She’d mentioned it, but Molly’d been so miserable she hadn’t paid attention. “I guess I wasn’t listening.”

“Well, I was. I even fixed a couple of the sentences to make them more realistic. Now, I might not have this exactly right—you can call your sister to verify—but the gist of it is that you, Molly, promised to accept me, Kevin, as your husband, at least for a while. You promised to give me your respect and consideration from that day forward. Notice there was no mention of love and honor. You promised not to speak badly of me to others.” He eyed her. “And to support me in everything we share together.”

Molly bit her lip. It was just like Phoebe to have written something like that. Of course she’d done it to protect the baby.

She pulled herself together. “Okay, you’re a great quarterback. I can do the respect part. And if you don’t count Phoebe, Dan, and Roo, I never speak badly of you to others.”

“My eyes are tearing up from emotion. How about the other part? That ‘support’ thing?”

“That was supposed to be about—You know what it was about.” She blinked her eyes and took a deep breath. “Phoebe certainly wasn’t trying to force me into helping you run a B&B.”

“Don’t forget the cottages, and a sacred vow is just that.”

“You kidnapped me yesterday, and now you’re trying to manipulate me into forced labor!”

“It’ll only be for a couple of days. A week at the most. Or maybe that’s too much to ask from a rich girl.”

“This is your problem, not mine.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then that cold look settled over his face. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

Kevin wasn’t someone who asked for help easily, and she regretted her peevishness, but she couldn’t be around people now. Still, she should have been more tactful about refusing him. “I just—I haven’t been in great shape lately, and—”

“Forget it,” he snapped. “I’ll manage on my own.” He stalked across the porch and out through the back door.

She stomped around the cottage for a while, feeling ugly and out of sorts. He’d brought in her suitcase. She unzipped it, only to go back out on the porch and stare at the lake.

Those wedding vows … She’d been prepared to break the traditional ones. Even couples who loved each other had a hard time living up to those. But these vows—the ones Phoebe had written—were different. These were vows that an honorable person should be able to keep.

Kevin had.

“Damn.”

Roo looked up.

“I don’t want to be with a lot of people now, that’s all.”

But she wasn’t telling herself the whole truth. She mainly didn’t want to be around him.