by Taylor Hart
He pushed thoughts of his brothers aside and tried to make his mind blank, but she popped up all the same. Sarah. Too bad; his brain had been filled with her since yesterday.
Sutton hadn’t helped, either. When Zane had gone back and accused him of withholding precious information on this operation, the smarmy limey had laughed in his face and told him he’d done Zane a favor pulling him in on this one and they both knew it. He also told Zane he was losing his edge if he hadn’t figured out it was her before going to the coffee shop.
Whatever. He focused on his breath again. Out, he thought of an ocean wave and how it ebbed and flowed. He was just ebbing and flowing at the moment. It was fine. He went back to the mantra. Ohmm. Ohmm. Ohmm. He liked the mantras. Truthfully, he’d downloaded the sounds and used them every day in Tai Chi. Another position, but which one? His mind was supposed to be blank, but thoughts of Sarah flooded in like a geyser. How would he get close to her for this op? Would he really have to be her client?
He remembered the first time he’d met her, at cross-country practice. She’d been so prissy and proper. She had even worn makeup at six in the morning. The first thing he’d wanted to do was dismiss a chick like her, until she smiled and put her hand out, introducing herself properly. “Welcome to Newberry High.” He could still picture that cheerleader smile that he’d thought was fake at the time. She’d continued with, “I hope you enjoy your last two years with us.” She’d sounded like an infomercial.
He’d acquiesced and pumped her hand, instantly noticing the shock of something between them. Honestly, he’d thought about that day a million times. About the way her hand had felt inside of his. About the way every part of him had known she was the one for him right then. Not in just a physical way, although there had definitely been attraction. No, in the white picket fences and happily ever after kind of way. The way all sappy love movies ended.
“I’m Zane,” he’d said, holding her hand.
She’d grinned, breaking the Barbie doll smile and putting her other hand to her mouth as she blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Sarah, named after my grandmother on my mother’s side.”
That’s when he’d fallen in love. She’d actually sounded like an old person when she talked. The way his grandmother talked and asked, “How’s your mother?” in an Englishy way, all proper. He liked it.
In the present, his skin prickled and he realized Sarah was here on his beach. Flashing his eyes open, he saw her marching toward him. She wore a white pantsuit with a red scarf that flowed in the gentle breeze. The thought crossed his mind that she could have been a model. Her lips matched the scarf perfectly. Of course they did. It was Sarah. Despite seeming picture perfect, her face clearly wasn’t happy.
He broke the pose and moved toward her, unable to do anything else. She was a magnet to him, always had been. The only woman he’d ever completely tuned in to. Funny, because the last woman he’d dated had told him she felt he never could really focus on her.
“What’s wrong?” he kind of growled, surprising himself with the tone of his voice.
She blinked and stopped about four feet away from him, crossing her arms. “I thought I was in the wrong place until I saw the two flags flying high from that boat.” She pointed them and looked up.
He grinned, satisfied that she recognized he would have the flags. He looked up as well and stared at the Stars and Stripes and the Trident.
She wagged a painted fingernail at him. “You were always a SEAL fan from the day I met you.”
He shrugged, thinking of the posters on his wall. He wasn’t just a fan; he was completely obsessed. He had known he would be a SEAL from the first time he’d watched Black Hawk Down. He tried to stay focused on the fact that she was here. From the way she’d looked when she’d first gotten here, there was a reason she had come. “I need to ask again, what is wrong?”
Her lip trembled slightly, and she looked raw and vulnerable. Frankly, he was feeling the same way. “I almost forgot how you know me,” she said. The words sounded like they were dragged out of her.
He sighed, still feeling shaken. “What brings you here?” he tried to say in a civilized tone.
This made her smile, and she shook her head, seeming to clear it. “I did come for a reason.”
