"I cannot believe she hasn't yet accepted his proposal. Doesn't she realize how wealthy he is? Why, with him for a son-in-law, there would be nowhere I couldn't go. Every door in the country would be open to me."

Bree gave a shake of her head. Her mother might drive her nuts, but at least she wasn't shallow. If Bree were considering marriage, it would never occur to Allison to try to benefit from it. Her only concern would be whether her future son-in-law loved Bree enough.

Kate returned from the kitchen and set a glass in front of Margery. Stepping back, she folded her hands over the serving tray and waited.

Margery took a sip, grew stiff, and turned a frigid look on Kate. "That's nothing but ice water. So you have a sense of humor. Too bad I don't. Bring me a bottle of scotch, you little-"

"Mrs. McBride." Leaning across the table, Bree laid her hand on the woman's arm. At the same time, she signaled Kate to leave with a nod. Hesitantly, gently, she said, "My father always said that needing a drink was the first sign that you had a problem."

"My husband used to say that, too. He hardly even qualified as a social drinker. A glass of wine from time to time, a few beers ... Smug, insolent man." She drew a deep breath, then another, then folded her hands together. "I take it you don't drink?"

Bree shook her head.

"And that allows you to be holier-than-thou with those of us who do."

"I have nothing against people who drink ... occasionally. And I'm not being holier-than-thou. I just don't understand how alcohol can mean more to you than your daughter, your marriage, and your husband."

"How dare you!" Rising quickly to her feet, Margery raised her hand as if to strike Bree. Bree scrambled to her feet, too, but retreat wasn't necessary. All it took to freeze them both in place was a bewildered voice speaking from the doorway.

"Sabrina? Baby, what's going on?"

For an instant her heart stopped beating in her chest. She felt the color drain from her face and a queasiness stir in her stomach, as she slowly turned toward the door. Margery was turning, too, so pale that she looked as if she might faint. When her gaze reached the door, she staggered back a step or two, then sank into the waiting chair. "You," she whispered sickly. "Oh, dear God, it's you."

Bree glanced at Margery, then crossed the dining room in long strides, wrapping her arms around Allison. "Mom! Oh, Mom, I'm so sorry."

"Bree, what's going on here?"

At the sound of Holly's voice, Bree clung tighter to her mother. God, she hadn't meant for things to happen this way. She wasn't even sure she'd meant for them to happen at all. But her mother was here, and so were the McBrides, and clearly Margery knew who Allison was, and ...

Gulping in a breath, she freed herself from her mother's embrace and saw Holly and Tom, just returned from the party. He was helping her remove her coat, but her attention was all theirs. Bree brushed back her hair, smoothed a wrinkle in her shirt, then laced her fingers tightly together. "I-uh, I'm sorry, Holly. I didn't-I-I-" With another deep breath, she blurted out, "This is my mother, Allison Aiken. Mom, this is Holly McBride."

Holly took the few steps necessary to shake hands. "Mrs. Aiken. I..." Her attention shifted to the dining room, where her mother was slumped in the chair, hands over her face. "I, uh, I'm glad to meet you. Bree-"

"Get her out of here!" Margery surged to her feet and furiously approached them, one finger pointing accusingly. "Get that woman out of here! I will not be under the same roof with her, do you understand? Get her out!"

What in the world had she walked into this time? Holly wondered. After the afternoon of relentless teasing at the party, couldn't she have five minutes' peace in her own home before World War III broke out?

She stepped in front of Margery, stopping her a few short feet from Bree and her mother. Margery was livid, Bree frightened, Mrs. Aiken oddly calm. Margery tried to sidestep her, but Holly was quicker.

"Get out of my way!" her mother shrieked. "If you won't remove her from the premises, I will. I will not tolerate that-that woman's presence in my house!"

"Mother!" Holly snapped. Catching Margery's arms, she gave her a shake. "Calm down and shut up! Just a reminder-this is my house, and I will not tolerate this kind of drunken behavior here!"

"I'm not drunk, I'm enraged! How dare she come here? How dare she!"

"Let's go into the library where we won't have an audience," Tom said quietly, slipping his arm around Margery's waist and half guiding, half dragging her across the floor.

