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Frozen with anger and betrayal, Jane didn’t know whether to cry or stick her size nine shoe under the stall and stomp her sister’s dainty little foot. Instead, she flung open her door and went to the sink, rinsed her mouth out with water, and stared in the mirror at her tear-streaked face.
How could she have been such a fool? How could she have believed for so many years that Bradley was different, worthy of all her pining and idolizing? And how could her traitorous bitch of a sister be screwing that very same guy the night before her wedding?
Suddenly it all made sense—Heather’s prewedding cold feet, her efforts to talk to Jane about her “big problems,” Jane finding Heather and Bradley alone at Heather’s house early in the morning. Jane realized in a rush of horrible understanding that she knew nothing. She wasn’t just a fool, she was naive and misguided, the biggest idiot in the state of Texas.
Heather’s stall opened, and Jane swung on her.
“What the hell were you doing in there?”
Her sister blinked her blue saucer eyes slowly, taking in Jane’s appearance. “Janie, I’ve been wanting to tell you—”
“Tell me what? That you’re screwing around on your fiancé?”
Heather’s face crumpled. “It’s not like that…. I mean, it is, but it’s not, but…”
“Either you are or you aren’t, Heather. I heard what just happened in there.”
“Stop! Please, we can’t talk about this here. Not right now.”
She removed a makeup kit from her purse and began touching up her face with amazing skill. But Jane saw that her hands shook as she dabbed at her eyes and reapplied her lipstick.
“Where then? Tomorrow during the wedding photos? Or maybe right after you say your vows?”
Heather winced, then rolled her eyes toward the ceiling to keep tears from ruining her reapplied makeup. “Janie, I’m ashamed of what I’ve done, but I need to explain it to you. And I need more time than we have now. Everyone is probably wondering where I am right now.”
“Did you know how I felt about Bradley?” Jane heard herself ask through clenched teeth. She didn’t want to make this about her, but she couldn’t help herself.
“I’m so sorry.” Heather looked at her then. “I tried to tell you what was going on, but you didn’t want to listen.”
Jane thought of her big-sister strike, of all the times in the past few months when she’d been too stressed-out to deal with Heather’s problems on top of her own. Little had she known….
“Are you calling off the wedding?”
“No! I love Michael.”
“So much that you’re screwing one of his groomsmen? What if he finds out?” Jane, for one vengeful moment, imagined telling Michael, not so much for him, but just to get even with Heather and Bradley.
But then she remembered that it was her own cowardliness that had kept her from pursuing her attraction to him, and now that she knew what kind of guy he really was, she was pretty damn happy with her cowardly tendencies.
“Jane, you aren’t going to tell him, are you?”
In spite of the perverse impulse to keep Heather wondering, she glared at her sister and said, “No, that’s your job.”
Before Heather could say anything else, Jane turned and left the rest room, not sure where she would go but dreading having to go back into the reserved dining room and finish having dinner with so many people she didn’t want to see.
But where else could she go? It would be too obvious to just disappear from the rehearsal dinner when she was one of the wedding party. She could say she’d gotten sick, which was true, but then someone might insist on driving her home.
Her stomach clenching, she entered the restaurant dining room again and immediately spotted Luke sitting alone, sipping a glass of water. Some small part of her reached out to him, wanted to run into his arms, but she stood still, unsure. Then he turned and read the emotions on her face like the oddly perceptive male that he was, and without hesitation he stood and went to her.
“What’s wrong?”
Jane bit her lip, imagining how foolish she would sound if she admitted she’d just discovered the guy she’d been mooning over since college doing the wild thing with her sister. And then the truth of it hit her all over again. She willed herself not to gag.
Luke grasped her shoulders and pulled her to him, then encircled her with his arms. She rested her face against the solid wall of his chest and tried to compose herself enough to make it out of the room without calling attention to herself.
“Let’s go outside,” she whispered.
He guided her out the door, through the main restaurant, and into the parking lot, led her to his car and helped her into the passenger seat, then went to the driver’s side and got in himself.
