Loving the Chase (Heart of the Storm #1)

by Sharla Lovelace

  In all the improvements to the land, the little workshop remained. Zach had built his house in front of it with his own two hands, because he couldn’t imagine a more perfect location, something connected to his father.

  Zach remembered sitting in there watching his dad build the amazing pieces that now graced his mother’s home, inside and out. Helping him and Harlan lug wood in and out of there, over the steps on either side. Hanging over the rail to watch the fish swim under the building. Among the sawdust and tools, surrounded by the smell of wood and metal and grease, and the sound of water moving under their feet, Zach thought it was the coolest place on earth.

  That was before his dad and Harlan had their falling out and went their separate ways. Zach never knew what the feud was about, and neither did his siblings, but he was probably the most affected by Harlan’s absence. He questioned his parents repeatedly until Josiah banned the topic outright, and before Zach could push the issue, his dad was gone. And his mother shelved that subject forever.

  Regardless, the Chases and the Boudreaus shared a town and a calling, and Zach always had a soft spot for the old man. He may be crass and quicker to act than to think at times, but he knew his shit. No one knew how to read a storm off gut instinct like Harlan and his dad had.

  Zach sank into a wooden chair that was damn near more comfortable than his recliner, and closed his eyes, knowing full well exactly what they’d land on when he opened them. His body knew the feel of this space centimeter by centimeter, what was on every shelf, what was next to what on the table, the walls, and even the bare-raftered ceiling. The smell of sawdust and the different types of wood he had stored there. He could identify them if he were struck blind tomorrow. There weren’t many days that went by that Zach wasn’t there, working on something.

  Making a living.

  Building deer stands. Eli’s words rankled in his gut, but he knew it was somewhat his own doing. Zach didn’t talk about what he’d carved out for himself, the business—such as it was—he was building back there in the little shack everyone had mostly forgotten about. His family thought he just messed around back there, piddled with his tools a little, went fishing. He hadn’t wet a hook in years.

  He didn’t tell anyone about the repeat business he was starting to get just by word of mouth from delighted customers. His custom pieces were works of art, a combination of modern technology and old-school woodwork techniques that he made around his other life as a Chase. For some reason, he couldn’t bring it to the light just yet. It needed to succeed first. Be a little more substantial. More something, so that the next time Eli made a fuckhead remark like that, he could shove the numbers in his face.

  His dad had wanted to do the same thing, but he never had the time to take it outside of a hobby. With the storm-chasing life and five kids, his craft never made it past filling his own house. And passing his skills to his son. Simon’s words echoed in Zach’s head. He was his dad’s son—there was never any doubt of that. He was cut from the same cloth, had the same interests, the same adrenaline when it came to the chase. And out of all of them, he knew he looked the most like him.

  He opened his eyes and focused immediately on a framed photo up high on the wall across from him. The whole room had photos lining the walls above the shelves—all pictures his mother had taken over the years. Josiah always framed his favorites and brought them out here, especially the black-and-white ones.

  Zach’s favorite was the one of him and his dad making the big massive table that now adorned the family room. It was made of four different types of wood, all inlaid and stained to bring out the different colors and grains. He was about sixteen at the time, and his mom had captured them deep in their work, head-to-head in stern concentration. The resemblance was uncanny.

  Zach let his gaze travel over the other photos, till they landed on one that made him get up. It was of Hannah and Maddi posing to be cute and Zach photo-bombing them from behind. They were young—it was before they were dating because Maddi still had her braces, but only just. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d noticed that photo. God, they were such babies back then.

  So much still ahead of them—good and bad. He’d thought she was it. Even being the flirt he was at a young age, and being fully aware of the effect he had on the opposite sex, once Maddi Hayes put her claim on him, he wasn’t interested in other girls. When he put a ring on her finger later, he thought it was forever. She was all he ever wanted, and he lost her. To a storm.

  No. He lost her to being stupid.

