Keep On Loving you

by Christie Ridgway

He pulled a handful of business cards out of his pocket. They belonged to his attorney, but Zan had added other numbers and two email addresses, an additional one he’d set up just that day. “This is how you can get ahold of me and/or my attorney, anytime of the day or night.”

  Making the rounds of the room, he handed a card to each and every one of the Walker clan, including London and Mason. The boy looked up with a grin. He must have just lost a tooth, because there was a gap on the top row.

  And like that, Zan couldn’t breathe as heavy emotion moved through his chest like a cement mixer. The knowledge hit him so hard, he went back on one foot.

  He could have left Mac a single mother, like Poppy. He could have had a kid, a boy or a girl, cute like this, who needed a dad. He couldn’t remember much about his father, but he for damn sure knew a man was supposed to be one if his lover had a baby.

  The knowledge of that, of how he’d failed Mac—not been there in her moments of uncertainty and vulnerability—had finally driven him to ensure he’d always be available if this family needed him.

  Feeling as if he was a million years old, he moved on to stand before Brett.

  “Brother,” he said.

  The other man was fingering the business card, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Yeah?”

  “I need to give you something else...as head of the Walker family.” He glanced back at Mac, aware in her mind that he was going to pile on the unforgivable. “As the oldest.”

  “Give me what?”

  “I’m giving it to all of you, actually,” Zan said, sending his gaze around the room. The group was still, expectant, except for Mason, who was lining up the chess pieces on the board.

  Mac rose from her seat, the magazine falling to the floor. “Don’t,” she said.

  He ignored her. “I discovered a couple of weeks ago that my grandfather bought the mountaintop property from Victor Fremont.”

  The Walkers glanced at each other.

  Zan took a deep breath. “And before that, he made a loan to your dad, with the lower piece of land as collateral. The money wasn’t paid back, and through a series of events and unintended consequences, that land has now come to me.”

  “Zan!” Mac’s hand flew to her throat. She was looking at Poppy, though, who appeared more surprised than anything else.

  “Unintended consequences?” Brett asked.

  Zan nodded. “I’ll lay it all out for you as soon as you like. I have all the relevant paperwork and we can make an appointment with the estate lawyer as early as tomorrow.”

  Ryan moved forward. “You own the mountain, then? The whole mountain?”

  And without waiting for a reply, both he and Jace said together, “I’ll buy it from you.”

  Zan felt his faint grin. “Not necessary.”

  “Not going to happen,” Mac said staunchly. “That’s Walker land.”

  “It’s Elliott land now, I guess,” Poppy pointed out. She was looking at Zan with interest, as if she suspected he had something else up his sleeve.

  Which he did.

  “We’re not letting flatlanders get involved in this,” Mac said, her tone vehement.

  Shay looked over. “Um, Mac, Ryan and Jace and Angelica have married or are marrying into this family. Can we cut them some flatlander slack?”

  Appearing affronted, Mac slumped back onto the couch. “It’s our Walker legacy.”

  Shay’s face softened. “I know where you’re coming from, but look. Now we have a chance, maybe, to get our legacy back, the whole thing, intact. That is, if Zan will consider a sale?” She turned to him.

  “No.” He waited a beat. “Because I’m already giving it to you.”

  “We can’t take charity!”

  Mac again. God, she was still fighting, but now he knew where at least some of that stubbornness was coming from. I learned I don’t need any man to keep me up. That was the irony, of course. In failing her, he’d actually caused her to build those strong, high walls he found so very maddening.

  “It’s not charity. It’s family.” He angled to give Poppy a small smile. “Brother of the heart, right?”

  Her gaze softened and she smiled back. “Brother of the heart.”

  “Poppy.” Mac rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows you’re squishy to your soul.”

  Zan turned to the oldest Walker. “What do you say, Brett? Can you accept something from your brother?”

  “You’re playing dirty,” Mac said angrily.

  Zan didn’t take his eyes off his oldest friend. “Or am I playing fair? If you’re my family, then I share with you. That seems reasonable to me.”

  Brett studied his face. “You staying?”

  “You’ll always know how to get in touch.” That was all he and his ghosts were prepared to offer. “And if you want my opinion on what to do with the place, then build your dream. Make it Walker Mountain—a place for family and visitors alike.”

  Brett cocked his head. “Are you giving us a choice, Zan?”

  “Not about the land. My attorney is already drawing up the papers. What you do with it and...and about the brother of the heart...not my call.”

  “I know what I want,” Poppy piped up.

  Then Mason did, too, and proved he was wise beyond his years. “Does this mean I have another uncle? Does this mean more Christmas and birthday presents?”

  Most everybody laughed, loud enough to cover his mother’s scolding.

  “I like the sound of Uncle Zan,” Zan said, looking toward Mason and London. The boy grinned. The girl uttered, “Cool,” and went back to her phone, clearly this event on a scale of a mere one or two in the teenage drama department.

  But to Zan, it was off the charts.

  The room exploded with enthusiastic talk after that, as the assembled group discussed possibilities, timelines, and divvied up new responsibilities. The action moved from the family room to the kitchen. Poppy tried to bustle about, but Ryan took things into his own hands by sweeping her off her feet and holding her on his lap as everyone else prepared the meal.

