Thief of My Heart. Janice Sims

a Raleigh park on Saturday morning.

      Desiree glanced back at her older sister and grinned. “Nobody told you to party all night with Colton.”

      The day was bright and clear, the temperature in the low sixties. Lauren squinted at the sun before saying, “If you’re going to party with anyone all night long, it should be your husband.”

      Desiree and her sisters got together every Saturday morning to exercise and catch up with each other’s lives. Desiree, thirty-one, was single and a psychologist with a private practice. Lauren, thirty-three, was an architect. She was married and had a small son. The baby of the family, Meghan, twenty-seven, was single and a history instructor at a local university. The only sisters missing were Mina, twenty-nine, who ran a lodge near the Great Smoky Mountains, several hundred miles away, and Petra, thirty-two, a zoologist presently studying the Great Apes in Central Africa.

      Desiree laughed. She observed the puffiness of Lauren’s eyes and the haphazard way she’d piled her thick black hair atop her head this morning. Lauren was usually put together for every occasion. “Yes, but he could at least let you get your rest afterward. You look like you didn’t sleep a wink.”

      “I’ll have you know these dark circles under my eyes are well worth a sleepless night with my man,” Lauren said, laughing, too.

      “Let’s not start talking about sex,” Meghan protested. The shortest of the sisters at five-six, she had recently cut off her long black hair and now wore it in a sophisticated bob. “Let’s talk about hair, as in do you like my haircut?”

      “I was trying not to say anything,” Lauren said, peering at her sister’s haircut with a critical eye. “I hope you don’t regret it like I did when I cut mine off a few years ago. Long hair can be more trouble to keep up, but it has so many more styling options. I didn’t know what to do with my short hair.”

      “That’s because you were so used to long hair,” Desiree said. “I loved my short hair.”

      “Then why are you letting it grow out?” asked Lauren reasonably.

      “Because I think I look more intelligent with longer hair,” Desiree said.

      Lauren laughed harder. “You have a doctorate in psychology. What does hair length have to do with intelligence?”

      “We look on the outside how we feel on the inside,” Desiree said. “Haven’t you ever wondered why everyone has their own sense of style? Everything we wear, how we style our hair, it all depends on how we feel about ourselves. I think I look smarter with my hair in a bun. That’s how I wear it when I’m in session. Looking intelligent makes my clients more confident in my ability to help them.”

      Lauren sighed loudly. “Wearing your hair up has no effect on your ability to help your clients. Your dedication coupled with your education and your willingness to give of yourself to everyone who comes to you for help is what makes you a good psychologist, my dear sister!”

      “We all have little behaviors we rely on to make it through the day,” Desiree said. “You, for example, have a habit of rubbing your left earlobe when you’re thinking hard about something.”

      “I do not!” Lauren cried, brown eyes sparkling with humor.

      “Yes, you do,” Meghan confirmed. She looked at Desiree. “What mannerisms do I have?”

      Desiree grinned at her. “You have a habit of shaking your leg nervously when you’re sitting at the dinner table. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but you tend not to close things after opening them. You leave drawers open, cabinet doors, closet doors. When we were living at home with Mom and Dad, I used to go behind you, closing things. It drove Mom mad, but I don’t think she ever caught you at it.”

      Meghan laughed heartily. “No, you’re wrong, I know I have that problem, but I still can’t shake it. I’ll go behind myself to this day and close things hours after I’ve left them open.” She looked at her sister with admiration. “That’s why you became a psychologist. You’re very observant of people.”

      “That and the cute boy she wanted to meet, who happened to be taking Psychology 101 at the time,” Lauren quipped.

      Desiree frowned, remembering how she had fallen in love with Noel Alexander her freshman year while sitting behind him in Psychology 101. He was tall and well built with the most beautiful milk-chocolate skin and dark brown eyes. She had been so in awe of him, she couldn’t bring herself to walk up to him and introduce herself. If they hadn’t accidentally bumped into each other one day while entering their classroom, they would never have met. Once Noel looked into her eyes, sparks flew and they were inseparable from that day forward.

      “Why’d you have to bring him up?” she asked Lauren irritably. “I’m trying to forget I ever knew that creep.”

      Desiree picked up her pace. But her older sister was soon at her side again.

      “You need to talk about it,” Lauren said.

      She and Meghan flanked Desiree.

      Desiree sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “I already told you two what happened.”

      “Yes, but it’s been over a week now, and you haven’t said how it makes you feel,” Meghan said gently. “Finding out the man you loved, a man you idolized, cheated on you, must make you feel something!”

      “And the way his mother just blurted it out in the middle of the cemetery like that,” Lauren put in. “After ten years of keeping his son a secret! Come on, Desi, that must have pissed you off.”

      “Of course it pissed me off,” Desiree said angrily. “What really irks me about it is I don’t believe she would have told me at all if Noel Jr. hadn’t been with her, and I immediately saw the resemblance between him and Noel. I think it was the look in my eyes that made her spill her guts. But what am I supposed to do about it, go cuss out a dead man?”

      “Why not?” Lauren asked reasonably. “We’ll go with you and make a party of it. We’ll go at midnight and burn candles on his grave. And after you’re finished cussing him out, we’ll toast your new beginning with champagne.”

      “So that’s it,” Desi said, looking at Lauren suspiciously. “You think this is going to throw me into a depression.”

      “You did have that man on a pedestal for ten years,” Meghan reminded her. “Whenever some other guy got too close to you, you would whip him out as the perfect example of fidelity and true love. No other man could compare to him. Now that you know he wasn’t perfect, you must be regretting those lost years.”

      “Damn right I regret them. But I can’t blame Noel for that. I was the one who chose to hide behind him in order to avoid relationships. I understand that about me.”

      “Then why won’t you give Decker a chance?” asked Lauren.

      “Because dating Decker Riley is just asking for trouble,” Desiree said. “That man is sex personified. Noel was good-looking, but he didn’t compare to Decker. If Noel could rip my heart out with his behavior, Decker will eviscerate me.”

      “I never took you for a coward,” Lauren said. Her expressive brown eyes held a challenge in them.

      Desiree knew that look well. Her big sister had been goading her into action all her life. This time she was not going to take the bait. “Well, where he’s concerned, I’m a coward!”

      Then she sprinted ahead of her sisters. And since she was by far the fastest runner in the family, she left them in her dust.

Chapter 2

      As was his habit, Decker personally went to the florist’s to choose the flowers he wanted Desiree to receive. He picked a spring bouquet because whenever he saw her, she was always turned out in the most appealingly feminine way. And it had not escaped his notice the past two years that