Runaway Bridesmaid

Her hand plowed through her hair. “Don't you see, Dean? It doesn't matter.” Anguish again flooded her features; a cold, sick feeling washed over him that they weren't having the conversation he thought they were having. “It's not just a matter of my forgiving you, if that's what you want. Too much has happened, too much time has passed….”

The look in those honey-brown eyes stabbed him all the way to his soul.

He didn't care what happened now, even if she belted him clear into another zip code. She still cared. A great deal, unless he was way off course.

And, heaven help him, so did he.

Dear Reader,

You've loved Beverly Barton's miniseries THE PROTECTORS since it started, so I know you'll be thrilled to find another installment leading off this month.
Navajo's Woman
features a to-swoon-for Native American hero, a heroine capable of standing up to this tough cop—and enough steam to heat your house. Enjoy!

A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY continues with bestselling author Linda Turner's
The Enemy's Daughter.
This story of subterfuge and irresistible passion—not to mention heart-stopping suspense—is set in the Australian outback, and I know you'll want to go along for the ride. Ruth Langan completes her trilogy with
Seducing Celeste,
the last of THE SULLIVAN SISTERS. Don't miss this emotional read. Then check out Karen Templeton's
Runaway Bridesmaid,
a reunion romance with a heroine who's got quite a secret. Elane Osborn's
Which Twin?
offers a new twist on the popular twins plotline, while Linda Winstead Jones rounds out the month with
Madigan's Wife
, a wonderful tale of an ex-couple who truly belong together.

As always, we've got six exciting romances to tempt you—and we'll be back next month with six more. Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

“H
ey—what's with the horse out in the waiting room?”

At the familiar sarcastic drawl, Sarah Whitehouse glanced up from the examining table where she held an ill-tempered ginger tomcat in a hammerlock, treating it for ear mites. She allowed a beleaguered grin for her younger sister, Jennifer, who worked at the travel agency just up the street. “Ah. That would be Bojangles.”

“Bo-what?”

Sarah grimaced as she wrestled with the pissed-off cat. “Bojangles. Great Dane. Nine months old.”

“Nine
months?
” Jennifer rolled her eyes, then shifted in the doorway, crossing her arms so that her engagement ring, modest though it was, twinkled brilliantly. “Hey, listen—”

“Anybody else out there?”

“Uh…oh, I don't know….” Sarah caught the whiff of petulance in her sister's voice. “Two more cats, maybe? At least, two more cat carriers. I can't vouch for what's in 'em. A collie, a Dobie…and some small fuzzy thing I'll have to guess is a canine with indiscreet parents. Sarah—”

“Damn. They must all be drop-ins. The Dane was all I had scheduled, which is why I let Jolene go off to lunch.” Sarah ignored the cat's menacing growl as she swabbed his ear. “Anyone seem panicked? Bleeding? In labor?”

Her sister considered for a moment, then shook her head, a half-can's worth of Aqua Net prohibiting any individual movement of her shoulder-length waves. “Nope. Just the usual panting and get-me-outta-here whimpering and butt-smelling routines. Though one owner looks like she misplaced her Prozac—”

“Could you tell everyone to hold on, I'll get to 'em soon as I can?”

With a telling sigh, Jennifer stuck her honey-gold head out the door and delivered Sarah's message, then waltzed on into the examining room and plopped her handbag on a chair in the corner. By now she was pouting.

Sarah got the message.

“I'm sorry, honey…was there something you wanted to tell me?”

Jennifer hesitated, then gave a short, dismissive wave of her hand. “It'll wait. You're busy.”

“You sure?”

“No point in talking to you if you're not listening.”

“I promise to give you my undivided attention just as soon as I'm finished….” The thing twisted out of Sarah's grasp and spit at her.

Her sister took a circumspect step backward, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “And what is
our
problem?”

Sarah wrapped the cat's leash around her palm, reined him back in. “I think
we
know that ear mites aren't the only things being removed today.”

“Oooh,” Jennifer said with a comprehending nod in the creature's direction. The cat actually sneered at her as Sarah elbowed the thing into her chest and went after the other ear. “Heck, you ask me, it couldn't happen to a better guy. Except maybe Bruce Miller. Did you know Abby's pregnant
again?
”

Sarah stifled her laugh. “Stop it, will you? I'm having enough trouble doing this.”

“Sorry. Couldn't resist.” Out of the corner of her eye, Sarah caught Jennifer's glance around the room. “Where's Katey?”

“Little girl's room, I expect.” Sarah paused in her torture of the cat and stroked his head. The feline's eyes squeezed shut with each touch, though whether in pleasure or irritated tolerance, she couldn't say. “Begged the living daylights out of me to come, but now that she's here, of course, she's bored to tears.”

