Runaway Bridesmaid

“Mama! Make her stop!”

Vivian, her own hair hanging like tangled vines around her face, shifted her eyes to her oldest daughter, her mouth twitching. “Sarah Louise, stop torturing your sister.”

“Yes, Mama,” Sarah said, tucking her hands behind her back and shuffling one bare foot back and forth over the puddled floor. Then she went after Jennifer with a war whoop and the wet towel, sending her shrieking out the kitchen door.

And sending Sarah straight into Dean’s chest, which, along with the rest of him, happened to pick that moment to come out to the kitchen.

She felt strong, rough hands close firmly around her upper arms, her chest and hips meld into his as he steadied her to keep from being knocked over. For more seconds than she wanted to know, his breath, sweet and warm, fanned over her still damp face, making her shiver. Her nipples pebbled, instantly and just this side of painfully. She froze, not sure whether it was her heartbeat or his she felt pounding against her skin.

“Well, now…” One side of his mouth hitched up around a low drawl that was affected and deliberately irritating and made her bare toes curl against the cool lacquered floor. “I see you’re just as clumsy as you always were. Nice to see not everything’s changed about you, Sarah Louise.”

She wasn’t sure, but she thought he drew her just a little closer, close enough that she knew with certain dread that two layers of limp, thin, wet fabric were no barrier to his being able to feel her taut nipples against his chest. The half-grin grew downright insouciant. Lightning flickered eerily across his taut features as he said in a voice too soft for anyone else to hear, “But then again, it would appear that some things have improved considerably.”

It would appear the man had a death wish.

Panicked eyes locked with his, a little cry of alarm escaped parted lips…and, exquisitely timed with the next roar of thunder, two surprisingly strong fists crashed down with unerring aim on either side of his collarbone.

The cups in the glass-fronted cupboard rattled like maracas as Dean let go of Sarah with a grunt, then watched as she streaked past him and out the kitchen door. Rubbing one wounded shoulder, he heard her footsteps pound down the hall, up the stairs and down the upstairs hallway to her room, ending with a door slam that rattled the cups in the cupboard all over again.

Whoo-ee—she sure as hell was stronger than she used to be.

Still coddling his shoulder, he leaned against the open swinging door, half in, half out of the kitchen, and shut his eyes for a moment. She’d left more than a set of bruises behind. Her scent, damp and natural, lingered in his nostrils. And the effects of her body pressed against his still lingered below his waist. Although, lingering wasn’t perhaps the most accurate description….

“Well, just don’t stand there like a lump, boy. Get your butt in here.”

With a slight start, Dean shifted his attention to Sarah’s mother, who was toweling off her hair, having already changed into dry jeans and another loose shirt. Dean couldn’t remember ever seeing the statuesque woman in anything fitted, even when he was a kid.

But when would she have changed clothes? His brow wrinkled as he obeyed, letting the door swing to a close behind him. Vivian apparently picked up on his confusion, answering with a loud laugh.

“Laundry day. Seemed to make more sense to pull dry things out of the basket right here than tramp all the way upstairs. Besides, gives me two less things to put away, right?” She tossed the damp towel out into the laundry room, then haphazardly braided her long hair in a single plait at the nape of her neck as tangential strands curled around her broad face. “So tell me…” Yanking open a small drawer next to the sink, she poked around in the jumbled contents until she found a rubber band, with which she tidily finished off the braid. “How’s life in Atlanta?” She settled back on a stool, crossed her arms. “Must make this place look dull as Luke Hanover’s old bloodhound.”

“Sometimes, dull is good,” Dean admitted, not missing the merest hint of a hitched eyebrow. He decided to let Sarah’s mother come to her own conclusions, which she undoubtedly would.

Vivian simply studied him for a long moment, a half smile lifting her full, round cheeks, those gray eyes searing right into his brain. Other than that, she had no reaction. Whatsoever.

Dean leaned back against the counter, his hands gripping the edge. Woman was making him nervous as a cat watching a frog. This prodigal son business was not what he’d expected. Sarah’s mother could just as well run him out of her house with a shotgun at his backside for leaving her daughter like that. Considering Sarah’s devastated expression when she’d fled his room that day, it was a miracle he was still in one piece. That Vivian Whitehouse was actually being friendly was an even bigger miracle.

If not downright weird.

After a few seconds, the smile blossomed. “Still know your way around a bag of briquettes, boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“That no-count brother of yours can’t barbecue worth beans. But I seem to recall your daddy and you used to cook up a storm.”

The knot in his stomach began to ease a little. “Yes, ma’am, I guess so. But…well, I don’t mean to be rude, but…speaking of storms?”

“Shoot…this’ll be over before Katey’s finished shucking the corn. Grab a Coke out of the fridge and take a load off. I’ll be right back.”

