix. I mean, I know it was awful—”
“Kathie, no—”
“It was, and I know that, and I feel just awful about it—”
“I’m not mad, I promise,” Kate protested.
“But I’m going to fix as much of it as I can. Joe said people in town think I’ve stayed away because you can’t forgive me for what he and I did, that there’s