of her mother hung over her too strongly. She’d spent her life trying to make people look at her family differently. She could not go through the rest of her life with yet another mark against her.
Billy’s family left town. He told her they were going to leave—and he begged her to go with them.
“You’re asking me to choose between you and my father.”
“I am,” Billy said. “But in return, I will give you my life. You will have it all.”
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go with Billy, knowing what she did, any more than she could make an effort to take Nate away from Stacy.
She wasn’t so innocent that she didn’t know how much Nate liked her. Whereas she and Billy had been different people, it was as if she and Nate were two halves of a whole. Never had she ever felt so at ease with a person as she did with Nate.
She’d had to teach Billy things. “No! Pick up that end,” she’d snap at him.
One time she was so bad-tempered at his not knowing how to do things, that he’d put his arms around her—then fallen sideways into the lake. It had taken him an hour of kisses to calm her anger down over that.
There was nothing like that with Nate. He’d done so much in his life that there wasn’t much she needed to teach him. And his way with people! She’d never seen anything like it. Billy was likable, but Nate went beyond that. He soothed people, made them feel better. He joined them, matched them up. He—
Terri took a breath. They didn’t belong to her. Neither man was hers and was never going to be. It should help that each separation was her choice, but it didn’t.
The truth was that she knew she could have Nate if she went after him. “Accidentally” landed in bed with him. Wore seductive clothing—or a lack of them. It wouldn’t take much to make him forget his promises to Miss Stacy Hartman.
But Terri wasn’t going to do it. She wasn’t going to be like her mother and leave behind such deep pain that people never recovered.
She wasn’t going to be that selfish. She knew that if she seduced Nate, forced him to choose her, Brody would say, “I just want you to be happy.” And that was true. But her father’d had more than twenty years of whispers about a wife who’d left him. He didn’t deserve more scandal about a daughter who’d slutted her way between a man and the mayor’s daughter. Dear Stacy Hartman who’d never hurt anyone. A young woman who was universally loved by all.
If Terri got together with Nate under those circumstances, the town would be rampant with talk of her mother, of Terri injuring a boy who had a promising athletic career, of Terri killing the spirit of Billy Thorndyke, the boy the whole town loved. Add Stacy to that and Terri would have to disappear. Leaving town wouldn’t be enough. The town would probably hire mercenaries to go after her.
She closed her eyes for a moment, then slowly got out of the chair. That was enough about the past. Enough wallowing in self-pity. She had a lot of work to do and she needed to put her mind to that.
Chapter 11
“It was the most romantic thing I ever saw in my life,” the girl said.
Terri didn’t know the girl well, just that she was rarely without a book in her hand and she stayed with her parents in cabin number eighteen. Behind her were two other girls looking up at Terri as though she was supposed to make some comment. She was on a stepladder, staple gun in hand, electric drill in a holster at her hip. “Hand me that yellow box, would you?”
The girl picked up the staples, reached up to Terri and gave them to her.
The big tent Terri was working on had a tear in it the size of an ice crevasse. “You didn’t unroll this thing and check it?” she’d asked the three older women putting up the knitting booth.
“Were we supposed to do that? We’re very sorry, Terri.”
She sighed. They were widows and they’d spent the winter knitting really cute things for their stall. Of course they hadn’t looked at the tent for possible rips and tears. “I’ll fix it,” Terri said, “but only if I get one of those blue scarves.”
Smiling angelically, the three women walked away. “I told you she’d know what