Holly glanced around and saw several guests looking on curiously from the stairs. She gave them a strained smile, offered a hasty apology, then gestured for Bree and her mother to precede her into the library. The instant she closed the door after her, she asked, "What's going on?"

Mrs. Aiken pulled away from her daughter and went to stand in front of Margery. "Hello, Margery," she said softly. "Imagine meeting like this after all these years."

"All these years I've wished you were dead!" Margery spat out. She would have lunged at Mrs. Aiken, Holly was sure, if Tom hadn't been holding her by the shoulders. "All these years I've hated you!"

"I'm sorry," Bree's mother said. "I've tried to tell you so many times how very sorry I am."

"Mrs. Aiken-"

She turned toward Holly, her expression gentle. "Ms. Aiken. Or Allison. I kept my maiden name."

"Maiden name?" Margery let out a cruel laugh. "Your only name, you mean, because he never married you! He wouldn't!"

Heat flushed Holly's face at the same time as a chill danced down her spine. Panic was welling inside her, urging her to run, run as far as she could. She didn't want to know what was going on, didn't want to know how her mother and Bree's knew each other. She damn sure didn't want to know who he was. Desperately she wished she and Tom were back at the party, that they'd accepted Maggie's invitation to dinner at their house, that they were anywhere but here, dealing with anything but this.

But she couldn't move, couldn't unfold her fingers to open the door, couldn't make her feet obey her commands to flee. Instead, she stood there as if rooted to the floor as Allison Aiken came toward her. "Holly, I'm so sorry. I never would have come here if I'd realized that Margery was here. I never would have risked stirring up bad memories for her."

Margery made a vulgar response to that, but Allison ignored it.

"I just wanted to see my daughter, to find out what in the world she was doing here. She's always been so curious about you, so envious..." Allison smiled affectionately at Bree, who came to slide her arm around her waist.

"I'm sorry," Bree whispered, looking more distressed than Holly had ever seen her before.

"I-I don't understand." Holly's voice was unsteady, rough. "Who are you? Why are you here?"

"They're nocould!" Margery said scornfully. "A no-good worthless slut and her bastard daughter! Nocould!"

Holly looked past them to her mother, lost her temper for one instant, and shouted, actually shouted, "Shut up!"

In the silence that followed, no one was willing to speak-not Allison, not Bree, not even Margery. Tom had his hands full keeping Margery on her side of the room, and wasn't about to speak up, though he'd already guessed what Holly was trying to avoid. She could see it in the way he looked at her, with tenderness and regret and pity, and it made her want to cry, to curl up in his arms and weep and know that he would keep her safe.

She didn't move toward him, though. Slowly she shifted her gaze once more to the Aiken women, and she summoned the courage to speak once more. "Who are you, Bree, to be curious about me? To be envious of me? How did you know I even existed?"

Her gaze darting everywhere except in Holly's direction, Bree dried her hands on her jeans, folded her arms over her chest, and knotted her fists. Finally she stood utterly motionless, looked Holly in the eye, and said, "Because your father was also my father. You're my half-sister."

* * * Holly sat on the porch steps, staring into the dark night sky. Behind her it was business as usual inside the inn. Dessert was being served in the restaurant, beds were being turned down upstairs, dishes were being washed in the kitchen. Life was going merrily on.

Except for her. She was numb inside, and might remain that way forever.

She heard footsteps behind her. Tom. Who else would have the nerve to approach her? She'd sent him away two hours ago. She'd wanted to be alone, wanted to be with him, hadn't wanted to admit just how much she wanted to be with him. She had asked him politely, calmly, to leave her in peace, and, after one look into her eyes, he had politely, calmly agreed.

How had he known that she'd had enough solitude for now?

He sat down on the step above her, his legs on either side of her, and wrapped a down comforter around them both before pulling her back to lean against him. He didn't say anything but simply held her, warmed her, inside and out.

After a time she clasped his hands. "Did Margery settle down?"

"I called J.D. He sedated her. She won't wake up until morning."

"What about Bree and her mother?"

"They talked for a while, then Allison left to go home. Bree went for a walk and hasn't come back yet."

Holly numbly shook her head. "All those years I wished for a sister, and when I stopped wishing ... I got one. I just didn't know it. I guess that explains why she was so nervous around me."