  “Are they ready to go?” Simon asked as the Dallas skyline came into view. “How much farther?”

  “About twenty minutes,” Zach said. “I called the station yesterday evening and talked to Brown Broussard, the head producer. He said it was all a go.”

  He could see a line of darkness on the distant horizon that he knew from experience was likely to be unpleasant, but it was about an hour away. If they didn’t dawdle around, anyway.

  “Did you tell them to pack a bag just in case this thing lingers and we need to snag a motel?” Simon asked.

  “Yep,” Zach said. “And if Nicole looks like she sounds on the phone, I’m hoping there’s a just in case.”

  Simon laughed and Hannah groaned from the backseat, thumping him on the back of the head. But that was okay. He sounded like himself, like the asshole playboy he was known to be and not the man who’d stayed up all night running what-if scenarios from seven years ago.

  “Ow, by the way,” Zach said, attempting a halfhearted swing behind him.

  “You deserved it,” Hannah answered. “You’re such a pig.”

  Zach rubbed at his eyes. It was too early again. Why didn’t storms ever roll in around noon? It always seemed like what they were handed happened at the crack of dawn.

  “Nowhere near pig potential, little sister,” Zach said. “Besides, her cameraman might be a looker, too. Everyone else in that place seemed to be.”

  “Or he could be married and bald and walk with a limp,” Hannah said, bunching up a blanket under her head. “Cameramen tend to be housed in the secret basement.”

  “There’s no secret basement in this place,” Zach said. “Everything is nice.”

  “Besides, I’m not fishing,” Hannah said, eyes already closed.

  “Really?” Zach said, nudging Simon as he watched her in the rearview mirror. “Is our Hannah off the market?”

  “Our Hannah is sleeping the next fifteen minutes, so hush,” she said, kicking the back of his seat.

  “Why didn’t Quinn come?” Simon asked.

  “She had an early shift,” Hannah mumbled. “Besides, two cameras plus a TV camera seemed a bit ridiculous.”

  “I’d rather look at her than some fat, bald cameraman,” Simon said, looking out the window.

  “She’s too young for you.”

  “She’s thirty!” he said, looking back at her with disdain.

  “Which made her twelve when you were sixteen and screwing Lori Wallace on the back patio,” Hannah said, her eyes still closed.

  “You screwed Lori Wallace?” Zach asked, giving him a thumbs-up. “Way to go.”

  Simon turned back around to face forward and shook his head. “I don’t even want to know how you know that, Hannah, but it’s all beside the point.”

  “Twe-elve,” she said in a singsong voice.

  “Do you really want me to start breaking down stats on your boyfriends?” Simon said.

  “And Quinn is taken,” Hannah continued, ignoring his remark.

  “For now,” Simon said, smirking. “There’s time.”

  Zach chuckled, always entertained by Simon’s easy confidence that Hannah’s petite and stunning assistant and roommate would one day walk away from a two-year engagement and fall into his arms.

  They drove the next few minutes in silence, he and Simon watching the weather band in
front of them. There was something about that time just before the first raindrops hit that always struck Zach with a weird mixture of excitement and dread. Like walking into someone else’s house uninvited, and the consequences were unknown. He never really understood the dread part, because in his heart he loved it, but it was still there. Like a tiny whisper in the back of his brain.

  Taking the exit toward the TV station annoyed him, and he popped his neck to shake it off. They hadn’t even entered the picture yet and they were already in the way, but Zach refused to let that thought take root. That would be Eli talking, and he wasn’t even with them on this one.

  “Do you think Gran has her fingers in this?” Zach wondered aloud.

  Simon’s head snapped up from his screen. “Why do you ask that?”

  Zach shrugged. “I don’t know. Just seems like this is happening really easily.”

  Simon leaned his head back for a moment and appeared to study the road ahead. “Not impossible to imagine. She’s done sneakier things.”