His heart thudded inside his chest. He wanted, again, to demand answers. He wanted to know what exactly her relationship was with the jerk Harris. He’d gotten completely up to speed on the case since yesterday. Up to speed on her, too. It was strange, though, because he hadn’t planned on her just showing up on his turf.
It was weird, yet not weird, which made it weirder. He tried to focus on what he’d learned last night. She wasn’t a social media person, except for her matching business where she mostly posted inspirational quotes about love. He’d checked on all sites and there was nothing. Well, not quite. Her account was just stale, not blank. The last thing she’d posted on Facebook was a thank-you to all who had attended Jeff’s funeral two years ago.
A post that had nearly ripped his heart out and sent him into a nightly meditation that hadn’t worked. Dang it, he hadn’t used a sleeping pill in a long time, but he had last night to finally relax and go to sleep.
“Zane?” Her voice was a lifeline in his tumultuous brain.
His attention snapped back to her. “Yeah?”
She sighed. “Are you okay?”
How long had he lost time? Been in his own mind? It was something he did sometimes when he was stressed. His SEAL brothers all did it. The therapist had told him three years ago when he’d been ordered to get help after an incident in Afghanistan that it was normal for people who had been through difficult situations to feel disoriented at times.
Forget that. He didn’t like thinking he couldn’t control his mind. Feeling flustered, he shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs and focus on the present. “I’m fine,” he said curtly. “Why are you here?”
The middle of her brow creased. “Someone has been breaking into my house.”
“What?” This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not at all. “What?” he repeated, his voice rising along with a nasty set of jitters. “What do you mean, someone’s been breaking in?”
She put out her hand. “Just calm down.”
“I’m calm.” He wasn’t calm. How could he be? This was her and her safety.
“Last Monday, I walked into the living room and the French doors that open up to the beach were open. It was ten at night, so I called the police. I—” She broke off and pinched the bridge of her nose.
His heart rate kicked up a notch. Why hadn’t this been in the file? What was she talking about? “Someone broke into your house?” Every part of him was on alert. He wanted to catch said intruder and torture them, forget the Geneva Convention and their silly rules. This wasn’t supposed to be the deal. She shouldn’t actually need his protection yet, right?
Sarah hurried on. “It’s fine. I mean, I thought it was fine.” It was obvious she was shaken. She’d come to him, after all.
He told himself to calm down. “Keep going.” He grunted the words, thinking Sutton had to know a police report had been filed.
“So Thursday night, the doors were open, and nothing was taken. There was no change, nothing. I just had this weird feeling, right? Last night, I heard something and ran out and the doors were open again.”
“Should have put new locks on,” he said quickly.
“I’m not an idiot. I did.” She blinked and looked away, wiping beneath her eyes.
He hesitated. Gone was her polish. Gone was the soft-spoken Sarah. No, the woman in front of him was desperate and worried. It might have been seven years since he’d seen her, but he knew she was afraid. What did she need from him right how? It was a question he asked himself about all clients. What did they need? Reassurance. Or for him to chase down the cheater, which was most of his business. Usually, it was both. He stepped forward, closing the gap between them, and took her trembling hand. “It’s going to be fine.”
It was strange holding her hand again. Just like that first day at the high school.
Their eyes met and locked. She asked, “It is?”
The question was an arrow slipped right through all his armor and pierced his heart. She needed him.
As a flurry of emotions was unleashed inside of him, he found himself thinking back to the first day at Newberry High. The first day, when he’d expected she was some prissy Barbie girl. Which she hadn’t been, then or now. She was real. This moment was more real than the past seven years of anything he’d been through.
His gut told him he might actually need her, too. He’d always needed her. So, in a gesture that might rebuild a burnt bridge, he shook her hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Sarah Sommers. I mean, Sarah … Hamilton. I hope you like the service at Zane Kent Private Eye Firm.” He cracked a cheesy smile. “I hope it will match up to all your dreams.”
She blinked and let out a long breath. “You remember that?”