"I imagine it would be scary, meeting the legitimate daughter who doesn't know you're the illegitimate one."

"I can't believe..."

"You knew your parents weren't happy."

"Yes, but I didn't know my father went out and got himself a whole new family he could be happy with!" Belatedly she bit her lip. She didn't want to yell at him. He was the only one who'd done nothing wrong, who hadn't hidden something from her. "I'm sorry."

He hugged her tighter. "He wasn't rejecting you, Holly. You remember what your mother was like. She made life miserable for both of you. He had a chance to be happy with Allison, and he took it."

"Why didn't he divorce Margery first? Why didn't he ever tell me I had a sister?"

"People used to take those vows about 'for better, for worse, until death do us part' very seriously. Maybe he didn't want to put you though a divorce. Maybe he was too big a coward." His shrug rippled through her. "And as for telling you... How could he do that without tarnishing himself in your eyes?"

She squeezed her eyes shut to chase away the tears. "I always felt sorry for him. He was a good man. And my mother ... She was determined to punish him for moving her here. As long as she suffered, by God, so would he. Sometimes I indulged in these fantasies about his sending her back to the city, and he and I would live here together, just the two of us, and we would be so happy." She scoffed. "Now I know if he'd sent her away, he would have moved Allison and Bree in, and I would have been the outsider. He would have loved Bree better because he loved her mother, and when he looked at me, he would have seen Margery, and he would have ha-"

"He would have loved you as much as he always had."

She wondered if he was right and decided she wanted to believe it regardless. After all, her father was dead. Who was going to prove them wrong?

After a time, she gave a shake of her head. "God, a sister! I just can't believe ... I'm old enough to be her mother. And I almost fired her because she kept breaking stuff because she was so nervous every time I came around. What if I had fired her? What if she'd left without telling me? I never would have known. I never would have-"

Tom slid his hands up to her face, tilted her head back, and kissed her upside down. "You didn't fire her, she didn't leave, and now you know. You just have to decide what you're going to do about it."

She hadn't even thought about that. She hadn't thought about anything besides surviving the shock of her father's affair. No, not affair. Lewis's relationship with Allison had lasted at least eight years. He'd shared a house with them in Rochester , had spent two, three, four nights a week there for eight years. He'd pretended to be married to Allison, had been a loving father to Bree.

"I don't know that I'm going to do anything. Get to know her, I guess." She twisted so she could lean back against his thigh and gaze up at him. "How did Margery and Allison meet?" She was sketchy on some details. She'd listened to as much of the explanations as she could, and then she had walked out. She would have exploded if she'd heard one more word, felt one more degree of emotion.

"Before your parents were married, Allison was a maid for Margery's family. That's how she met your father. He was dating Margery but started to get interested in Allison. Margery found out, fired Allison, and pressured your father into marrying her. A few years later he ran into Allison again in Rochester , and..."

Oh, God, they'd been together more than eight years-more like twenty-something. A lifetime. Holly's lifetime.

"Listen, darlin', forget about your father, your mother, and Allison. Just concentrate on Bree. You and she are the only ones who matter."

She held his gaze for a long time, drawing strength from it, before finally sighing. "Maybe you should find her. Make sure she's all right."

"Maybe we should." He untangled himself from the comforter and stood up, then helped her to her feet, supporting her until her legs were steady.

She waited until then to shake her head. "I don't want to see her yet. I don't want to talk."

"Holly-"

"Please, Tom. Just find her and bring her back. I'll talk to her as soon as I can deal with it."

He looked as if he wanted to argue, but she didn't give him a chance. She squeezed his hands tightly, then stepped around him and went inside. She knew she should go with him, should talk to Bree right away, but she felt too ... betrayed. Disillusioned. Hurt.

All her life she'd blamed her mother for making her father so unhappy. It had never occurred to her that he might be the cause of her unhappiness. All those years he'd been unfaithful to her. All those years he'd lived another life, with another wife, another daughter. No wonder Margery's drinking had gotten out of control. She'd needed to forget.

