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“Of course you will.”
There was subtext to the four words that couldn’t penetrate the throbbing in his head. His skin flashed hot then cold and the roots of his hair began to hurt. He rose to his feet, one hand on the tabletop to keep him steady.
“Zan?” Brett questioned. “Are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
He didn’t feel so good, either. “Uh...” The room was revolving around him.
“Do you need—”
“Just some fresh air,” he said, trying to shake off the dizziness. “I’ll see you later.”
Then he began to walk away, all the pleasure he’d felt in seeing the Walkers again tarnished, but he couldn’t figure out why.
He glanced back at Mac. She was watching him leave, but the expression on her lovely face didn’t exactly shout warm welcome, that was sure.
They said a person could never go home again... Apparently he couldn’t even go back to the place that had been the next best thing.
Or to the girl who had once been the first in his heart.
* * *
ONE MOMENT MAC was watching Zan thread his way through the tables toward the exit and the next she found herself on her feet.
“What are you doing?” her brother asked.
“I’m not going to miss this opportunity to give him a piece of my mind,” she said. “You heard him. He doesn’t plan to be around long.”
“Now, Mac, is this about him crashing the reception? Because—”
“Don’t ‘Now, Mac’ me,” she said. She wasn’t going to share with her brother about that “moment” they’d had on his big night, but it still embarrassed her to recall how readily she’d responded to Zan’s encircling arms. Not that she intended to get into that with Zan—but she had other things to say to the confounding man. “Have you forgotten on his way down the hill ten years ago he warned other guys to stay away from me?”
Brett rubbed his hand over his mouth as if to wipe away a sudden grin. “Who would take that seriously?”
“Maybe my perfect man!”
This time her brother laughed out loud. “How would he be perfect for you, then?”
She ignored his logic. “And what about those postcards? Ten years of finding reminders of him in my mail, with that Z as the only message. Don’t I deserve an explanation for that?”
Now she looked toward Zan, noting he’d been stopped by a middle-aged couple at a table on the other side of the room. The Robbinses had recently began living full-time in the mountains and were clients of her Maids by Mac business.
Without another word to her brother, she headed in that direction, prepared to engage Zan when he wrapped up his conversation with the pair. And she didn’t feel the least bit guilty over eavesdropping in the meantime.
“Ash came home exhausted but exhilarated from his experience with your documentary crew,” Veronica Robbins was saying.
Documentary crew? Ash was the Robbinses’ twentysomething son, and she’d heard the woman mention him spending time traveling since an internship ended in the fall.
“When will we get to see Earth Unfiltered?” she asked.
“It’s in postproduction now, but the IMAX theater dates should be nailed down fairly soon.”
“Nine years in the making,” Veronica gushed. “Footage from the remotest locations in the world.”
“I’ve been lucky to be a part of it,” Zan said.
From the corner of her eye, Mac studied him. Was he a documentary filmmaker? Really? That would mean that while she’d stayed home and cleaned up other people’s messes, he’d been traveling the world, gaining sophistication and savoir faire.
Not that he looked all that urbane at the moment. He was paler than he’d appeared when he first arrived. Her brother was right, Zan didn’t look so good. Was he sick?
Not that she should care. And she didn’t care that building a business in Blue Arrow Lake likely wouldn’t impress one of the creators of some IMAX theater-bound film called Earth Unfiltered. Zan had been born to a world of privilege but she’d been born to the mountains and considered that the best advantage of all.
She wasn’t afraid of hard work and she wasn’t impressed by material wealth. As a matter of fact, the Walkers and other longtime locals were quite suspicious of the moneyed flatlanders who moved up the hill. Zan’s grandfather had turned his vacation place into his permanent retirement home, but even though the luxury estate had been in the Elliott family since the early 1900s, he’d never achieved homegrown status in the eyes of the full-time mountain residents.
“I’ll see you later,” she heard Zan say to the couple, and then he was again on his way to the exit.
She hurried after him, frowning when he bumped into a table and then into the newspaper stand. Its metal frame rocked back and forth and Zan himself seemed ready to topple. Her hand shot out reflexively, and she grabbed his arm to steady him.
Slowly, he swung about, then stared down at her, blinking as if surprised to see her.