Jennifer's expression indicated she agreed with her baby sister's assessment of the situation, but she diplomatically refrained from comment. Instead, she said with a bright, lip-glossed smile, “So…how about lunch? Then I can tell you my news.”

The sigh just sort of slipped out. “This have anything to do with the wedding?”

“Now, how'd you know that?”

“Thank God—oh, be
still,
you nasty beast—we only have a week more to go through this,” Sarah groused good-naturedly. She finished with the cat and pushed him into a carrier. “But lunch ain't gonna happen today, as you may have guessed.” Shoving a hand through her cropped hair, she added, “Ed's out on farm duty, and Doc's off, so it's just me. I can't leave. So you'll have to tell me here.”

Jennifer squinted at her through smoothly mascara'd eyelashes. “I was trying to.”

“Sorry. So…spit it out.”

But “spitting it out” had never been part of Jennifer's repertoire. She paused for dramatic effect, which
had
been part of her repertoire since she was two and a half. “We-e-ell…you know how Tim Reynolds couldn't be Lance's best man after all 'cause he's got National Guard training camp that week?”

Sarah leaned one hip against the examining table. “Ye-e-es—”

“But did you know Tim wasn't Lance's first choice, anyway?”

“He wasn't? But they've been best friends since kindergarten—”

“I know,” Jennifer said with a slow, conspiratorial nod of her head. “But, see, turns out Lance had someone completely different in mind. He just didn't think he could convince him to do it.”

“Jen. Today, please.”

“Oh, all right.” She struck a pose, hands splayed out to the sides. “Ta-da! Dean said he'd be Lance's best man.”

Sarah went catatonic, staring at Jennifer with what must have been an incredibly stupid expression on her face. Her sister however, continued bubbling away like a just-poured glass of warm Dr. Pepper. “Isn't that the
best?
Lance is so excited he's been talking a mile a minute ever since Dean called him and said he'd be in tonight.”

That brought Sarah back to the land of the living. Underneath her smock, her sleeveless cotton blouse fused to her back. “He'll be here
tonight?
”

“Uh-huh,” Jennifer continued in euphoric oblivion. “And he's gonna be here for a whole week, I guess since he hasn't been here in so long. Anyway, Mama said to tell you dinner's at our house, and for you to get your skinny little butt home on time. You know, hang the little sign on the clinic door that says
Closed
?”

For emphasis, her sister mimed hanging up the sign, flashing long, tapered fuchsia fingernails the same color as the six-inch flowers splashed across her romper. Then she let out a little squeak, as if she'd been pinched.

“Oh! Oh, my God! I just realized…” Jennifer grabbed Sarah's wrist, sending a cloud of flowery perfume wafting up from between a set of breasts that had been making men bump into things since she was fourteen. “Here the two of you were high school sweethearts, and now, after all this time, he's going to be best man and you're going to be maid of honor at my wedding!” Her palm flattened over the magnificent bosomage. “What a
hoot!
”

“Yeah,” Sarah said weakly. “Hoot.”

“Well, hey, listen, I'll get out of your hair.” Jennifer flapped at her sister's boyish 'do. “What's left of it, anyway.” She scooped up her handbag and straightened out her perfectly straight collar. “Oh—don't forget. Gown fittings tomorrow morning at Miss Ellis's.”

Sarah managed something close to a smile. “How could I forget?”

Jennifer paused by the door, her hand on the frame. “Isn't tonight just going to be
great?
” She crinkled her nose in time-honored cute Southern cheerleader tradition, giggled and disappeared like Tinkerbell.
Poof!
Gone.

Sarah sank onto the desk chair in the examining room, dropping her head onto her arms. She wasn't sure what she felt at that moment, but
great
was not one of the choices. What most shocked her was that the prospect of seeing Dean again should be producing any effect at all. She'd long since gotten over him.

Long
since.

“Sarah? You okay?”

She lifted her gaze to a pair of large, worried eyes the same whiskey color as hers set in a face with the same narrow nose, the same wide mouth, the same square jawline ending in an incongruously pointed chin. People always said they'd never seen sisters look as much alike as Katey and Sarah. Like twins born eighteen years apart.

Sarah let out a long, shaky breath and clasped the little girl's slender waist, forcing a smile which God knew she did not feel. “Sure, baby. Just resting my eyes for a moment. Why don't you go tell Mr. Arby to bring Bojangles on in?”

As Katey scampered over to the door, Sarah rubbed her makeup-less eyes with a stubby-nailed forefinger. According to Jennifer's count, she had at least a half-dozen cases to see, and that wasn't counting later appointments or any emergencies that might come in. Of all the times to be the only vet in the clinic. Well, she told herself as she got to her feet and smoothed out the front of her smock, she'd just have to deal
with her ambivalent feelings about Dean Parrish later. Preferably before she came face-to-face with him in her living room.

