Not Quite Mine (Not Quite series) (9 page)

Monica had a point. Katelyn’s education needed to involve infant care, construction plans, and legalese about adoptions or baby abandonment clauses.
I hated school when I was in it.

Monica removed a frozen dinner from the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave. “Have you heard from Dean?”

Just hearing his name made her squirm in her seat. “No. Not a word.”

“Don’t you find that odd? I mean, you still have his hard hat and you haven’t returned there since the first day.”

Katelyn shrugged. “I’ll go in tomorrow to see how far along they are. Jack made it sound like it was taking forever for things to move forward. I doubt I’m needed every day.”

“You’re avoiding Dean.”

“I am not.”

“Are, too.”

Katelyn opened her mouth to protest again and promptly shut it. “Lord, Jessie must have hated growing up with you.”

Monica smiled and winked. “I call ’em as I see ’em. Jessie tried to hide her true emotions about all kinds of things growing up, but I could see the truth in her eyes. You have a thing for Dean and don’t even try and deny it.”

“Dean is my brother’s best friend.”

“Doesn’t mean you don’t have a thing for him. The man is gorgeous. I’m not sure why you of all people would deny your attraction to the man. He obviously feels the need to watch over you.”

“Misguided loyalty to my brother.”

Monica snorted. “Bull. Dean might feel the need to
watch out
for a weak sister,” she air quoted
watch out
with her fingers. “You’re not weak. You might have lost a little bit of snark with the lack of sleep, but you’re far from fragile.”

No, she wasn’t made of glass. She didn’t go out of her way to gossip and let anyone inside her head either. Yet talking with Monica, living with her for the better part of two weeks, boiled the need to talk and spill the entire story about her and Dean.

Maybe if Monica knew their history, she’d understand how desperate Katie was to keep Dean at a distance now.

“If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it only between the two of us?”

Monica lifted her lips into a cat-ate-the-canary smile. “I’m almost offended you need to ask. You’re living in my place with a child that isn’t yours. I
can
keep a secret.”

Katie glanced over at Savannah who hadn’t made much of a peep since Monica came home.

“Dean and I…” Katie ignored the chill down her spine. “We, ah…”

Monica placed her hand in the air. “Wait. This needs wine.”

Boy, did it ever.

Monica uncorked a bottle of wine and poured two glasses before settling into the sofa with her legs curled under her. It was as if she were getting ready to watch a movie. Her sharp gaze focused on Katie before she uttered the words, “Let me have it.”

After drawing in a fortifying breath, Katie started again. “Dean and I dated…secretly.”

Why Katie thought the sky would fall as she voiced her past, she didn’t know…but she did.

Monica sipped her wine and smiled. “I knew it.”

“We hadn’t set out to. It just kinda happened. And no one, not my brother, not my diary, knows about it.”

Monica put a hand in the air. “Why the secrecy?”

Katie shrugged. “We run in some tight circles back home. We thought it would be better to keep our relationship to ourselves to avoid any of those awkward
Do we invite Dean or do we invite Katelyn?
situations.”

“Sounds like you anticipated the breakup from the beginning.”

The memory of their first kiss surfaced in her mind. The softness of his touch, the pine scent of his skin. The way he cupped her head so she couldn’t pull away…

“Oh, to be a fly on the wall of your brain,” Monica said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you blush before.”

Katie sighed and covered her face with her hands.

Maybe Monica would understand if she started from the beginning. “Dean and my brother have been best friends since high school. Being the younger and annoying sister, the two of them didn’t pay a lot of attention to me. But you’ve met all the boys and none of them are hard on the eyes.

“When I hit thirteen, my hormones went crazy. My mom, if you can call her that, had already run off. She’d call once in a while, but I didn’t have another woman to confide in. My dad tried by having our housekeeper keep tabs on me, but I wanted nothing to do with her. I started wearing clothes that made me feel grown up and loved the attention the guys gave me. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t always had a crush on Dean. But he didn’t look. Not once.”

“He looked eventually,” Monica pointed out.

