Her Sister's Secret Life

Pausing in the doorway, Steve noticed Wade seated alone at a table. He glanced up from his newspaper and waved Steve over.

“Need a menu, honey?” asked the waitress, whose helmet of red hair was as familiar to Steve as the moose head mounted over the bar.

“No, thanks, Char,” he replied. “Just bring us a fresh pitcher and another glass.”

“What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” Wade asked as he put aside the paper. On the table sat a plastic basket holding a couple of lonely fries and an empty tartar sauce container.

Steve pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. “I got thirsty. What’s your story?”

Wade shrugged. “Pauline’s at the shop and I found a new office, so I’m celebrating.”

“Good for you. Where’s it at?” Glad for the distraction, Steve listened carefully while Wade described the old house and his plans to renovate it. “Call me if you need any help,” Steve offered when Wade had finally run down.

“Thanks,” Wade replied. “What’s new with you?”

Steve slouched down in the chair and stretched out his legs to the side. “Guess who showed up on my doorstep a while ago?”

Wade’s forehead pleated into a puzzled frown. “I dunno. Who?”

Steve hesitated while Char brought over a pitcher of pale amber liquid. After filling his glass and topping off Wade’s, she collected the lunch trash.

“Anything else I can bring you all right now?” She worked her gum, one hand parked on her hip. A pencil was stuck through the swirl of hair above her ear and a plastic name tag was pinned to the front of her red-and-black uniform shirt. “The mussel stew is real good today.”

“No, thanks,” Steve replied. If he tried to eat with his stomach churning like a concrete mixer, he would probably regret it.

“You were about to reveal the identity of your visitor,” Wade prompted as soon as Char sauntered off with her tray tucked under one arm. “I hope it wasn’t a process server slapping you with a lawsuit.”

“Nothing like that,” Steve replied after he’d wet his throat. “I’d almost prefer that it had been.”

Wade’s eyes widened. “Lily came to see you?” he guessed.

“Close enough.” Steve wiped the foam from his mustache with a paper napkin. “Her son.”

Wade muttered an expletive. “What did he want?”

“What do you think?” Wade didn’t interrupt as Steve described the visit, right down to seeing Lily when he took Jordan home.

“She must have been as sweet as cotton candy back in high school,” Wade commented with a shake of his head. “I’ll deny it if you quote me, but she’s sure as hell strike-me-blind gorgeous now.”

“I suppose.” Steve concentrated on making a row of wet rings on the tabletop with his glass. “Yeah, she was the prettiest girl in school, but she was really nice, too, you know? Not at all stuck-up, even though her folks treated her like a future Miss Universe.”

“That’s pretty much what Pauline told me,” Wade replied. “That she was the brain and Lily the princess.”

The girls’ parents had been killed in a boating accident while Pauline was in college and Lily was a high-school student. Damn, but Steve didn’t feel like discussing ancient history.

He drained his glass. “I was hoping Lily had changed, gotten hard-looking, I guess.” He gave Wade a rueful grin. “With a couple of missing teeth, thinning hair, maybe a scar or a couple hundred pounds of added weight, you know?”

Wade laughed. “Didn’t happen, man. She’s hot.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed reluctantly. If she had been the least bit affected by the sight of him, she’d hidden it well.

“Big reunion?” Wade teased after he’d swallowed some of his beer. “Hugs and kisses all around?”

“Yeah, right.” Steve rolled his eyes as the tension binding his chest like steel bands began to ease up. “More like ‘cool as you please and what have you been doing with my kid?’”

“Her kid?” Wade echoed, expression questioning. “Are you so sure that’s all?”

For a moment, Steve was silent as regret, relief and a decades’ old feeling of loss twisted together inside him like razor wire. “Positive,” he said finally.

Wade’s eyebrows spiked. Doubt flashed across his face, followed immediately by dawning understanding. “You never slept together.”

Steve pointed his finger like a cocked pistol. “Give the man a prize.” At this rate, he would have no secrets left.

“If he’s not your son, then whose is he?” Wade asked, leaning across the table.

“Damned if I know,” Steve admitted past the sudden tightness gripping his throat. “Some guy she met down south, I guess, but she didn’t tell me.”

“That’s not what everyone in town seems to have concluded,” Wade said after Char had checked on them and left again. “You’ve got to admit the evidence is pretty compelling.”

Steve snorted. “What, that he’s got my coloring? Big deal.”

“There’s more to the argument than that.” Wade shrugged. “Jordan’s not deaf, obviously. So what did you tell him?”

“What could I say? I said for him to ask his mother.” Steve poured another beer. He could always ask Wade to drive him home later.

“I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation,” Wade muttered as he raised his glass. “Here’s to negative paternity test results.”

If you only knew, Steve thought, touching his schooner to Wade’s. “And to moving on.”

Lily paced restlessly back and forth in her bedroom as she waited for Pauline to get home from work. Finding out that a cool guy—in her son’s opinion—wasn’t his father after all was going to be disappointing for a boy with a blooming case of hero worship.

She wanted to blame Wade for starting it, but she knew that wouldn’t be fair. The wheels had been set into motion long before he’d decided to meddle. She should have talked to Jordan before they came back to Crescent Cove, but she hadn’t wanted to add to his anger and grief. Nor had she realized how much gossip there would be—hadn’t wanted to think their arrival would be such a reminder of her reason for fleeing in the first place.

As though it were yesterday, Lily could picture the shock on her sister’s face when she walked into the library at the manor during the graduation party she’d thrown for Lily and seen Carter trying to kiss her. Pauline’s fiancé and her sister. The betrayal had to hurt even more after Pauline had quit college to come home after their parents’ accident so that Lily could finish high school here instead of being shipped off to some aunt she barely knew.

Lily knew now that Pauline had figured out that Carter had kissed her against her will. After Pauline had thrown her engagement ring in his face and the story got around, Lily had taken the coward’s way out. At the time, she had truly believed it would spare both Pauline and Steve any more pain.

Seeing Lily again a few weeks ago had obviously reopened old wounds for Pauline, but because of her generosity and willingness to put the past behind them, she and Lily had found the way back to each other. Being close again was a dream come true for Lily.

Now she sat down on the edge of her bed with her hands covering her face. She hated the idea of bringing Pauline fresh pain, but she had no choice. It was time for the truth to come out. The whole truth.

If she was going to finally level with Jordan, she would also have to rip out her sister’s heart.

Chapter Four

When Lily heard Pauline’s SUV in the driveway, followed by the sounds of the back door opening and shutting, she stopped pacing restlessly in her bedroom. Heart thudding, Lily prayed silently for words that would minimize the fresh pain she was about to inflict on her sister.

No excuses, Lily reminded herself as she went downstairs. No more secrets. She had known this day would come, this conversation, and there was no one to blame for the reasons behind it except herself.