too. They were patients, and he’d trained himself to be clinical and objective when treating them.
Samantha was different. She wasn’t a patient. She wasn’t even a friend, despite their determination to pretend they could pull that off. She was a potential lover. He knew it. So did she. And that turned casual glimpses of bare skin and intimate little moments into something dangerous. It hadn’t sounded to him as if she recognized that.
Was that because she didn’t feel the sizzling chemistry the way he did? Or was she only trying to ignore it, to pretend it didn’t exist?
He’d known what to do with all the meddling. It had been annoying, but too blatant to take seriously.
He’d even been able to dismiss the hints that Samantha had held a long-ago crush on him. Time faded that sort of thing, especially when they had never exchanged more than a word or two back then.
But this new twist, this need that was growing inside him? That had the potential to rip him apart.
In Afghanistan, it hadn’t been possible to hide from the dangers. They were all around and part of the job. This danger was something else, something he could avoid.
And somehow he had to find a way to ignore his suddenly raging hormones and do just that.
6
“I went downstairs and he was gone. He just took off without a word, not ten minutes after handing me a container of coffee and a muffin,” Samantha told Emily later that morning when she’d finally managed to get a lift over to Castle’s from a neighbor who was heading that way. “Now will you please end the plotting and scheming? It’s evident that Ethan and I are not meant to be. Being pushed together constantly is just making both of us uncomfortable. If you keep trying to make something happen, one of us is likely to bail on your wedding.”
To her dismay, Emily burst into tears at the warning. “Sure, you’d like nothing better than to ruin my wedding, wouldn’t you? Go on and bail, if that’s what you want to do. Gabi can always fill in. Maybe I should have picked her to be maid of honor in the first place.”
Samantha barely resisted the desire to snap right back. Instead, she latched onto Emily’s arm and drew her outside. “Okay, let’s have this out right now. Do you even want me in your wedding?” She tried to temper her anger and added more gently, “Em, it’s okay if you don’t. Frankly, I never expected you to ask me. If you’d rather have Gabi, it would be okay.”
Emily’s tears flowed harder. “No, I want you in the wedding. And I wanted Ethan to fall for you. I thought it would make up for things.”
“What things?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. We’ve never been close.”
“We’ve had our problems, sure, but we’ve been close,” Samantha said. “We’re sisters. We’ll always have each other’s backs. Nobody knows us better than we know each other.”
“You and I don’t get along the way you and Gabi do,” Emily insisted, then added with a sniff, “Or the way you and Mom did.”
Samantha stared at her incredulously. “And Gabi and I don’t relate the same way the two of you do. That’s nothing to be jealous about. It’s just the nature of relationships. As for Mom, she absolutely adored you. You were her beautiful baby.”
“No,” Emily insisted, rejecting the idea. “I was the afterthought that kept her from having the life she really wanted.”
The bitter words that revealed years of unexpressed pain stunned Samantha. “Sweetie, you know that’s not so.”
“It is so,” Emily insisted. “I heard her once, you know. She was telling a friend that she’d applied for this dream job, but then found out she was pregnant with me. The same thing had happened before, when she and Dad were first married. She’d just started working and then she got pregnant with you, so she’d quit to be a full-time mother.”
Samantha tried to absorb this news, or rather the implication it apparently held for her sister. Though she knew she’d been a bit of a surprise to her parents, she’d never given it another thought. And she couldn’t understand why what Emily had overheard had caused this rift between her and Emily. “Okay, I knew both pregnancies were unexpected, but what does that have to do with you and me?”
“She never resented you for ruining her life,” Emily said, her tone accusatory. “But she did resent me. I could