Panic sliced through her.

She heard extra-large-size canine toenails scraping on the linoleum floor as Ben Arby half lugged, half shoved the reluctant Great Dane into the examining room. The black behemoth took one look at Sarah, yelped, and promptly piddled all over the floor.

“Oh, come on, now, sweetie…” She ripped off a half-dozen paper towels from the spindle over the sink and tossed them onto the floor, stepping on them to soak up the puddle as she scratched the dog's ears. “How bad can it be, huh?”

She didn't want to know.

 

Dean wished he were invisible. At least for a hour or so, anyway, just until he got used to the idea of being back in Sweetbranch before anyone else noticed he was.

That not being an option, he decided to hide out in his pickup for a bit, cruising the back roads, trying to come to terms with that weird sensation when you return someplace after being away for a long time and everything seems so familiar and strange all at once. And here he'd gone and said he'd stay for a whole week. Lord. If he'd been a drinking man, he'd've sworn he'd had one too many when he'd made that promise. He'd figured he'd feel unsettled. What he hadn't figured on was how right it felt to be
home.

And he didn't quite know what to do with that feeling.

Nine years. Nine years of growing up, of making something of himself in spite of a reading disability that had finally bested him halfway through his junior year of high school. Nine years of forcing himself to stay away from everything good he'd ever known in order to give Sarah Whitehouse the chance to become everything she could. Nine years of wondering if he'd made a dumb-assed mistake.

Well, he thought as he took a swallow of warm Coke from the almost empty can he'd been nursing since Atlanta, nothing to be done for it now. Not a dad-blasted thing.

For a long time, he'd tried to blame his leaving on his Aunt Ethel, his father's older sister, who'd taken him and Lance in after his mother died when he was fifteen, with her constant harping on the differences between him and Sarah.
She's a doctor's daughter, not the offspring of some small-time country carpenter. Lookit how bright she is, gettin' straight A's in school, and that scholarship to Auburn. What's a poor country boy got to offer a girl like that?
she'd say.
Face it—in the long run, you'll end up feeling like half a man. That what you really want? For either one of you…?

At twenty, he'd discovered, sometimes you're not so all-fired set in your convictions. At twenty, maybe you're not so sure who's right and who's wrong. Or
what's
right or wrong, for that matter. Oh, he didn't doubt his feelings for Sarah at the time, but his aunt's objections slowly ate away at his resolve to make the relationship work, birthing an annoying little gremlin of doubt that eventually became a constant, unwelcome companion. At last, he came to believe that maybe his aunt was right, that maybe he would be an impediment to Sarah's future, that maybe she'd end up resenting him.

So better she hated him then, went the impaired reasoning, than waiting around for their love to die a slow, agonizing death.

He hadn't known his heart would shatter into a million pieces when he realized how well he'd played his part that day. And in the end, he also realized, he had no one to blame but himself.

He steered the Dakota onto the road leading to his aunt's house, the eerie feeling of…displacement, he guessed it was, becoming even stronger. The differences in the scenery stood out like black sheep, simply because there were so few. For instance, he noticed Percy Jenkins had planted a new elm to replace the old one he'd had to take out because of disease. The new tree reached over the roof already, its deep green leaves quivering in the light breeze.

And Myrtle Andersen had painted her house trim a deep blue. He liked it.

And Frank Cuthbertson had finally gotten rid of that old Chevy on the side of his house that his chickens had adopted as a sort of coop-away-from-coop. He chuckled, remembering how, as kids, he and Sarah used to sneak up and pilfer the eggs that sometimes appeared on the back seat, an odoriferous booty the all-too-frequent reward for their clandestine activity.

There were some kids he didn't recognize, of course, as well as the occasional unfamiliar stray dog nonchalantly trotting across the road right in front of his truck. But for the most part, it was all the same. Kudzu-choked pastures sandwiched between the same pecan and peach and apple orchards; the same heady aroma of wild honeysuckle and mimosa; the same Alabama clay that tinged everything in the vicinity a garish orange.

And Sarah's house, too, was just as he remembered it. Still stately and fussy at the same time—the curse of a good Queen Anne—still yellow and white and forest green, although it looked like it could use a new paint job. He drew in a quick breath: Lance had told him Sarah's father had died suddenly about three years ago. Heart attack. The news hadn't really registered until he saw the house, the house Dr. Whitehouse had spent so much time restoring and caring for, ever since Dean could remember. The house he'd grown up in nearly as much as his own. Lance said Sarah's parents had had a midlife baby, too, a little girl just now turned eight. A real shame, a child losing her daddy that young.