Page 38 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Hart sisters might actually be at the establishment they owned.

Or that I would see them there.

Or that they would see me.

Or—and this one was a doozy—that one of them would flirt with me.

I still hadn’t recovered from the shock of that one. It was quite possibly the most surreal, awkward experience of my life. I had been stunned speechless. Thankfully, Kate hadn’t realized anything was amiss.

And why would she? The Hart sisters didn’t look like carbon copies of me—or even like each other. Still, when I looked at Hannah, I had felt a jolt of recognition. Our eyes were the same shade of green, and our cheekbones had subtle similarities a person might notice if he was used to seeing those cheekbones in the mirror every day. I had never taken special note of my bone structure before, but I knew it when I saw it staring back at me. Even in a more feminine form.

Maybe I should have said something to Kate. To explain why all my words had lodged uselessly in my throat. Only I didn’t have an explanation. So an online genealogy database gave it a ninety-five percent chance that the Hart sisters were my cousins on my mother’s side. I knew better than most that biology didn’t make someone family. “You can’t choose your family” was a familiar adage, but that was a damn lie. A person could absolutely choose their family.

A person could also choose who wasn’t family.

I knew this because my mother had never chosen me. Not really. For a day, maybe. But that was quickly overruled by boyfriends and drugs. Those things had been more important than her own son. That was her choice, the one she made over and over again until it wasn’t a choice, it was an addiction.

The Hart sisters weren’t my family unless they chose to be.

So it shouldn’t have felt like a momentous occasion to see them like that. It shouldn’t have felt so deep.

My only explanation for the strange, almost needy, emotions that had swirled inside me was that I was unprepared for a face-to-face encounter. It was one thing to logically know my unmet cousins existed. It was something entirely different to see them in person, with my eyes and cheekbones on a stranger’s face.

But that tempest inside me had paled in comparison to what had happened next.

Because Kate had put her hands on me, tempting and teasing me in the most delightful way. I wasn’t used to playfulness in relationships. I was a serious guy and tended to date serious women. Women who wouldn’t be caught dead in candy-hued dresses and kept their hands to themselves except in the bedroom, with the lights off. Comfortable women. I knew what to expect from them.

But Kate never failed to surprise me.

A fact that she seemed to relish with unholy glee.

Which, perhaps perversely, made me enjoy it even more.

I had contemplated the benefits of ending our axe-throwing session early in favor of spending the next hour at my house. More specifically, my bed. I would have her back home to Jessica on time, and no one would be the wiser.

Maybe I would have done it, taken her by the hand and led her out of there and into the moonlight, but I had felt her withdraw, her attention pulled elsewhere.

To Steven. The best friend of Kate’s deceased husband. Who was, at that moment, looking at Kate in a way that I could only describe as proprietary. Like Steven thought he had some say in how Kate behaved, in what she could and couldn’t do. Like she belonged to him in some way.

Which she sure as fuck did not.

Because she belonged to me.

A stupid thought. Rationally, I knew that Kate didn’t belong to anyone. Not in that way. This was practice. I had no more claim on her than Steven had. But I wasn’t thinking rationally, and the tempest of emotions I had experienced when I had looked into Hannah’s too-familiar green eyes was a light summer breeze in comparison to this. It felt like swallowing a tornado.

Because Kate didn’t belong to Steven. She didn’t belong to Hart’s Ridge. She didn’t even belong to George, because George was dead, and a dead man couldn’t make claims on a living woman—a thought that had, in the moment, filled me with a sort of ruthless satisfaction, but now, looking at Kate’s pensive profile as I drove her home, left me with guilt.

But it still felt true.

As true as it had felt the moment I kissed Kate. I hadn’t been thinking about practice. Mine. That was the only thought in my head, and the second it had flickered through my lizard brain, I had acted on it, lowering my mouth to Kate’s. Thereby informing the world, Hart’s Ridge, and most of all, fucking Steven, that Kate was mine.

It hadn’t felt like practice. It had felt necessary.

I suspected Kate had very different feelings on the matter. For her, it was practice. Practice in stepping out of the box the citizens of Hart’s Ridge, however good-intentioned, had caged her in. Practice in being a woman on a date. Practice in being something other than George’s devoted widow.

And that was all great. I wanted that for her, because she had told me she wanted that for herself, and she deserved to have the things she wanted. Her night had gone entirely to plan, unlike mine.

Messy.

---