  “Like buying Eli’s bank loan and refinancing it under AC Enterprises with no interest?” Zach said.

  Simon laughed. “She never did cop to that one, but I mean, come on.”

  “He was so pissed.”

  “I can’t blame him,” Simon said. “Trying to do something actually on his own, and here swoops in Queen Granabelle.”

  “And Levi’s house mysteriously getting paid off after five years?” Zach said. “Your history professor—”

  “Oh, don’t even get me started on that,” Simon said, shaking his head. Zach knew he was remembering when, during a particularly difficult semester, his most challenging professor suddenly was awarded tenure in exchange for passing Simon. Not that Simon could ever prove it. But with Annabelle on the university board and his lower grades falling off the curve all of a sudden, it was hard not to question that coincidence.

  “Her heart’s always in the right place,” said Hannah from the backseat, not moving from her fetal position. “She makes sure you’re taken care of.”

  Zach twitched at the comment. “I’m just saying it smells a little like déjà vu,” he said, blowing out a long breath. “I don’t know.”

  “Would it really matter, though?” Simon asked, looking at Zach. “Would you blow it off if you found out she was pulling a string or two?”

  Zach watched the road disappear under them, stripe by stripe. “I don’t know.” And that was the truth. As everyone loved to keep pointing out, he didn’t have a real job. Not a structured one. He thrived on being at a storm’s beck and call, and he loved working with his hands, and he was a master at both. And for some ungodly reason, Gran understood that. Encouraged it. Probably because she didn’t encourage it with her own son. For a long time, she did take care of Zach, but for the last year and a half he hadn’t cashed her checks. They were stacked in his desk, waiting for the time he could come clean about his side business and hand them proudly back to her. Either she knew this and wasn’t saying anything, or her accountant sucked.

  So in one sense, he did owe her the respect of not blowing up if she dabbled in this new idea. If she’d pulled a string or two, as Simon said, Zach could let it go. Or could he? He knew her intentions were in the right place, but for once he wanted something of his own, outside of her money-laden reach. Another reason his furniture business stayed under wraps.

  Traffic was better this time around, since the going-to-work pileup wouldn’t be for another hour, so cruising through the streets to the big glass building was a breeze. He pulled into the front parking lot and drove straight to the Infinity TV van. He could see the bottom half of a female sitting in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dashboard, in snug jeans and sandals. Good potential.

  For about thirty seconds. When he pulled next to them, she got out, and his stomach threatened to come up in his throat.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath.

  “Wait, that looks like—” Hannah began, leaning forward over the center console.

  “Is that Maddi?” Simon asked.

  Zach’s skin started to tingle from the rush of anger that spread through his veins. Or that’s what he told himself it was. He ran his hands over his face and back through his hair before looking back at her. She was looking right back at him, her dark hair blowing around her face, arms crossed over her chest and eyes as dark as the angry clouds up ahead.

  Maddi dug her nails into her arms as Zach opened his door and got out to face her. She held her chin up, trying to look braver than she felt. Hoping he hadn’t noticed her nearly fall out of the van. She was trying too hard to look cool and confident, which she was anything but. Her heart was on some sort of race from hell, and she knew she needed to take some breaths and calm down if she was going to pull this off. There was no table between them this time, no bosses to bluff. Nothing but air and history between her and the one man she’d ever let break her.

  And she was voluntarily riding into the one thing she feared the most.

  “Why are you here?” he said, his voice low.

  “Because my boss couldn’t be,” she said through her teeth, releasing the death grip she had on her own arms to move hair out of her face. “And she wants this.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” Zach said. “She misses the meeting, misses the ride-along, but she’s all about it.”

  “It is what it is, Zach,” Maddi said. “I didn’t ask for this, either, but it’s my job. Are you going to have a problem with it?”

  Zach’s eyes bored into hers so hard she had to resist the urge to reach for the car door. For anything to hold her steady. Finally he took a deep breath and stared off toward the dark clouds in the distance.