Yes, he did. There were times over the years Dean would stand beside her brother Jack as the two of them confronted her with another tabloid article about her dating life. She took Dean’s sharp disapproval like she had her brother’s or her father’s. She ignored it. Eventually Jack backed off…hell, even her father didn’t bother with anything more than a grunt or a shake of the head these days.

But not Dean. He’d suggested she find a different guy to date, or different club to hang out at.

It was one of those
Change what you’re doing, Katie
conversations with Dean that resulted in that first kiss nearly two years ago.

“This guy is scum,” Dean had spit out between his teeth as he slapped the tabloid on the table in front of her. They were celebrating Jack’s birthday at the ranch and Dean had pulled her into an empty room to talk.

Katie tossed her chin up in defiance. “I’m not sure who died and left you as my fairy godmother. Not even my father tells me who I can sleep with and who I can’t.”

Dean’s face had grown even harder. The cleft in his chin was so tight she could probably bounce a golf ball off it.

“You’re sleeping with him?”

The
him
Dean referred to was an actor. And in reality, only a friend. But the tabloid had snapped a picture of the two of them leaving a club and suggested that Mason was cheating on his current girlfriend and that Katelyn was the “other woman.” It was laughable, really. The tabloids seldom painted a clear picture. Dean knew this but still raged on as if the magazine were gospel. A few times the rags would get the story somewhat right but she hadn’t slept with nearly as many people as the public thought she had.

As Dean obviously thought she had.

“That,” Katie poked her finger into Dean’s broad chest, “is none of your business.”

“It damn well is my business, darlin’.”

“Oh, really? How so?”

“You’re Jack’s sister. I’ve known you since before you wore a training bra.”

Katelyn glanced down at her ample cleavage and purposely tugged her shirt a little lower to reveal more skin. “Are you telling me you’re looking out for me like I’m
your
sister?”

Dean opened his mouth and then closed it.

That was the moment she knew that Dean didn’t look at her as a sister. His gaze had heated and desire flashed over his face.

Katelyn’s knees suddenly felt weak. As if sensing her inability to stand, Dean slid into her personal space and cupped the back of her head. She froze, hardly believing he was touching her. Then his lips met hers in a kiss that defined the art of kissing. He was soft and warm and made her tingle. Her eyes closed while she opened to him like a flower did to sunshine.

It ended too soon. Both of them were stunned by the kiss.

Neither of them acknowledged what had happened the rest of that day.

Not twenty-four hours later, Dean knocked on the door of her suite. When she asked what he was doing there, he told her he wanted to kiss her again. To make certain he hadn’t imagined the experience.

Suddenly Katie was a young girl again, giddy with his attention. He left her suite the next day, and she knew her life would never again be the same.

“We didn’t date in public. When we were with friends, it became a game to tease each other without anyone noticing,” Katie explained to Monica.

“How long did this go on?”

“A few months.”

“What happened to break it up?”

Katie’s gaze slid to the floor where she had been lying next to Savannah for the last hour as she talked about her past. Savannah had fallen to sleep, her pouty lips moved with every breath.

“We fought…things ended.” She wasn’t about to tell all her secrets. About how she’d ended up pregnant with Dean’s baby only to have a miscarriage. About how the awful monthly cycles she’d endured were actually a severe case of endometrioses that messed up not only her fallopian tubes, but made her uterus inhospitable to carry a pregnancy to term. The fact she ended up pregnant to begin with was a small miracle. “Six months after our breakup Dean was engaged. He obviously wasn’t heartbroken.”

“But you were.”

She shook her head. “No…please. We had a fling. That’s it.”

Monica was sipping her second glass of wine. “A fling? You sleep with your teenage crush and you think it’s a fling?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Hmm. Do the two of you ever talk about your affair?”

“No.” Not out loud anyway.

“Is it awkward? Working with him?”

“As much as can be expected. I’m sure it would have been worse had we told the world about us.”

Monica moved off the couch quietly and placed her wine glass in the sink. “I’m sure you think what you had is over, but Dean watches you whenever you’re in the room. I noticed it at the wedding. He obviously still cares.”

