The Sweetness of Honey (A Hope Springs Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

exist.
    She exited the stall just as Kaylie walked into the room, and she stood washing her hands silently, waiting for the other woman to say what she’d come to say. A couple of minutes later, Kaylie joined her at the sink, her expression drawn, as if she feared taking the wrong step.
    Indiana met Kaylie’s gaze in the mirror as she dried her hands, and broke the ice. “It’s okay. Just tell me.”
    Kaylie’s expression softened. “You know he’s eaten up with guilt, don’t you? That his interference is nothing but the manifestation of that.”
    It wasn’t a hard leap to make. Indiana had done so within days of reconnecting with her brother last spring. For some reason she’d assumed his reaching out after a decade apart meant he’d worked through it.
    Stupid, really, since she hadn’t taken but baby steps into the overgrown jungle of her own. “You haven’t said anything to him about my looking for Dakota, have you?”
    “I told you I wouldn’t,” Kaylie said, tossing her towels into the bin. “But I think you should.”
    “I will once things are set in motion. Not that he could stop me . . .”
    “You just don’t want to take the chance.”
    That had a smile pulling at Indiana’s mouth. “I may have lived with him the first sixteen years of my life, but something tells me you know him a lot better than I ever did.”
    Kaylie leaned closer to the mirror and blotted away a smear of mascara from beneath one eye. “Maybe not better. Just a different part of him.”
    “Or a different him, period. He’s . . .” Indiana paused, her hands on the vanity as she pulled in a deep breath. “He’s not the brother I remember. Or the brother I knew.”
    “He’s thirty years old, Indiana. He left home when he was eighteen and you were sixteen.”
    A year after Robby Hunt had tried to rape her.
    A year after Dakota had gone to prison for stopping him.
    Kaylie went on. “You can’t expect him to be who he was then. You’re not who you were then.”
    “I get that.” Really, truly she did. “I knew when I heard his voice, that message he left on my answering machine wanting my advice on your garden, that he wasn’t the Tennessee I’d grown up with. But he is an adult, and I’m an adult, and all I want is for him to respect that. To allow me to make my own decisions, my own mistakes. Not to treat me as if I’m still fifteen and making questionable choices.”
    “Which is why you have to tell him about looking for Dakota. And appreciate that he’s going to try to stop you. You said yourself he believes Dakota doesn’t want to be found. Allow him to be who he is, Indy. To be wrong at times. To disagree with you because he believes he’s doing what he has to do as your brother.”
    Kaylie was right. Indiana was asking him to respect her need to look for Dakota while she was unable to respect his need to stop her from making a mistake. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry. Whether to keep her plans from Tennessee or share them. Whether to move to Hope Springs, or stay in her Buda rental, or find a suitable house in one city or the other to buy, then use the property on Three Wishes Road for her bees and her heirloom garden.
    The property across the street from the Caffey-Gatlin Academy.
    Where she was likely to run into Oliver Gatlin.
    She shook off the thought. Oliver Gatlin did not play into any of her plans. Neither did Will Bowman. Tennessee and Dakota were the only men who did. And if she found Dakota, and he didn’t want to come back to Texas, much less settle in Hope Springs . . .
    Because that’s what she was hoping would happen, wasn’t it? That she and her brothers would each live their own lives but share the same happily ever after.
    “We should probably get back—”
    “I will tell him. I promise,” Indiana said, not wanting Kaylie to question her choices, too. “I just need time to figure out what to say.”
    “I don’t think you need time for that.”
    “Yeah,