He wore dark jeans and a cashmere sweater that clung to his wide shoulders and broad chest. How had he gotten so big? Maybe he’d grown taller after leaving Blue Arrow Lake. She couldn’t remember his exact height then, but surely he hadn’t made her feel so...feminine. So fragile.
She shook off the thought. Feminine and fragile sounded like weak and wussy, and no man was going to make Mackenzie Walker that way. Especially not the guy who had left her—and left a warning behind for the other guys in town. “I have a few things to say to you, Zan.”
“God, you’re beautiful. More beautiful than ever.”
The words instantly flustered her. “Well...” She rubbed her hands down the legs of her ancient jeans, suddenly aware she was dressed for work in threadbare denim and a sweatshirt with pilled ribbing around her hips and at the bottom of the sleeves.
“You were gorgeous as a girl and took my breath away dressed as a bridesmaid,” he said. “But now, like this...” His hand waved to indicate her figure.
Mac gaped, supremely aware she was dressed like a ragamuffin. “Are you blind or are you making fun of me?”
He blinked again. “Remember that day at the hot springs?”
She barely resisted squirming. “The time I had to come get you and Brett because the both of you had downed too many beers and weren’t sober enough to drive? When Missy Waters puked out the car window on the way home and I threatened to make you clean it up with your tongue?”
He winced. “Not that time. Our time. Your first time.”
“Shh!” She glanced around. “We’re not talking about that.”
“I dream about it sometimes. Do you?”
Gah! The man was making it hard to hold on to her mad. “I never think of it,” she said. Oh, but she did. Wouldn’t every woman remember her first time? Summer again, both of them in bathing suits at the remote hot springs that could only be reached by starting from the Walkers’ private land.
Upon becoming a couple, they hadn’t discussed the day, or if there ever would be a day, when she’d give him her virginity. But the knowledge that she wanted to be with him like that had hovered over her for weeks. Months. Years. Even when he’d seen her only as his best friend’s pesky younger sister.
Maybe she’d not had all the details of that kind of intimacy quite worked out when she was a girl, but anything she’d had then, she’d wanted to be Zan’s.
She’d been so gone for him.
Just as she’d been that lazy afternoon at the hot springs when she was seventeen. They’d had a cooler containing green grapes, a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked from scratch and a thermos of iced tea. They’d immersed themselves in a spring, and then, when they were too hot to stay in a second more, they’d stretched out on double-wide-striped beach towels and let the afternoon breeze cool their skin.
Propped on an elbow, she’d fed him grapes, her breast pressing against his bronzed biceps, her nipple pebbled to a tight bead at the contact. He’d let his fingertip drift over the bumps of her spine until it touched the bow of her bikini strap at the middle of her back.
His gaze never left hers as he slowly picked up the end of one damp string and pulled it free. Her breath ragged, she’d sat up and loosened the top bow herself. The scraps of fabric had fallen into her lap.
Second base, as she’d still referred to it then, hadn’t been new to them. But it was the first time he’d played with her breasts when the only other item she wore was a tiny pair of bottoms. Even now, she could remember the brush of his wet hair on her skin as he sucked on her nipples. She’d clutched the heavy bone of his shoulders, her breath shuddering in her lungs.
There didn’t seem to be any air to pull into them right now. Shoving the memory away, she folded her arms across her chest and tried to get a handle on the conversation. “Are you really a documentary filmmaker?” she heard herself ask. “Never mind,” she added hastily. “I want you to know that—”
“I wish I had that moment on film,” he said, his voice low and whisper-rough. “But I can close my eyes and see it in Technicolor. You had a sunburn on your nose and you bit your bottom lip when I—”
“Zan!” She felt her whole body flush. “Please. Stop.”
He smiled. “That’s not what you said then. Well, not the ‘stop’ part, anyway.”
“You’re a beast,” she whispered. “Now quit embarrassing me. I already have a bone to pick with you.”
“Yeah?” He seemed unconcerned as he reached out a hand to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. The gesture was too familiar and even more so when he stroked his fingertips slowly down her cheek.
Chills tumbled across her skin and she batted his hand away, but his fingers tangled with hers and he lifted them toward his face, rubbing her knuckles against the rasp of his whiskered jaw.
She tried tugging free, but he tightened his hold. “Zan Elliott, what are you doing?” she said through her teeth.
There was a feverish light in his eyes. “Remembering how good we were together.”
