Eyes on him, she began sidling again.
Then he pounced. It didn’t seem possible, because he appeared to be half the room away, but in one leap he had his hands on her and was lifting her over the couch. She let out a very unadult shriek—half gleeful, half alarmed—and twisted from his grasp just to make another mad dash...
Only to have him corner her in the room, beside an ornate desk. Gah! Trapped! Laughter bubbled again, and she felt alive as she hadn’t in years.
“Well, well, well,” he said with a mock leer, palms on either side of the wall, caging her in with his body.
Then, while she was still struggling to keep a straight face, he dived his hand behind her back and found paper. She gasped but then he had it in his hold and stepped back to stare down at it.
“What the heck?” he asked, glancing up at Mac’s face. “I thought Publishers Clearing House had finally delivered my check and you were attempting to steal it.”
Now she did laugh. “It’s an invitation to Shay’s wedding,” she finally said. There was no chance to hide it from him anymore. “I don’t want you to go.”
His eyebrows rose. “Because...”
Would he understand? “Because we’re sex buddies. Or possibly we’re sex buddies—”
“About that.” He moved in close again.
The heat of his body was all along the front of hers and she found herself holding her breath. If pressed, she’d have to admit she’d actually never done the sex buddies thing—the out-front, bodies-only, hormones-in-charge kind of relationship. But if she wanted Zan—and, oh, she did—that was the way it had to be. If she went in with shallow expectations, she figured when it was over she’d escape deep hurt.
Tough Mac, grown-up Mac, was smart enough to know that.
His head bent. But instead of touching his lips to hers, he found the skin at the side of her neck. She trembled. Okay, she was trembly, but tough. “Well...?”
“I’m game if that’s what you want,” he said, his breath hot on the thin skin over her pulse.
She trembled again, her body charged with anticipation, lust rushing through her veins, so that she felt on fire.
Then he tongued her flesh, sucked. She jolted in reaction, her body hitting that fancy desk next to her and causing something on top of it to slide to the floor with a thunk.
They both looked down at their feet.
She heard the harsh crinkle of paper as Zan’s hand fisted around the invitation.
A heavy photo album sat on the floor, with an eight-by-ten color picture inserted in the plastic-covered slot on its front. The image was of a family posed on a beach. A mom, a dad, a boy, a girl, a smaller boy.
Chills ran down Mac’s spine.
As if in slow motion, Zan bent and picked it up, set it back on the desk. Then he stared at the album as if it was spiders, snakes and alligators.
Mac knew his parents and siblings had died in a private airplane crash. He’d not been on the flight. Instead, he’d stayed home with a babysitter for the weekend because of an ear infection.
What she hadn’t known until this very moment was that Zan’s wounds from that loss still went to the core. As a boy, he’d never talked about it. As a teen, she’d never pressed.
As a woman, she recognized pain that scored to the marrow of one’s bones. She saw it etched on his face now, the lines of it harder than normal, the bleak expression in his hazel eyes leaching the green and leaving only darkness behind.
And it turned out that Zan’s pain...well, she couldn’t deal with it, not now, no matter how tough she professed to be.
To keep from touching him, she fisted her hands at her sides. Another woman, or the Mac she’d been before, would want to comfort him, kiss him, talk to him about his loss. But then their relationship couldn’t be merely shallow, merely surface. And getting close to him emotionally as well as physically...that would be her downfall.
She could be a friend or she could be a sex buddy, but not both.
Still, she felt craven as she slipped around him. “I’ll leave now,” she whispered, her chest burning, her throat tight.
He didn’t try to stop her.
* * *
AT HIS NOW-FAVORITE stool drawn up to the bar at Mr. Frank’s—it was on the end and in deep shadow—Zan acknowledged that coming back to the mountains had been a mistake. For years he’d managed to outrun his memories with a globe-trotting lifestyle that required he be both mentally and physically alert and always in the moment. But now, with former lovers and photo albums in his face, the past felt as if it was looming like a big-ass insect swatter poised to squash him like a bug.
So tonight he was planning on getting drunk and forgetting about everything but booze and whatever game was playing on the TV.
The young bartender was not much busier tonight than during Zan’s last visit, but since he barely looked up from his beer when the guy tried to start a conversation, the man wandered away. Zan savored another long swallow of beer and his solitude. A buzz couldn’t come soon enough.
It was just beginning to build when someone slid onto the stool beside his. Zan didn’t glance over, not wanting to encourage any kind of exchange. He was an old hat at this, after years of long and short flights. If he kept his head down, he’d keep hold of his separateness.
Only when he signaled for another beer and a shot of tequila did the person beside him clear his throat.
“Going for it hard, huh?” Brett Walker asked.
Zan stifled his groan. “What? Are you my conscience now?”
“It would be like old times, then.”
Not looking at his friend, Zan tipped back the shot glass and poured the tequila down his throat, embracing the burn. Then he coughed once. “I have a DD,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of a small table where Ash Robbins was nursing a soda, his attention on the game showing on the overhead TV.