  Zan didn’t do much, either, but he couldn’t stop smiling, and he found himself early on ensconced in a chess game with Mason at one end of the granite island. Grimm wandered in and with a groan flopped at the feet of Ryan and Poppy’s stool.

  Zan was sucked back in time.

  Happy voices, family voices, that included some squabbles and some teasing, but most of all communicated a pervading sense of security and contentment. It was what he’d experienced with his first family—his mother and father and siblings. It had been there those years with the Walkers, too, but he’d always stood on the edge of it...afraid of becoming too dependent on something he knew could be snatched away.

  Breathing in, he realized the heaviness on his shoulders had eased some. His ghosts seemed lighter in weight and not so dark in spirit.

  Or he wasn’t so dark in spirit.

  And he was able to hold on to that until they all gathered around Ryan and Poppy’s dining table for the meal and he realized that one person was missing.

  Mac was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WITH HER FULL backpack slung over her shoulder, Mac stomped toward Zan’s front door. It was twenty-four hours since she’d left Poppy and Ryan’s, stealing into the night as her siblings ramped up their enthusiasm for the Walker mountain and what they might create there.

  They’d taken the news of the ownership in stride, unbothered by the implications, untroubled by the problems the situation wrought.

  Because, she realized, it wasn’t trouble or problems for them.

  That ties between Zan and the Walkers would now never be severed didn’t give them the tiniest pause—because not one of them had thought about what accepting that property might do to her.


  In all fairness, she hadn’t stopped to share that with them. She hadn’t wanted to share that with them.

  She’d wanted to maintain her poise and her dignity, sure the truth would only gain her their pity.

  So she’d run off to lick her wounds and while doing so she’d come up with a plan she hoped would cut her own personal bonds with Zan.

  The doorbell rang out its distinctive musical phrase. Luckily she didn’t hang out with a crowd of classical music aficionados. Once Zan was gone, the likelihood of hearing this set of notes was so small she could count on not encountering anything that would prompt the unpleasant memory.

  Before the last tone sounded, the porch light blazed on and Zan pulled open the door. She didn’t hesitate to push her way inside, making for the parlor, where a low fire was once again burning. There, she slipped off her coat and slung her backpack onto the coffee table.

  “Mac?”

  Turning, she took him in from head to toe. She’d seen him in suit-type clothes and she’d seen him in mountain clothes, looking either GQ magazine-suave or as if he’d walked straight out of a Patagonia catalog. These garments were something entirely new—well, not new at all. He wore a ratty white T-shirt advertising a marathon in San Diego from twenty years before and a pair of sweatpants that had been washed to a bleached-out blue. The ragged hems trailed threads that brushed the floor.

  Because the shirt clung to his shoulders and the waistband of the pants hung sexily at his hip bones, he looked good, of course. But still a surprise.

  One of her brows rose.

  He must have understood the question in the gesture and his jaw worked for a moment. “Stuff of my dad’s.”

  Okay, sucker punch to the gut. Because now she was seeing Zan’s dad, a tall, lean man who dressed like that when he was rolling around with his kids before the fire or when tucking them into their beds upstairs. After story time, he’d sit on that couch, and fitting his wife to his side, watch the flames and dream about their future.

  Zan, dressed in his dad’s old clothes, was not Wanderer Zan, but Domesticated Zan, a side that rounded out Classy Zan and Caveman Zan in a manner that she wished she didn’t know.

  Unless he was still your Zan, a little voice said.

  Breathing in deep, she squelched the thought and reminded herself of the purpose of the visit.

  “Well—” she began.

  “Are you here about the land?”

  She glared at him, remembering all over again that not only had he broken his promise by telling early, but he’d actually given the land away. “Would it matter if I was?”

  He rubbed his hand over his face. “I guess not. Mac—”

  “I know why you did it.” The anger leached out of her, leaving only a dull sadness behind. She sighed. “And I know why they agreed so readily.”

  Her sibs thought accepting Zan’s property would keep him joined to the place and to them. They expected him to return regularly and be the brother they had missed and wanted once again in their lives.

  She knew better.

  Zan had arranged to transfer that property for exactly the opposite reason. It was his way to pay back the Walkers for what they’d given him when he was young. Now with that debt wiped clean, he could go on without another thought to them.

  “So then what brings you here?” Zan asked.

  “These,” she said, and her hand snagged the straps of the backpack to yank it open. Upending the canvas, she dumped 117 postcards onto the rug in front of the hearth. The firelight played over the glossy, colorful images from faraway places, highlighting those that had landed on their faces so their white underbellies showed, only marked by the distinctive Z.

  She started to fume all over again. “Why did you do it?” she demanded. “Why did you send them?”

  She could only see the top of Zan’s head as he stared down at the heap. “To let you know I was thinking of you, I suppose,” he said slowly.

  “One hundred seventeen times?”

  “A hundred times that. A thousand. Ten thousand.”