Something loosened inside his chest. Reflexively, he cupped her head with his hand and tilted it. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. “Of course I remember.” He leaned down.
She resisted the kiss briefly before leaning up on her tiptoes and lifting her lips to his.
Butterfly-soft was how she would describe it, he knew. He’d made fun of her for saying it before when they’d watched cheesy romance movies together.
Unable to stop himself, he pulled her closer, crushing her body into his. She made a little noise like a sigh. Their lips remembered who they were, what they had been together, what they’d always had. He drank from her, and she drank back.
Her hands tugged him closer and they were lost in time, drifting back to a place where they would never be apart. Every part of him was overcome with how fast and hard he’d fallen for her again. How it was like nothing had changed.
She yanked her head back, cutting off his lifeline, and searched his face with tear-filled eyes. “I can’t do this, Zane. I shouldn’t have come here. I need to go. I … never mind. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She broke free of him and turned.
At first, he let her retreat. His mind was discombobulated, his thoughts scattered. With effort, he remembered the mission and the arms dealer and—more than anything—the piece of crap who was breaking into her house. If Sutton knew who it was, he was about to pay for not telling him. “No.” He jogged to catch up with her, easily cutting her off. “Wait.”
She stumbled, almost falling to the ground, and he hurried to catch her by the shoulders. When she looked up at him, her expression was heartbreaking. “You hurt me.” Then she scowled at him. “You. Hurt. Me.”
Zane’s mouth went dry. He realized he’d been so mixed up in his own grief, in his own vision of what her life would be like with Jeff, that he hadn’t thought she could still be hurt. He’d thought and thought about her until he couldn’t do it anymore, so it all went into a tidy compartment in his brain he never opened. Seeing her yesterday had opened it. Papers had flown every which way, and the lock wouldn’t re-lock. “You hurt me too,” he admitted softly.
They simply stared at each other. The words and feelings and vulnerabilities hung in the air. Truthfully, he didn’t know if he could do this. He was doubting, and he hated doubt. Doubt in any form could sink a mission.
She pushed a hand to her forehead, and her eyes fluttered. “I can’t do this. I can’t go back to the place I was at for so long. We can’t kiss again,” she said quickly. “I shouldn’t have come to you.”
He pulled his hands back and focused. “Yes, you should have. I’m exactly the person you should have come to.”
“No, I can’t do this with us.” She wagged a finger back and forth between them. “Not with you. Not now. Not with my son.”
Squeezing his eyes shut for a second, he ran a hand through his hair. He got it. She had to protect the kid. “Fine.”
“Fine, what?” She looked out of sorts.
Every part of him was still pulsing from that kiss, but he had to put all of that aside for the mission. “We’ll focus on the immediate threat. We push the past back to the past.”
She gave him a wary look. “Can we do that?”
The fact she asked that question told him so many things. The fact she doubted they could not have a relationship told him there was a chance. “Of course.”
She looked hesitant. “Okay. That … if we can not …” She trailed again awkwardly.
He crossed his arms and put on what she called his SEAL look. “The mission.”
She cleared her throat. “Thank you for your help.”
As much as he wanted to demand more from her, to tell her that there was no way the past was in the past for him, he didn’t want to scare her off. “Come with me.” He moved down the dock toward his boat, already making this decision. She wouldn’t have a choice. Honestly, there was no choice for him either. “I’m going home with you. I’m setting up security, and I’m staying a couple of days.”
“What?” She paused, looking baffled.
He kept walking toward his boat, glancing over his shoulder at her. “I’m moving in.”
“You’re not moving in.”
As he climbed onto the boat, he nodded back at her. “Yes, I am.”
Much to his chagrin, his brother Sloane decided to make his exit from the boat at this exact moment. “Who’s moving where?” He walked up the steps and emerged wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses, boxer shorts, and his cowboy boots.
