“I guess I should go. Since you’re okay and everything.”
“Katy.” I didn’t know what to say. How did I make her stay? The woman fucking loved me. I knew she did. I saw it in her eyes, but she refused to admit it.
She shook her head, making her look like a reverse bobble head. “No, I stopped by to make sure Pelican Bay didn’t lose our evil villain,” she said and then forced a laugh.
“Katy, we need to talk.”
While she was still pliable, I directed her into the living room and sat her on the expensive white couch I only used when she visited.
Katy had been angry at me for many reasons over the years. Most of the time I didn’t know what I’d even done to upset her and bring on the wrath she was so well-known for, but in this case, I had a clue. Mari, my fake ex-fiancée.
Except she wasn’t a fake to Katy. She was the woman I told the town I planned to marry, the lucky woman ready to take her place in my life and stand right beside me. The one who caught Katy and me sharing a passionate kiss in the hallway of the title company and then fled town in the middle of the night with my cousin.
I promised Mari and my cousin I’d handle the cleanup in town and take the gossip head-on, but I hadn’t. It only been a few weeks, and the only thing I’d worried about was how angry Katy’s eyes looked every time she saw me. It’s the maddest I’d ever seen her. I hated to admit it, but I liked it more than I should have. Nothing was hotter than a pissed off Katy.
“We really shouldn’t be here together, Pierce. What if someone found out? You already have enough gossip right now. The phone tree is on fire.”
“Let them talk. I don’t care.” Pelican Bay couldn’t say I didn’t give them a good story.
“I do,” Katy said quickly. And that was the problem. Katy put on a hard exterior that made it seem as if she didn’t care what anyone in the world thought of her, but it was the exact opposite. She cared too much.
I took her hand in mine, pretending to share a sweet moment while she would let me, but in reality I was trying to keep her on my couch so she didn’t run away or slap me when the truth came out. Obviously, I’d waited too long.
“Katy, I have to tell you about Mari.”
She turned her head away, her jaw set hard. “I don’t want to hear about your fiancée, Pierce.”
This would not go over well. I should have told Katy right away, but the time never seemed right. “She wasn’t my actual fiancée.”
It didn’t matter the town didn’t know Katy’s involvement with Mari leaving me. Maybe she was upset at believing she was a part of it. Katy with her built-up anger had one of the softest hearts of anyone in Pelican Bay. She loved this place like people loved stray kittens. Hell, she loved stray kittens too.
“What are you talking about?”
“Mari is a family friend. She came to me looking for a loan to help with a project she was heading up in Guatemala. I promised to give her the money if she pretended to be my fiancée for six months.”
“Excuse me?” Yeah, definitely not going well. The question had three extra syllables when she said it.
“It was a rouse, so you and I didn’t cheat. You didn’t break us up.” She’d hate me, but she’d be alleviated of any guilt.
Katy’s eyes narrowed. “How could you do something like that?”
“Do you have to ask?” Katy saw how desperate I’d grown over the last year. Didn’t she? If something didn’t change between us and soon, we were going to go up in smoke.
She ripped her hand from mine but didn’t swing it back to slap me across the face as I expected, and she didn’t leave the couch. Instead, with her eyes closed tightly, she leaned back groaning.
“We can’t keep going on like this, Pierce. Who is going to get hurt next? How many more dead guys can we find? How many fiancées can you lose?”
“You can’t blame me for the guy at the reunion.” Katy called trouble like a magnet. That dead body was on her.
Her eyes opened in an instant. “Why not? I wouldn’t have been near that closet if not for you.”
And right there held the crux of Katy’s ongoing problem. Me. I was Katy’s problem. If the sun didn’t shine brightly enough on Thursday, that was somehow my fault. Give her enough time and Katy would have the whole town believing I created a device to block out the sun. With enough time, she’d find a way to blame anything on my deficiencies.
That’s the way things had always been, at least most of the time. We shared those few brief days in elementary school, yes, but there were others as well. Katy had always been in the back of my mind even as we both continued on with their lives. My senior year and her sophomore, we attended a homecoming dance. Katy arrived with Riley, promising they were only friends, and I walked into the dance with Quinn Edison.
Katy and I both put on a good show, but then—as we somehow always did—we came together. She was exiting the bathroom, and I’d been getting ready to enter the male side when we both stopped in our tracks and glared at one another. I was perfectly in my I-hate-Katy phase, which I maintained through most of high school. How dare someone like Katy decide I wasn’t good enough for her? If she didn’t like me, I wouldn’t like her either. It ended with those simple facts.
My ego took a big hit with her rejection, and I held on to that anger for most of my early twenties. Somewhere along the way I gave up the fight. It didn’t matter how much I tried to hate her. No one else on Earth created the protective reactions in me like Katy. Didn’t that mean something?