Brett turned his head, turned back. “How come you’re not sitting with your designated driver?”
“Because I’m not feeling sociable.” He glanced over at Brett to see if he got the point.
“I’m here to meet a client.” The other man took a sip of his own draft. “But you could do your drinking at home if you truly wanted to avoid the huddled masses.”
He wanted to avoid the empty house. That photo album. The memory of Mac saying, Want to be sex buddies?
“Is this any of your business, Brett?” he asked, completely aware of his testy tone.
“I guess not,” the other man retorted, “since you never bothered to find out about my business during the last ten years.”
He signaled for another shot. “I always said I was going down the hill. Never hid the fact that I wanted to get out of the mountains.”
“You never explained that meant it would appear you fell off the face of the earth, either.”
“That’s not exactly true. I...” Zan didn’t want to go there. Explaining he’d kept a kind-of contact with Mac would only lead to more questions.
“Yeah, I know what you did. Those effing postcards, no words on them and only signed with the letter Z. Quite the prolific correspondent you are.”
Shit. “But—”
“I’m sure my sister appreciated keeping up with your travels. Maybe she would have liked to let you know what was going on with her life, but hey, like I said, you couldn’t be bothered.”
“I never knew my next mailing address,” Zan muttered.
“Let me explain about this little thing called email. It moves from computer to computer, no stamps, no physical mailbox necessary.”
Zan swallowed down half his beer. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”
“I’m not kidding about how pissed I am that you left the way you did.”
“Jesus. I always said I was going to
get out of here!”
“You never said that you’d leave your family behind like that. No real words from you, no way to keep in touch.”
Family? His head started to pound as if he already had the hangover he anticipated for the next morning.
Then his mouth opened, and words came out of it without his permission. “How’d you get those scars?”
It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to know about them since his first glimpse of them at Oscar’s. One bisected an eyebrow and another crossed the bridge of Brett’s nose, and anyone could see they weren’t cat scratches. But, Christ, a man might be self-conscious and not want someone to pry...just as Zan didn’t want to let anyone in on the scars he had, the ones on the inside.
“Forget I asked,” he muttered, when Brett remained silent.
“Are we gonna get all touchy-feely now?” the other man said, his voice mild.
“Screw you—”
“I went into the army. Saw action in Afghanistan, followed up by doing hurricane relief effort work in Florida. It was there that a house fell on me.”
“Like the Wicked Witch of the East?” Zan couldn’t help but ask.
Brett snorted. “Didn’t die, just lost some of my pretty looks.”
Still, it gave Zan pause, not that he’d admit it out loud. “I bet the girls were worried.”
“My sisters, yeah. But it turns out the scars actually seemed to attract women.”
“Bet you hated that,” Zan remarked drily.
“Of course I didn’t. While I was enjoying my share of female company, I also earned a degree in landscape architecture and started a business up here that was mostly mow and blow and a little bit of design. Now I’m trying to flip that equation.”
“Flip it?”
“Mostly design, a little less mow and blow.”
Zan thought of that picture he’d seen on Brett’s wife’s phone—a rendering of the lodge he and Mac and Brett had dreamed of long ago. The lodge that belonged on Walker mountain.
Which they didn’t own anymore, not one piece, including the cabins, because all of it now belonged to him.
Guilt had him throwing back the rest of his beer, and he considered sharing with his old friend the truth. But he’d made a promise.
Shit. A promise to Mac, who was just another problem he didn’t want to contemplate right now. Want to be sex buddies?
She’d actually asked him that yesterday.
Seeing the bartender was occupied down at the other end, Zan reached over and grabbed up Brett’s beer. “Hey,” the other man snatched it back.
“I’m trying to do you a favor. I imagine that beautiful wife of yours wants you horny not sleepy when you get home tonight.”
A slow grin overtook Brett’s face.
Zan put on a disgusted expression and shook his head. “I never thought I’d see it, but you’re totally gone.” And he was glad for his friend.
“You said it, ‘beautiful wife.’”
“Is that why you’re doing more design now, and less mow and blow?”
Brett’s expression turned serious. “If you’re asking if Angelica is behind that, pushing for me to make more money or something, you’ve got it all wrong.”
“Okay.”
“That woman...what she wants is all she has already with my ring on her finger. A place to call home, a family—husband, sisters, a nephew, a niece—more of all that to come in the future.”
“What she has is the Walkers.”
“Yeah.” Brett let that sit, and then he grinned again. “And my prowess in the sack, of course.”
“Always so modest.” Zan shook his head. “I’ll tell her you said that.”
His friend’s expression turned smug. “She won’t deny it.”
Christ. “You’re married, Brett. You’re really married.”
“Yep.”
“Poppy and Shay minutes from walking down the aisle, too.”
“We’ve all grown up.”
With plans and futures they were making, while Zan didn’t even have a clue where he was going to go next and what he would do when he got there.