Zane wanted to command him to go back to Texas, where he’d recently bought a home, but of course, a woman had broken his heart and left him. Sloane claimed he was “worse than a country love song.” So Zane patiently waited for him to get up the stairs and shrugged at Sarah. “Sorry you have to witness this. Sarah, you remember Sloane.”
“Sarah Sommers?” Sloane gasped out. “Well, come give me a hug.”
Sarah cocked an eyebrow at him. “Hamilton now,” she corrected.
Sloane grinned at her. “That’s right.” He waved her over. “How are you?”
Zane watched as Sarah let herself be hugged by the country music star.
The next moment, his other brother, Walker, emerged from the boat with a cup of coffee; his outfit of shorts and no shirt was not much better than Sloane’s. “Sarah!” He went to her and put his coffee down and drew her into a bear hug, picking her up and twirling her.
Sarah actually laughed at their antics, and warmth filled Zane at the sound. Their eyes met again, and Zane only knew one thing for sure—he would keep this woman safe no matter what.
Chapter 6
Sarah was unable to believe Zane Kent—the first boy she’d kissed, the man she’d almost married—was playing security detail in her house. She was kinda having a mini freak-out, but she’d forced herself to calm down on the way home.
Her mind flashed to earlier, when his brother Sloane emerged from the boat in his underwear and a cowboy hat, and the mental image sparked a laugh that she had to muffle. He was the same crazy guy he’d always been. And his other brother, Walker, looked more like Zane. He had the blond hair and blue eyes, and he was very built; it came with the territory of being a professional football player. Of course, none of the brothers were as handsome as Zane, in her humble opinion. She thought about his other crazy brothers and wondered what they’d been up to the past couple of years.
Covertly, she studied Zane, marveling as he expertly pulled out gadgets and began lining them up on her parents’ dining room table. His focus was laser-like, intense, militant.
The pit of her gut rustled with butterflies she hadn’t realized were there. There weren’t even words for this. In all her dreams, nightmares, in anything, she had never thought she would be standing in her parents’ beach house with Zane, let alone having him put together a security plan for her and Tyler. It all felt so foreign.
She touched her lips, thinking about how it had felt to kiss him earlier. Like she was falling, or what she imagin
ed it would feel like to skydive. She’d never done it, but always wanted to. For her birthday, right before Jeff passed and before they’d found out about the cancer, she’d tried to talk him into buying her a package to skydive over Castle Rock on the outskirts of Denver. Jeff had ardently said no, refusing to even talk about it with her. He’d squashed her dreams in one instant, reminding her that she was a mother and all her focus and time should be on Tyler and getting pregnant again—which she hadn’t been able to. Jeff had acted like she should be a fertility machine; he kept immaculate spreadsheets on her cycle and her vitamin intake and whether she was working out too much. Seriously, he’d acted like a child was more important than her, and it’d made her so angry at times.
“Sarah?”
Jolted back to the present, she turned to face Zane, shocked by how lost she’d been in her thoughts. “Yeah?”
His blond hair had gotten loose from the band at the back of his neck. He seriously looked like some amazingly hot UFC fighter on television or something. His black T-shirt was tight and showed off his broad shoulders and physique. The same physique from before, but now all traces of boyhood were gone. Zane Kent could be on one of those calendars. A firefighter calendar. Do the SEALs have a calendar? she wondered.
She dismissed the thought. Her heart rate skipped. “Sorry.”
He gave her a sharp look. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. What do you need?”
With a grunt, he turned back to the table. “Just so you know, I’m going to set up cameras in every room and on the outside and inside of the house.”
It didn’t really sit well to hear him say “in every room.” She fidgeted a little, like the cameras had already been set up. “I don’t like being watched everywhere.”
He put his hand up. “I give you my word I won’t use the cameras in the rooms without a real reason. I’ll mainly police the main areas and the outside perimeter.”
“So you won’t be staying here?” The words slipped out before she could stop them. It was all she’d been able to think of on the way back to her place, that he would be moving in.