A Man of Honor Read Free Page B

to tell everyone the good news. But it’s been a long day, and I’ve still got to do some PT. You’d better go home with your brother, sweetheart.”
    He was telegraphing her the kind of looks that indicated that something on the scale of a category five hurricane was brewing under his deceptively tranquil surface. Cat weighed her options. She could protest. Tell her brother…what? That she’d come here to get answers but things had spun way out of control? Or she could save her pride and lie, tell him it had been Preston’s fault that they’d ended up kissing, and have her brother inflict pain and injury right before Maddie’s wedding. Neither choice appealed.
    As the maid of honor, Cat felt responsible to ensure everything was perfect for her sister, who meant everything to her. She swallowed the knot in her throat and her integrity and stepped forward to kiss Preston’s cheek, where a five-o’clock shadow was already gracing the rigid planes of his dead-serious face. This time, he actually flinched. “Bye, honey,” she said in an affectionate tone. But she needn’t have bothered. Derrick was already out the door.
    The rain had stopped, the only good thing about this night. In the driveway, Derrick opened the passenger door of his pickup with an aggressive tug. He hadn’t been this furious since she was fourteen and he’d caught her smoking in the woods behind the high school with her girlfriends.
    He blew out a big breath and eyed her dubiously. “Cat, really?”
    “Really, what? Preston’s your oldest friend. Is it such a crime I would date him?”
    “You know I love him. I would kill for him, and I know he’d do the same for me. But he’s commitment-phobic under the best of circumstances. After all he’s been through this past year—”
    What exactly had he been through? He’d been called up from the Reserves to serve, and he’d gone proudly. She knew the leg injury was bad. A bullet had shattered his kneecap and damaged his leg. He’d had two surgeries, and judging from the awkward brace and the way he moved, things still weren’t right, if they ever would be. But what had really happened, and why had he shut her out so completely?
    Derrick shook his head, still lethally angry. “You were so upset about how things cooled off between you two. I would’ve killed him myself if he weren’t already injured. Now he’s back, and suddenly you’re starting things up with him again?”
    “It’s…complicated.” Complicated was right. Her fiancé, Robert, had called off their engagement last July, and it had been upsetting. But she’d met up with Preston in September and nothing before had ever felt so natural. They’d simply clicked, and everything that had happened with Preston up to his injury had felt so…right. She’d never questioned that what she felt for him was leaps and bounds over what she’d had with Robert. After all, Preston had felt it, too—or so she thought.
    Preston’s rejection had totally blindsided her—it had cut to the bone to know he had given her up so easily when she thought they had the possibility of a forever kind of thing. It made her doubt herself. Question her sanity. Think she’d leaped too fast and too blindly after Robert. After her failed engagement, this was just one more thing to demonstrate what a bad judge of character she was. Yet even now Robert seemed like nothing more than a mosquito bite compared to the total body-and-soul devastation wreaked by Hurricane Preston.
    “Look, you’ve had a tough year, too,” her brother said. “I don’t want to see you hurt again.”
    Cat bit back the words that would have spilled out had she not pursed her lips tight. She wasn’t a fragile child with asthma anymore whom all her older siblings had to protect. She could fight her own battles. She loved her big brother, but she’d had more than enough of his overbearing protectiveness. She was fine, just fine.
    Actually, she was lonely as hell. She’d gone