“He nearly married another woman. If he felt anything for me, it was lust and that’s it.”

“Time will work that out.”

“Time will work what out?”

“Whether he only wants you for the crazy-hot sex or something more.”

“I didn’t say it was crazy-hot.”

Monica rolled her eyes. “You didn’t have to. The temperature in the room rose five degrees while you talked about it. Listen, all I’m saying is this. If you’re going to be working beside him for the next
few months, and he still has a thing for you, you’re going to find out about it. My gut says he does.”

Katie started to shake her head.

“And…my gut is also saying you have a thing for him.”

“
Had
a thing.”

Monica waved her hand in the air, dismissing everything Katie was saying. “Whatever!
De’Nial
is a river in Egypt yet you’ve parked your brain right next to it. Deny you care about him all you want. But when he starts sniffing around asking where you’re spending your time, you’ll know without a doubt that he’s thinking about you.”

Monica slipped past her and started down the hall. “I’m taking a shower and going to bed.”

“G’night, Monica.”

Left alone with her thoughts, Katie wondered if it was possible that Dean thought about her at all. She’d severed their relationship with a hacking knife instead of a quick clean blade.

Two weeks after the miscarriage and all the follow-up tests her doctor put her through determined that she would never carry a child, Katie found Dean in her suite looking at pictures on his cell phone. They were pictures of his nephew and Dean’s large family visiting the baby in the maternity wing at the hospital.

For the first time in weeks, Katie had felt like getting dressed and joining the world. She’d surprised Dean by coming up behind him.

He snapped his phone away, but Katie had already seen the pictures.

“Hey,” he said, pecking a kiss on her cheek. “You’re dressed.”

He’d been strong, a shoulder to cry on…a friend. “I’m feeling better,” she said. “What were you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Nothing?”

Dean tucked his phone into his jeans as he stood. He placated her with a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Just pictures. So, what do you have planned today?” His changing of the subject wasn’t unnoticed.

“How old is your nephew now?”

Dean shuffled his feet. “A year and a half.”

“You still keep a baby picture of him on your phone?” The hurt of losing their child hung just above the surface of her skin, it burned.

“He’s a cute kid.” There was more to his walk down memory lane than glancing at a picture of his nephew. Dean was thinking about the magnitude of Katie’s problem. At least that’s what she thought. If she asked him, he’d probably tell her she was wrong. But she knew he wanted to be a dad. He’d been right there with her from the beginning of the pregnancy and never once said he wasn’t ready. Quite the opposite.

They’d never kept secrets from each other and the moment Katie suspected she was pregnant, she told Dean. They drove together to a drugstore far outside of town, hoping like hell that there weren’t any cameras pointing her way. They’d been together when the double lines on the stick told her that her period wasn’t late, it simply wasn’t coming. Instead of staring at the stick and cursing it, Dean gathered her in his arms and kissed the living daylights out of her. “Yeah, we didn’t plan it,” he’d said. “But I was born to be a dad and you’re going to be the best mom.” He’d made love to her that night and the next morning she woke up to a plush teddy bear on the pillow next to her.

Within a week, she’d miscarried.

All the joy, all the excitement, left Dean’s eyes. Until she’d seen him staring at the picture of his nephew.

Her inability to have kids was her problem.

It wasn’t too late for Dean.

For the next few days, Katie cloaked her emotions with her debutant persona, slid into her tight skirts, and avoided Dean. No one
knew about them. No one knew about the miscarriage. Katie knew she had to cut her ties and the only way she’d be able to do that was with bloodshed.

The nightclub was packed the night Dean found her. She’d had a couple of drinks, but was far from drunk. She was contemplating leaving when she spotted him looking for her. She ran her hand up the arm of a man who’d been trying to get her attention all night and asked him to dance.

The weight of Dean’s stare followed her, watched her, as she wiggled her hips, and didn’t brush away the stranger’s hand when he spread his palm on her ass.

Dean cut in, damn near taking the other man’s arm off at his shoulder. Katie stormed away and Dean followed.

Outside the club, Dean lit into her. “What the fuck, Katie?”