  “I can do it if you can,” he said.

  “Good. Let’s get on with it, then,” she said with more bravado than she felt. She crooked a finger at a man who appeared from the back of the van.

  The way his gaze drilled into her when she met it again forced her to look away. There was something—old, and painfully familiar there. He’d done that in the meeting as well, and it made her thoughts go all dizzy. She couldn’t afford dizzy. Remember the stairs, she reminded herself, and relaxed as the ice returned to her veins.

  “This is Rudy, my cameraman,” she said, as the two men shook hands.

  “Simon and Hannah are in the truck,” Zach said, for which Maddi wanted to jump up and down. She was so grateful for something to do that didn’t include trading uncomfortable moments with Zach. And he looked like all the wind had been knocked out of him. Good. He needed to be knocked somewhere, all right. “You remember them?” he added.

  “Of course,” she said, giving him a look. She moved past him and leaned in the window slowly, smiling at them as well as to herself. Maybe the airheads had something on this positioning idea after all. “Hey, long time no see!”

  Zach glared at the band of darkness up ahead while they did the niceties. He just wanted to get back on the road and somehow make this normal. He needed normal, and the electricity in the air was beginning to make him itchy.

  He knocked on Hannah’s window while Maddi laughed with Simon about how short his hair was now. Her raised eyebrow as the window lowered made him blow out a breath.

  “Interesting secret you kept,” she said without moving her lips.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be her,” Zach said. “And I just found out she worked there yesterday.”

  His heart warmed toward his sister when she looked Maddi’s way as if she were looking at a rotten tomato. She’d loved Maddi like a sister once upon a time, had been one of her best friends. And felt nearly as bereft as he had when Maddi left. Then she got mad.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He looked at the woman chatting with his brother like old times. The woman he thought he’d never lay eyes on again. The woman that currently had his fucking hands shak
ing and his head on a rotisserie.

  “Jesus,” he muttered, shoving his hands in his pocket. “Yeah.”

  Hannah’s left eyebrow rose as she took in the movement. “I can see that. Don’t let her get to you.”

  Zach swallowed hard and closed his eyes for a second so he could get where he needed to be. He needed cold, analytical thinking. No emotion. He blew out a slow breath and tuned out the sound of Maddi’s laughter just three feet away.

  “I’m good,” he said, opening his eyes and winking one of them at his sister.

  Hannah smiled. “And she’s going to sit through a possible tornado? Really?” she asked under her breath.

  Zach closed his eyes again and clenched his teeth together. “This is so fucked—” Inhaling sharply, he turned and slapped a hand on Rudy’s back. “This is Rudy,” he said. “Rudy, this is my sister, Hannah, our photographer and videographer.”

  Hannah gave her most dazzling smile and held out her hand. “Hi, Rudy, ready for some fun?”

  “Okay,” Zach said, pulling himself back to business. “Here’s the plan. See that band of nasty over there?” Maddi and Rudy looked where he was pointing, at the line of looming darkness that had grown even more in the last twenty minutes. “We’re driving straight into that.”

  “Yay,” Maddi said, adding a little laugh that Zach didn’t buy.

  “Stay right behind me, and be careful,” Zach said, reaching for the radio Hannah was already holding out the window. “This handheld radio is already tuned to ours. If you get into trouble and you can’t get a cell signal, just press and talk and we’ll hear you.”

  Maddi handed the radio to Rudy. “He’ll take that. I’m supposed to ride with you.”

  “Say what?” Hannah asked, her eyebrows lifting.

  Maddi smiled at her. “Yep.” She opened the back door, forcing Hannah to back up and move over. “My boss wants me in the thick of it—her words—and asking questions. I can’t very well do that from the other car,” she said, getting in and closing the door. “Rudy has a roof cam so he can film from behind and maybe catch something good.” She smiled at Hannah. “Like old times, huh?”