Katey sat at the kitchen table in front of a pile of corn large enough to feed the whole county, shucking it so slowly there was no doubt Vivian was right. The child offered him a doleful expression and a put-upon sigh and tugged off another handful of husk.

Dean nodded toward the corn, his brow creased in sympathy. “Think your Mama would mind if I helped?”

“Yes, I would” came the stentorian voice from the pantry. “That’s her job. You just let her be.”

Katey screwed up one side of her mouth. “Thanks, anyway.”

“Sorry, honey,” he said, briefly touching her shoulder. “I tried.”

He pulled a Coke out of the refrigerator and popped the top, surveying the enormous kitchen appreciatively, a room that had always represented love and warmth and security when he was growing up. Even as the angry storm slashed against the windows, this room was bright, inviting, safe. He sagged against the counter and took a swig of the soda, only half listening as Vivian chattered to him from the other side of the door.

The all-white room hadn’t changed much since he’d last seen it. The same handpainted porcelain plates marched across the soffit over the light oak cabinets his father had put in—as well as the butcherblock countertops—when the Whitehouses had first bought the old place almost twenty-five years ago. He’d only been five at the time, but he still remembered coming over and “helping,” and how Vivian had fussed and clucked over him and fed him enormous chunks of hot corn-bread dripping with butter or still-warm peanut butter cookies or that last piece of chocolate cake that “was just going to go stale if someone didn’t eat it real soon,” all of which were courtesy of the enormous converted cast-iron stove, which still took up a good chunk of one wall like a giant sleeping bull.

His focus shifted toward the sink, where he could almost see a teenaged Sarah, like a hologram or something, standing with her hand on her slim waist and a teasing smile on her lips, her long hair rippling like a waterfall over her shoulders as she’d throw him a towel to dry so they could go riding their bikes up to the lake before it got dark.

He swallowed hard, then his eyes wandered back to the pine table where Katey sat at her task, her tongue stuck out in concentration. The table had also been his daddy’s handiwork, and he noted underneath the growing pile of husks it was still adorned with familiar handmade rag placemats and a pot of fresh flowers in the center. He thought of all the dinners and all the jokes and all the laughter he’d shared at that table. And how much he’d missed all that.

And how, if he hadn’t panicked, believing other people knew more than he did, maybe he wouldn’t’ve had to.

He realized his eyes were moist, about the same time he caught Vivian standing in the pantry door, a bag of briquettes in her arms. Conspiracy lighting up her dove-colored eyes, she walked heavily across the old wood floor and shoved the bag into his arms.

“You have one week,” she said in a low voice. So the child wouldn’t hear, he presumed.

“I don’t…” He frowned. “Huh?”

Vivian sighed, then leveled him with a piercing look that could have converted rocks into diamonds. “To win her back, you fool.”

This time he did jump, just as if the frog had sprung into his face. But her earnest expression stilled him immediately. Worried him, too.

“Look, mistakes get made,” she said in a low voice. “And you can either learn from them and try to fix them, or you can give up and be miserable for the rest of your life. So…there’s your choice. Don’t screw it up.”

Before Dean could protest that he seriously doubted whether winning back Sarah’s affections—even if he’d wanted to—was either reasonable, possible, or the best choice for anyone concerned, the kitchen door swung open and the lady herself appeared. She’d showcased those long legs in a pair of white shorts, topped by a blousy white cotton shirt with the top two buttons left intriguingly undone. Whiskey eyes flashed from her mother to Dean and back again as she stood with one hand on the side of the door, the other on her hip.

Leading Dean to wonder exactly how long she’d been standing on the other side of the door.

Chapter 3

Judging from Dean’s furtive expression, she’d been the topic of conversation. Judging from her mother’s, by Vivian’s, choice.

No way was she going there.

So she went instead to the refrigerator—acutely aware of Dean’s appreciative scrutiny of her legs as she passed—pulled out a Coke, then returned to the living room to check out the wedding gifts, leaving her mother and Dean to think whatever they liked.

Played it pretty cool the rest of the evening, too, if she said so herself. Whenever she caught Dean watching her at supper, she rearranged her features into what she hoped was an expression of aloof nonchalance.

Not that the rest of her would cooperate. She forced herself to eat—otherwise four people would have jumped on her case—but the corn and burgers and salad and watermelon and apple pie felt like wet sand in her stomach.

Dean’s own peculiar expression didn’t help matters, a look which she caught far more often than she liked simply because the man would not take his eyes off of her. They didn’t exchange as much as a dozen words during the meal, which nobody noticed what with Jennifer and Katey and her mother all holding forth about the wedding, but she felt as if he was trying to absorb her through his eyes. Just as she was fixing to tell him to perform some physiologically impossible feat, Jennifer came to the rescue.