She tried gathering her mad again. “Well, I’m remembering that you rode out of town, but not before apparently informing the male half of our community that I was still somehow yours.”
The corners of his mouth curled up. “But you were.”
“Zan! You left.”
He stroked the back of her hand against his face once again. He was hot, she realized. His skin burning up.
She frowned. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Better seeing you. Always better around you. It’s been a long ten years.”
Something definitely wasn’t okay with him. Where he’d been pale before, now he had a definite flush and his lips looked too dry. As she watched, a fine tremor racked his body.
“Maybe you should sit down.”
“I—”
“Oh. My. God. Zan Elliott,” someone called.
Mac closed her eyes. Hell.
“And with Mac Walker.” There was glee in the voice of the biggest gossip in the mountains. Missy Waters, she of the puking incident, who had never forgiven Mac for having “stolen” Zan—when the other woman had never had him to begin with.
“Hey, Missy,” Mac said, resigned to be the star of a story for the rest of the week.
“Missy...” Zan said, as if trying to place the name.
Irritation flashed across the woman’s face, then smoothed out. “I’d not heard you’d come back to town,” she said to him, her gaze dropping to their hands, still joined. “Or that you two have picked up right where you left off.”
Crap. “That hasn’t happened. That’s never going to happen,” Mac said, trying to free herself from him.
He had a grip like an octopus. “Missy!” he said, his memory obviously clearing. “Didn’t your hair used to be dark?”
It was platinum now, and Missy’s pride and joy. She fluffed it with her fingers and beamed at him. “Thank you for noticing. I went blond and have never looked back. Unlike Mac, I should say, who everyone knows is stuck in the past.”
“What?” He shifted his glance from Missy to Mac. “What’s that mean?”
“Nothing,” Mac said firmly. Desperately. “Missy, did you hear about Angelica’s new car? Brett gave her the sweetest ride as a wedding gift.”
“Really?” For a moment she was diverted. Then her attention went back to Zan’s fingers, still wrapped around Mac’s. “Zan, you haven’t let go of Mac.”
He followed her gaze, executed one of those odd blinks that seemed to suggest he was having trouble focusing. “No, I haven’t let go of Mac.”
This was getting out of control. At this point, she was willing to give up on the big tell-off she’d had planned for the man if only she could end this odd conversation. “I’ve got to get to work.”
When he didn’t release her, she jiggled their joined hands. “Work, do you hear me? That thing I do that allows me to put gas in my car and food in my belly.”
“I’ll do that,” Zan said. “Go out to dinner with me tonight.”
“I will not.”
Missy was following the exchange with unconcealed curiosity. “You should, Mac. It’s not like you have a steady guy or anything. Nobody thinks you’ll ever stick with anyone because—”
“Do you mind, Missy?” Mac asked, done with politeness. “This is a private conversation.”
“In Oscar’s?” she questioned. “I’m not the only one watching Zan stake his claim.”
“Good God.” Mac felt as if the walls were closing in on her. “That’s not happening. I’ll never be his to claim.”
“Wrong, Mackenzie Marie.” Zan’s cheeks were flushed even redder, and his eyes glittered feverishly. “You’ll always be mine.”
That was it. I’m done with this.
As she lifted her free hand to slap some sense into him, however, he collapsed. Catching him in her arms, she staggered, the two of them crashing into the nearby wall before sliding to the floor.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_732f79fb-8428-5bd1-a79c-0accf0972999)
MAC HAD LOST the round of rock-paper-scissors. She tried convincing Brett to make it two out of three, but he squeezed his “paper” hand over her “rock” fist and promised to call later to see if she needed him to spell her at the end of his workday. However, she knew he had an evening meeting scheduled with a client who wanted him to design a landscape—something her brother was now finally seriously pursuing after years building up a mowing-and-blowing business. She wouldn’t allow him to put that off, nor did she want to compromise her pride by admitting she was the least bit anxious about being left alone with Zan Elliott.
Which meant Mac was on her own dealing with the one sick puppy that he seemed to be.
At Oscar’s she and her brother had wrestled Zan into her car—with little help from him and with a lot of senseless, feverish mumbling. Brett had followed her to the Elliott estate and fished for the keys from his buddy’s pocket himself. Then they’d propelled him to the master bedroom, where he was obviously staying.
