Boy Re-Meets Girl

By Patricia Hagan

MOST LIKELY TO MARRY!?

After fifteen years, was it too much for Kelly Sinclair to ask that her high school sweetheart at least be fat and bald and boring? Yup. The fact was, the grown–up Robert Brooks was even sexier than before. He was also rich and successful and perfect.

Kelly couldn't show up at the class reunion admitting her life was a total bust! So she waltzed in, pretending to be polished, perk and happily married, just like Robert.

But Robert had a secret of his own!

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781460882245

Patricia Hagan

Patricia Hagan also known as Patricia Hagan Howell is the published author of over forty books of romantic fiction. Several of her titles have appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. One of her books, "Ocean of Dreams", is based on her own shipboard romance when she met her former husband, a Norwegian engineer. She is also a former Radio/TV Motorsports Journalist, covering NASCAR Grand National Stock Car Racing. Her work has won many awards by the National Motorsports Press Association.

Book preview

1

"Come on, Kelly. You know you want to as bad as I do."

What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand, Jeff?

Hands against his chest, Kelly gave him a hard shove, which caused him to lose his balance and fall from the sofa to the floor.

Quickly scrambling to get up, he cried, Look, I’ve told you there’s nothing to worry about. It will be safe sex, for crying out loud. So what’s your problem? We’re both adults, and we have needs.

Speak for yourself. Now I think it’s time for you to go home. She got up, crossed the room and opened the front door before adding, Besides, you promised this date wouldn’t turn into another wrestling match, remember?

He snatched up his coat and sneered at the empty cups on the coffee table. Some thanks I get for the classy evening. I take you out to the Golden Angus and blow nearly a hundred bucks on steak and wine, and all I get for thanks is stale pound cake and weak coffee.

She shrugged. Blame the manufacturer for the cake, and I don’t make strong coffee at night. It keeps me awake. She took her purse from the table beside the door and counted out fifty dollars. And here’s my half for dinner. Now we’re even.

He brushed it aside. Keep it. Serves me right for being stupid enough to think you’d appreciate a nice meal.

"Oh, I appreciated it, Jeff—but not enough to go to bed with you to show my gratitude. That’s where you were stupid—to think a woman is supposed to."

Yeah? Well, you need to wake up, Kelly. These are the nineties, and people aren’t ashamed to have needs.

She crooked a brow. "There’s that word again—need. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe I don’t need a selfish clod like you in my life?"

Yeah? he countered again. Well, how long have you been a widow now? Two years, right? And how many dates have you had? Not many, I’ll bet, because in case you haven’t noticed, there are more single girls than single guys out there, and I sure as hell don’t have to waste my time with a bimbo like you.

He walked out and slammed the door after him, saving her the trouble.

Hands on her hips, lips pursed, she stared at the door for a moment, then said aloud, Bimbo, eh? Well, they don’t make bimbos loan managers at banks, Jeff Templeton, and you seem to have forgotten that you’ve got an application with this bimbo for a loan to buy a new car.

But to hell with him.

She returned to the coffee table and began clearing dishes away.

He could have his loan. He qualified, and she wasn’t the sort to take revenge, anyway. Better to forget and move on.

But to what?

In the two years since Brent had died in the motel fire, along with his mistress, Kelly felt she had done a pretty good job of taking control of her life—something Brent had prevented her from doing since the day they were wed.

He had made a decent living as an accountant and saw no need for her to finish college because he had no intentions of allowing his wife to work. He had also wanted to start a family right away, but seven years passed before Missy was born. They had almost given up hope because by then they had begun to drift apart and hardly ever made love.

That was also around the time that Kelly had begun to suspect Brent was seeing other women, and she was sure of it by the time Missy’s first birthday rolled around.

Kelly’s parents had been killed in a car wreck a few years earlier, and she had no other close relatives. So with no training for a job to support herself, it was easier for her to close her eyes to Brent’s philandering and wrap her life around her daughter. Consequently, when he died, she felt no real grief.

There was a little insurance and, after buying the small but adequate condo, she had put the rest aside for Missy’s education, then gone out and done what Brent had always forbidden—she took a job. Starting as a bank teller, she had worked herself up to cashier within a year, and not long after, she was promoted to loan manager.

She put the few dishes in the sink and ran water over them, thinking all the while how she’d been a fool to go out with Jeff again. He was like so many of the other men she had been out with—self-centered, preoccupied with their own lives and most of them expecting her to go to bed with them after a few dates. What was the harm, they all chanted—as if they had rehearsed it together—as long as they engaged in safe sex?

The phone rang, and she answered it warily, wondering who could be calling so late.

Kelly? It’s Jeff. He sounded anxious.

She groaned. What do you want?

I’m on the car phone. I couldn’t wait till I got home to call you. I got to thinking I acted like a real jerk. Can you forgive me?

Sure. She shrugged. It made no difference. She was not going out with him again, anyway.

She heard his sigh of relief, then, Hey, that’s great. You’re a real sweetheart, did you know that? And I really am sorry. It’s just that you drive me crazy, and—

She cut him off, It’s late, Jeff. Good night.

But, hey, I’ve got to know you’ll give me another chance, and this time, I swear I won’t get out of line. I thought maybe Sunday we could drive to the coast for the day…have some fresh seafood. You know, take a spin in my new car. He paused for the briefest of seconds. "The loan will be approved, won’t it?"

"Oh, don’t worry about that, Jeff. You know how we bimbos are—we approve loans for anybody. And no thanks. I don’t want to go to the coast or anywhere else with you. Good night, and goodbye."

