With a second of hesitation, Colin stood there, looked between the two of them and nodded.
Good. He was going to go, and she could focus completely on the work at hand without wondering what might or might not happen during those few minutes she’d have had with him alone in the car.
He came closer. Leaned over. And planted a not-so-chaste—and definitely not-society-dinner-table—kiss on her lips. “I’ll see you later.” She heard the promise in the words and tingled all the way to her expensively shoed toes.
“See ya, sis.” He grinned at an openmouthed Julie and was gone.
* * *
“HE SURE KNOWS how to make an exit,” Julie said, shaking her head.
Chantel, hot and bothered and not at all comfortable, put her napkin on the table. She didn’t need shortcake, after all. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“What, the kiss? Don’t apologize!” She sounded...almost happy. Then, her hands clasped together, she sobered. “I’m glad he’s finally met someone who got through his walls of mistrust. Someone who makes him forget, at least for a few minutes, that I was hurt under his watch and he couldn’t do anything about it.”
TMI. Too much information. She didn’t want it. Didn’t need insight into his soul to get the job done.
She hung on to it, anyway. Tightly. Her heart hurting for the way she was deceiving him.
It was a major danger of going under, getting involved with a subject. She had to be able to wall off the tenderness to get the job done.
The job.
“What could he have done?”
“Absolutely nothing. I went to a party my parents would have allowed me to go to. It would have happened just the same if they’d both been alive and home waiting up for me.”
More insight.
Colin had told her he’d taken his sister to the emergency room that night.
“He was waiting up for you, wasn’t he? When you came in?”
Julie nodded.
Chantel needed to know who did it. Who was guilty of the crime that had irrevocably changed the lives of two very special people? Robbed at least one of them of the freedom to love openly. And the other of the ability to trust.
Julie wasn’t running away. Hadn’t left the table. Chantel waited. She couldn’t risk pushing her away with an ill-timed question.
Waited and felt the ache growing in her heart. So maybe being undercover didn’t mean you didn’t feel. It just meant you were strong enough to do the job in spite of what you felt.
In spite of the fact that you were going to have to walk away from incredible joy.
The joy was only momentary, anyway. She knew that. Men like Colin, macho alpha males with that overdose of testosterone, men who were eaten alive by the fact that they hadn’t been able to protect someone even when it would have been impossible—those kind of men didn’t go for women who’d push them to the ground to protect them.
Men like Colin went for decorous women like Johnson.
“I heard today that the guy who raped me is going to be at the library function.” Julie’s voice didn’t break, but it shook with emotional tremors.
Every nerve Chantel possessed was on alert.
“It’s the first time he’s openly responded with acceptance to any function with which I’m directly involved,” Julie continued.
The obvious effort it was costing her to speak—and the fact that she was doing it, anyway—brought the threat of tears to Chantel’s eyes. She stiffened her backbone—not her tone of voice—and said, “You were in charge of the guest list.”
“I know.”
Wow. Maybe Julie was farther along in her healing than Colin thought. “And you invited him?”
“No. Neither did Leslie. But Patricia saw that they’d been left off. She invited them.”
Shit.
“And they accepted.”
“Yes.”
Okay, they were dealing with something big here. Something that stunk. She didn’t like it at all.
“Is that why Leslie called you back in this morning? To tell you?”
“Yes. Patricia had told her earlier. She said she’d noticed the oversight and corrected it quickly and quietly so no one would be embarrassed. She said she wouldn’t have said anything if they’d been unable to attend, and they hadn’t ever formally accepted the invitation, but now they have and since they were going to be there, they’d need place cards.”
Julie was in charge of them.
“She knew Leslie would tell you.”
“Yes.”
Julie thought Patricia was on the committee because of her to watch her. Were they afraid she wasn’t going to keep her vow of silence regarding the past?
And another unsavory thought occurred to her. Was Patricia there to make certain that Chantel didn’t suspect anything?