As soon as Tully left the apartment, Kate called in sick to work and crawled into bed. She hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes when a knock at the front door startled her out of her thoughts. “Damn it, Tully,” she muttered, pulling on her pink velour robe and slipping into her bunny slippers. “Can’t you ever remember your key?” She opened the door.

Johnny stood there. “You don’t look sick.”

“Liar. I look terrible.”

He reached forward, untied the belt, and pushed the robe off her shoulders. It fell around her feet in a poufy pink puddle. “A flannel nightgown. How sexy.” He closed the door behind them.

She tried not to think about her conversation with Tully—

rebound

can’t love you

—but the words chased one another across her mind, tripping every now and then over his: . . . don’t want to hurt you.

She saw now, suddenly, the danger she’d accepted so naïvely. He could shatter her heart and there was no way to protect herself.

“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” he said.

“I told Tully about us.”

“Oh. And was there a problem?”

“She thinks I’m a rebound girl.”

“She does, does she?”

Kate swallowed hard. “Do you love her?”

“That’s what this is about?” He swept her up into his arms, carrying her toward her bedroom as if she weighed nothing at all. Once they were in bed, he began unbuttoning her nightgown, planting kisses along the way. “It doesn’t matter,” he whispered against her bare skin. “She didn’t love me.”

She closed her eyes and let him rock her world again, but when it was over and she was curled against him again, the uncertainty returned. She might not be the most experienced girl in the world, but neither was she the most naïve, and there was one thing of which she was sure: it mattered whether Johnny had loved Tully.

It mattered very much.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Falling in love was everything Kate had dreamed it would be. By the time spring came again, painting the landscape with vibrant color, she and Johnny were an honest-to-God couple; they spent most of their weekends together and as many weeknights as possible. In March she’d brought him home to meet the parents and they’d been ecstatic. A nice Irish Catholic boy with a great career and a good sense of humor who liked to play board games and cards. Dad called him a “good egg” and Mom declared him to be perfect. “Definitely worth waiting for,” she’d whispered at the end of the first meeting.