She hung up the phone and went to check on Missy again. The sitter, a grandmotherly type who lived next door, said she had been a little angel as usual.

Her heart warmed at the sight of her sleeping cherub. Tucking the blanket around her, she kissed her and started out of the room, then paused.

In the glow of the night-light, she could see Brent’s photograph and could not help thinking that while he might have been a rotten husband, there was no denying he had endeavored to be a good father.

She looked at herself in the white-framed mirror on the wall over Missy’s pink ruffled dressing table.

With her naturally curly dark hair, wide brown eyes and turned-up nose, she was considered cute.

Her senior year, she had been voted Best Personality.

But a cute girl with a good personality was not the sort Brent Reeves should have married, because it was the sleek, sexy women he had ultimately wound up being involved with.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine, then put a Barry White CD on the player.

Kicking off her shoes, she curled up on the sofa and wondered why she was torturing herself by creating such romantic ambience. After all, it only served to make her feel even more lonely—especially on a Saturday night.

I never should have married him, she whispered out loud to the emptiness that hung about her like an invisible shroud.

But she could look back and see, miserably, why she had.

Her parents had insisted after her graduation from high school that she go to her mother’s alma mater, Meredith College, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Once there, Brent, whose mother had been Kelly’s mother’s roommate, began calling to ask Kelly to go out with him.

At first, she wasn’t interested in dating him or anybody else, for she still believed in fairy tales and thought her dreams would come true—that she and her high school sweetheart, Robert Brooks, would ultimately be wed.

But fate had decreed otherwise.

She and Robert had planned to be married that June and had talked of nothing else since they were juniors. Robert’s parents could not afford to send him to college, but he had a good job at the paper mill over in Canton, not too far from their hometown of Weaverville, just north of Asheville.

She remembered how furious her mother and father had been when she told them she didn’t want to go to college, that all she wanted was to marry Robert and have his children. He made decent wages at the mill, and she could go to work there in the office. They would get by, because they loved each other, and that was all that mattered or ever would.

Then, two months before graduation and three months before their scheduled wedding day, Robert suddenly informed her that they would have to postpone their plans, because he was moving to Atlanta to work at the airport, where he would receive on-the-job training in aircraft maintenance.

Kelly was stunned. He had never even hinted at such a vocation, but his mind was made up. I want to be able to take good care of you and our kids, he had explained. I want to make some really big money, and believe me, it’s there to be made as an aircraft mechanic.

She told him fine, she’d move to Atlanta, too, and they would get married as planned. She would probably have a better chance of finding a good-paying job in such a large city, anyway. They didn’t have to postpone anything.

But he wouldn’t hear of it, arguing that it would be wrong for her to throw away the chance for college. An education is something nobody can ever take away from you, Kelly. I can’t let you pass that up to marry me. Besides, we’ll be together on holidays, and the time will fly by, and later you’ll be glad we waited.

Only, it hadn’t worked out that way, because once he moved to Atlanta, and she went to Raleigh, they began to drift apart—through no fault of hers.

He had not written as he promised he would, and when she asked him about it, he had sworn up and down he had mailed one letter a day.

When his phone calls became less frequent, she had worried he might be seeing someone else and had been slowly drifting away all along.

Finally her mother had said she hated to be the one to tell her, but she had heard at the beauty parlor, where Robert’s sister worked, that he was dating someone. Sadly, Kelly knew then that her suspicions were correct.

Eventually, though her heart still ached, she was caught up in the exciting whirlwind of college life and began going out with other boys, trying all the while not to think about how much she still loved Robert.

During Christmas vacation, they had finally run into each other. They got into an argument, and that had been the official end of their romance.

With her mother and Brent pressuring her every inch of the way, Kelly, hurt and disillusioned, had eventually allowed herself to be manipulated into accepting Brent’s proposal.

But the truth was she had never stopped thinking about Robert and how different her life might have been if she had married him. Even now, she compared other men to him, for he had always been so caring, tender and solicitous to her every need.

She still felt a warm stirring to remember his funny, crooked little smile, and how when they would be walking along, hand in hand, he would give her fingers a squeeze every so often as he gazed down at her in adoration.

There had not, she thought, blinking back tears, been a time when they were together that she had ever doubted his love. Never in a million years would she have believed things would turn out like they had.

Years later, when she had returned to Weaverville for her parents’ funeral, she heard that he had married. By now, he probably had several children and was completely happy and never gave the past, nor her, a thought. While she knew she was foolish to still think about him, she just couldn’t help it.

After all, she reasoned, did any woman ever really forget the first person she fell in love with?

The music ended, and she drank the last of her wine.

It was time to go to bed and she hoped she would sleep deeply and not dream, as she did all too often, of what might have been.

When she went to make sure the security latch was on the door, she noticed the mail on the table. Bringing Jeff in for coffee, she’d paid no mind earlier.

She leafed through it—junk, the electric bill, a postcard from one of the girls at the bank vacationing at Disney World.

Nothing interesting caught her eye till she saw the envelope on the bottom. It had been forwarded from her old address on the other side of town, where she had lived before Brent died. Probably the post office would have sent it back with a stamp saying forwarding time had expired except for the plea written in large, red letters. IMPORTANT. PLEASE, PLEASE FORWARD.

The return address was the Old Stone Inn, a famous and fashionable resort in Asheville. Penned above it was the name Sandra Fuller.

Kelly couldn’t recall knowing anyone by that name and curiously opened the letter.

Dear Kelly, she began to read, and then the mystery quickly unfolded. "Remember me? Sandra White, your old cheerleading teammate from Rockmont High. Only, my name is Fuller now, and the reason I’m writing is to invite you and your family to our class reunion