Holly would have given a lot to forget, to wipe the last few hours from her mind. She wanted to think of her father once again as a good man. Not a liar, a betrayer, a fraud. Not a cheating two-timer who hadn't cared enough for his wives or his daughters, who had cared too much about his own happiness. She wanted to face his memory one more time with affection and love, not disappointment. She'd trusted him, believed in him, felt such great sympathy for him, and he had lied to her, to her mother, to the whole damn world. His entire life as she knew it had been one great, meticulous lie. And she wasn't sure she would ever forgive him for it.

* * * Tom had done this routine before, on another cold winter night. Then it had been Christmas Eve, and he'd been looking for Maggie, who'd left home after an argument with Ross. He'd seen more of Bethlehem that night than he'd ever wanted to see, and all he'd been able to think about was what had happened the previous Christmas Eve, when she'd left after another argument and had nearly died on an ice-covered highway.

This time he felt relatively certain nothing so traumatic had happened to Bree. She'd been upset but not that upset. It was cold, but the roads were clear, and it was dark, but this was Bethlehem . The streets were safe.

He was halfway through a methodical search, all the way down one street and back up the next, when he finally spotted her, huddling against the cold in the bandstand in the square. He turned into a parking space, then followed the sidewalk to the bandstand.

Bree sat on one step, an older woman on the next. He couldn't place her until she lit up with a big smile and greeted him with great pleasure. "Mr. Flynt! How nice of you to come. See, Samantha, I told you they'd be worried about you."

She was Gloria, who'd checked coats at the Sweethearts Dance, whom Holly had found trespassing on her property, who couldn't keep names straight to save her life. He greeted her with a nod before turning his attention to the girl-to Holly's sister. The designation sounded strange in his mind. "Bree, are you all right?"

She nodded, though her eyes were puffy.

"Poor girl," Gloria said, patting her arm. "I found her here weeping as if her heart were breaking. Why, last time I heard tears like those, it snowed for two solid days. She was afraid she had ruined everything, but I told her she hadn't ruined a thing. There might have been more tactful ways to break the news that she's Holly's sister, but she can't be blamed because her mother spoiled things, now can she?"

"No, of course not."

An awkward silence settled over them. After a moment, Gloria broke it with a sudden clap of her hands as she stood up. "I'd best be going. Remember what I told you, Serena. Be honest, be patient, and have faith. Mr. Flynt, the same advice wouldn't hurt you any." With a nod, she crossed the bandstand, then stopped and turned back. Though she was smiling, her gaze was oddly intense when it connected with his. "Honesty, patience, and faith. Trust me."

Feeling uncomfortable, Tom glanced away. He was a reasonably honest man, and he could be very patient. He wasn't sure where he stood on faith, though. Luckily, he didn't have to decide at that moment, because when he looked back, she was already out of sight.

After a long moment, he sat down one step below Bree. Beyond good-mornings exchanged in the hallway, he probably hadn't spoken to her twice. But soon, if luck was with him, she would be his sister-in-law.

When he'd decided to get married, he'd expected to get a wife, nothing more. He'd given no thought to mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, or, in the future, nieces or nephews. He well might wind up with more of a family than he'd ever thought possible.

And that was a more pleasant prospect than he'd ever believed possible.

Finally Bree gave a great sigh and murmured, "I'm so sorry."

"For what? Wanting to meet your sister?"

"Breaking the news in such a horrible way." Fumbling in her pocket, she drew out a tissue and blew her nose. "I'd never dreamed Mom would look for me... Daddy used to tell me he'd bring Holly to meet us someday. After he died, Mom told me to just forget about her. But how do you forget your only sister?"

"So you decided to come and meet her on your own."

She nodded. "All these years I wondered ... I thought maybe we could be friends, even if we couldn't be sisters. But when I finally met her, she was so..." At a loss for words, she shrugged, then rested her chi in her cupped hands.

Holly was definitely so ... Tom silently agreed. So beautiful. Sensual, sexual. Bold, aggressive, independent. So no-nonsense. She'd intimidated the hell out of Bree from the start, and an intimidated Bree was not an impressive sight.

Suddenly she looked at him. "Is she going to fire me?"

"I don't think so."

"Is she angry?"

"She's stunned. And, yes, she's angry with her father. She feels betrayed." He wondered how, or if, that would affect things between them. Her father was the only man she'd loved and trusted unconditionally, and now, so many years after his death, he'd broken her heart. Would she use it as an excuse to push him away?