  The quiet admission didn’t do anything to quell her temper. “Ten years, Zan. You rambled about for ten years, yet you still felt compelled to...to keep the knot tied with postcards. Why did you do that when it was you who left?” She nudged the pile with her foot, setting those on top sliding. One slithered all the way to Zan’s bare toes.

  Bending, he picked it up. A snowy mountain range. The Andes? She couldn’t remember. “Yes, I did leave.” His long fingers ran over the postcard’s edges, and then he folded it into a crude airplane. It was a poor design, because when he let it go, instead of sailing it spiraled to the ground, nose first.

  “And that leaving...” he began, staring down at the ground. Then he looked up, his gaze direct on hers. “My parents and brother and sister were on their way here.”

  “What?” Mac blinked and her stomach pitched. “Here?”

  “A ski weekend. It was hardly more than a couple of driving hours from our house at the beach, but they had a friend with a private plane.”

  God! “I...I didn’t know, Zan.” God.

  “Turns out, I’m the only one of the family who made it to Blue Arrow Lake that winter.”

  Mac’s legs folded as both her indignation and her strength ebbed. She dropped to the rug, right beside the hill of postcards. Pressing her hands to her eyes, she thought about the boy that was Zan, arriving at the place that had been the destination his loved ones had died trying to reach. “No wonder you always were bent on going away from here.”

  “Yeah.” He sat on the rug now, too, 117 postcards between them. “You were right when you wondered if I was trying to escape by leaving this place. I thought I could leave the ghosts of them behind. Turns out, they came with me. All over the fucking world.”

  Mac closed her eyes at the bitter pain in his voice. “They wouldn’t want to be a burden. They would never want to hold you down.”

  He went on as if he didn’t hear her. “They weren’t the only thing I was running from. It was all of you, too, of course.”

  “I don’t understand why,” she whispered.

  “Because I was a Walker hanger-on, obviously. A pretender.”

  Her eyes popped open and her head came around to stare at him. “What do you mean? Did you only pretend to...to care for me?”

  “Fuck, no, Mac.” He pushed both hands through his hair. “But it was only a matter of time, right? Sure, I was your first lover, but you’d move on. Shay and Poppy and Brett, their lives would move on, too, and ultimately away from me. You’d have each other forever. Me, I would have no one if I stayed.”

  Everything ends.

  “Zan—”

  “It was easier for me to go away than for me to be left behind again.”

  God! She drew up her knees and dropped her forehead to them. It made so much sense in a twisted, miserable sort of way.

  “So, Mac...the postcards?”

  Her plan. Remember the plan! Lifting her head, she glanced down at the small souvenirs of his travels. “It’s time to get rid of them.”

  He was staring into the fire, his face expressionless. “I feel a symbolic annihilation coming on.”

  “I thought about the shredder in my office, but they’d dull the blades,” she said. “I don’t have a fireplace, but—”

  “I do.”

  And it had seemed fitting, that their destruction should be witnessed by them both. He wanted to burn the bridges between them, and he would watch while she did that, too.

  Climbing to his feet, Zan reached for a log in the holder on the hearth. “We’ll get the flames roaring, then.” He tossed it in, then used the poker to stir up the embers and resettle the wood.

  After a few minutes the fire was leaping and snapping and putting off so much h
eat that Mac scooted back a couple of inches. She swallowed. “I guess it’s ready.”

  He settled back on the rug. “Looks like it.”

  She stole another glance at him, his handsome profile limned by gold and red light, another memory she’d have to eradicate after the 117 that would go up in smoke tonight. Blindly, she reached for a postcard.

  Her fingers closed over the nearest, then froze. Her entire arm couldn’t move.

  Zan’s head turned to look at her. “Do you need help?”

  “Um...maybe.” She was still clutching the postcard she’d selected in a rigid grasp.

  “How about I do the first?”

  Her fingers tightened as did every muscle in her body. “Okay.”

  Then she watched him reach for a card. As his fingers closed over tagboard, her muscles snapped, releasing her body from its prison. She lunged. “Not that one.”

  He glanced at her, eyebrows raised, but let her pluck it from his hold.

  “I like that one,” she said, retaking her place without looking at it. “I’ll...I’ll save it for last.”

  “Then why don’t you choose? Tell me which one and I’ll toss it in.”

  Toss it in? That sounded so casual. So cavalier. This was her past he was conferring to the fire. Her secret pain and her secret dreams that had been triggered every time the mail carrier arrived.

  They were about to burn the 117 reasons she’d never married anyone else—the reasons that had to be destroyed or she’d never be free.

  She darted another look at Zan, then at the pile of cards. Could she destroy them? Did she really want to be free?

  Maybe not. Maybe not this way. Burning the postcards would mean she was attempting to also forget those precious, joyous moments of her youth.

  No way did she want to lose the memory of their first kiss after that silly, teenage tussle.

  Or the first time he’d taken her to the movies and instead of being one of a group of Walkers and Zan, arguing over who got the seats with the rail in front, it was just Mac and Zan, and they’d climbed to the top row, making it their place.

  She didn’t want to extinguish her recollection of the day they’d first made love and she’d been so excited she’d bit her hand to stop her cries until he’d pried it away from her mouth and encouraged her to make all the noise she wanted.