In the mirror, his gaze caught on a new patron entering the bar. Mac.
He hunched around his beer, hoping she wouldn’t spot him, even as he didn’t take his eyes off her. She was dressed to socialize, in a pair of tight jeans, high-heeled boots and a sweater that clung to every curve. As she passed a booth, someone grabbed her arm and she turned, a smile breaking out for the woman who dragged her onto the seat beside her.
Want to be sex buddies?
“So what about you?” Brett said. “A steady woman been in your life?”
Mac, all those years ago. Zan shook his head to dislodge that thought. Want to be sex buddies?
What the hell was he going to do with that?
He felt Brett’s attention on him. “What?” he demanded, without looking over.
“Christ, you’re surly,” Brett complained. “When was the last time you got laid?”
“Really? We’re getting all touchy-feely now?” Zan said, echoing the other man’s earlier words to avoid spilling how he’d almost gotten laid by the other man’s sister. Want to be sex buddies?
Of course he wanted to have sex with Mac. There was no doubt about that. But sex buddies? Once she’d left him at the house, he’d had a clearer head to contemplate that proposition.
He’d been sex buddies with Simone. Mac was not Simone.
Then a man strode into the bar, in jeans, a snap-fronted shirt and cowboy boots. He glanced around, and then his gaze landed on Mac. At her name, she looked up, smiled at the newcomer, then slid out from beneath the table where she sat.
At the hug she gave the guy and the kiss he pressed to her cheek, Zan realized that Mac wasn’t just at Mr. Frank’s to socialize. She was here to have a date.
“Who the hell is that with your sister?” Zan said, lifting his chin to indicate the pair in the mirror.
Brett took a gander. “Friend of hers. Stuart Christianson.”
“Should I remember him?”
“Used to often go around with Glory Hallett—she’s married to someone else now.”
“What the hell!” He watched Mac and Stuart Christianson seat themselves at a table for two. “Is this matrimony central, or what?”
“Time didn’t stand still when you ran off, and we all didn’t stand still, either.”
Not for the first time, Zan wondered if that’s what he’d expected. Everyone in the mountains staying the same, just waiting for the occasion of his return to reanimate and then start moving about their lives again.
Okay, that was self-centered.
“I thought about visiting before,” he confessed to Brett. Uh-oh. Maybe getting shit-faced wasn’t the right thing to do.
“So why didn’t you?”
“I suppose I was waiting for the right moment.”
“The right moment for what?”
How the hell did he know? The moment when he was settled enough within himself to come back to them, maybe. The moment when he’d be convinced the ghosts were gone from the mountains—which was ridiculous, because he’d carried them with him all this time.
The only thing he’d managed to do in ten years was to ignore their presence by immersing himself in new challenges, new sights, new people.
But always, just as surely as the ghosts rode his shoulders, there had lingered a thought in the back of his mind. A thought that there might come a day when he’d return and pick up where he’d left off with Mac, and...what?
Want to be sex buddies?
In the mirror, he found her again, leaning toward Stuart Christianson, who wore a smile on his face and kept his eyes on Mac’s. A few couples were moving around the dance floor now,
and as he watched, Stuart Christianson and Mac joined them. It was something slow and country, and Stuart Christianson took the opportunity to pull Mac in close. Too close, for a weeknight at Mr. Frank’s, if you asked Zan.
And it was then he realized, with a pang, that though he’d come out tonight to forget...he’d only been focused on regrets.
And at the top of that list would be losing out on Mac if he didn’t do something about her. Tonight.
CHAPTER TEN
ASH SPOTTED TILDA the instant she walked into the bar. Though he’d been debating with himself about how much time he should let pass before asking her out again, now he didn’t hesitate to vault from his chair. Her arrival had to be a sign that tonight he should make his move. Coming up behind her, he laid a hand on her shoulder.
She whirled, surprise shifting to a quick smile that she smothered too soon for his liking. “You.”
He grinned. “Me.” Again she was dressed in that too-thin jacket, which she wore over jeans, a long sweater and sneakers with a hole in one toe. “You look cold. Let me buy you something to warm you up.”
“I...” She shook her head. “No, no, thanks.” Her head twisted to take a look around the bar.
“Are you meeting someone?” That would be disappointing, since she was here, practically in his lap.
Which sounded very nice, by the way.
Her gaze still roamed the patrons of Mr. Frank’s. “I’m looking for a friend.”
“Come on, I’ll get you that drink. You can sit with me until she arrives.”
She threw a glance at him. “It’s a he.”
Shit. He should have sewed up the second date before he’d let the first one end! In the two days that had passed since they went out, some other guy had already moved into Ash’s territory.
He winced at the proprietary thought. His parents had raised him to be more gentlemanly than that. A woman wasn’t his property, of course. Backing off, he gave her his best polite smile. “Have a nice night.”
“Thanks,” Tilda said in an absent voice, then seemed to mutter to herself. “It was an off chance he’d be here, anyway.”
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