by Bella Andre
Her mouth warm beneath his at the ballpark as he stole that first kiss, the desperation that had flared to life between them and only grown hotter every time they touched.
Running after her on the sidewalk to tell her he loved her, and loving her even more for the way she’d yelled at him, for how hard she’d tried to insist their love wasn’t real.
And then, later, the taste of her tears on his lips as she’d cried in his arms, the dogs there with them, all of them comforting her.
People had always joked that nothing could touch Zach and his charmed life, but as the wall finally won the battle he was waging to control the car and the heat of the engine’s flames burned through metal and leather, he knew better.
He’d always known better.
After all, his father had died young, and everyone always said that Zach was exactly like Jack Sullivan.
Jack Sullivan’s life had been perfect. He’d had a beautiful wife he loved and eight great kids. He’d been the definition of charmed.
But he’d still died.
And left them all behind.
* * *
Heather blindly pushed through the people on the bleachers to get to Zach. She was at the entry gate to the race track when Ryan’s arms came around her.
“You can’t go out there.”
She fought Ryan’s hold with every ounce of strength she had, but Smith was there, too, and the brothers’ muscles were like steel clamped around her.
“Let go of me!” she screamed at the two superstars while a dozen photographers spun back and forth to film the crash and her and Smith and Ryan.
But his brothers just held her tighter as she watched flames engulf Zach’s car.
He was supposed to be indestructible...and hers forever.
She’d known he wasn’t, that nobody was bulletproof. But it had been easier to lull herself into a false sense of security than to have to face the utter loss of control that came from sitting helpless in the stands while he raced a car at dizzying speeds.
She could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers, from the kiss he’d left her with. She’d stopped praying a long time ago, had substituted hard work and focus and reality for those prayers.
Now, her lips wouldn’t stop moving, wouldn’t stop repeating, “Please, God. Please.”
The smoke from the fire extinguishers grew thick and dark around the car as the emergency crew attacked the flames. Her tears mixed in with the smoke and the dust from the track as cars skidded to a stop one by one. The other drivers got out to watch the scene unfold, horror on their faces as they yanked off their helmets.
Suddenly, she saw boots. Legs. And then a man throwing himself to the ground, rolling out of the way of the flames.
Shock made Smith and Ryan’s hands loosen just enough for her to slip free, to hurdle the gate. The roar of the crowd mixed with the pounding of her heart in her ears as she sprinted toward Zach. His crew had dragged him away from the car, had all backed away themselves as the flames only grew taller, brighter.
The explosion rocked the ground, but even though she stumbled, she got right back up on her feet.
Zach pushed up from his knees to pull off his helmet. She crashed into him at the exact second his eyes met hers, and she pressed her mouth to his face again and again. “Lori said you were indestructible. I didn’t believe her. Now I do. Thank God nothing ever touches you.”
His eyes flashed with darkness before he pulled her so tightly to him that it almost hurt.
“I love you so much,” she told him in their last private moment before the track doctors, the other drivers, and the rest of the Sullivans descended. Heather didn’t want to let go of Zach’s hand, didn’t want to lose that connection, but she knew he’d be all hers later.
Believing he’d been spared from the car crash and fire so that they could have their forever, when his fingers started to slip free of hers, she let him go.
Chapter Thirty
After the emergency crew checked Zach out and he’d convinced his brothers and sisters that he was okay, Heather had known without being told that all he wanted was to get away from the race track. She’d thought she would be the one to drive home, but when he’d headed for the wheel she’d realized it was probably best that he dealt with driving a car sooner, rather than later.
There were so many things she wanted to say to him, so many things she wanted to tell him—how much she loved him and how she wasn’t sure about these races, but would try to be open to them in the future if they were really important to him—but just as she buckled into the passenger seat and they headed off toward the city, his mother called.
Mary Sullivan’s distress over the accident was palpable. And yet, Heather admired the calm that lay at the foundation of her love for her son. If Zach had seemed a bit short, even a little irritated with the mother Heather knew he loved, she figured it was one of a dozen natural responses to the crash. There had been so many people hovering around him wanting reassurance that he was okay. He had to be exhausted.
But even though she hadn’t been the one fighting like hell to right the car, and then to escape it, Heather still couldn’t find her own calm. It would take time to stop seeing the man she loved go up in flames every time she closed her eyes. And until that day came, she wanted to live every single minute with him to the fullest. She was done holding back a part of her heart from him, done waiting for that other shoe to drop.
Today she’d learned just how precious life—and love—truly was.
Standing in his kitchen cooking dinner, the knife almost sliced through the tip of Heather’s finger instead of the bell pepper as another image of Zach spinning out on the track zinged through her head. Just as she put the knife down, Zach walked out of the bedroom. His hair was wet from the shower, his perfect face scratched up and down the right side.
Thank God he was alive.
Despite her lingering distress over his crash, she couldn’t help smiling at him. The truth was that she’d always grinned like a fool whenever he was around. Only, Zach didn’t smile back.
It was the first time he’d ever not smiled back.
“Gabe’s coming over.”
She was surprised to hear he was up for a visit from one of his siblings when she could see how beat he was. “Is he going to bring over the rest of Cuddles’s things?”
“No.” The word shot like a bullet from his lips. “He’s coming to take her back.”
Even as he said it, Cuddles was rubbing against his calves trying to get his attention. But he wasn’t scooping her up into his arms.
Instead, he was ignoring the puppy completely. He wasn’t even looking at her.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and she didn’t, couldn’t possibly believe that he was serious. “You just told them you were keeping her.”
He shrugged, the shrug of a man who didn’t seem to care what he’d said to a seven-year-old girl...or what other promises he might have made along the way to anyone else.
“She’s better off with them. The dog needs a kid around to play with.”
The dog?
The way he said it was different than when he called Cuddles and Atlas mutts or fur balls. He was affectionate, teasing when he said those things. But this was just plain dismissive.
The paramedics had said he didn’t have a concussion. Had they been wrong?
“Zach.” She started to move toward him, but the remote expression on his face stopped her in her tracks. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He sat down on the couch and grabbed the remote, flipping on the TV. The sound of another car race immediately started up. Bile rose in her throat at the sight of the cars racing in circles around the track.
She wanted to scream at him, wanted to throw something at his big, thick head. Her feet unstuck from the kitchen floor and she yanked the controls off the coffee table to jam her thumb over the red Off button.
“I can’t watch that right now.” The TV sc
reen went back to black. “How can you? Don’t you remember you almost died out there today?”
Before he could answer, Cuddles walked over with one of Zach’s leather shoes. The puppy plopped down in front of him and started chewing it, her big brown eyes trained on him as if she were waiting for a command to do otherwise.
“Aren’t you going to stop her?”
Zach barely glanced down at the puppy. “No. Summer will figure out how to get her to stop making mistakes.”
“She’s a puppy. She’s going to make mistakes.” But wasn’t the truth that some mistakes were so big that they couldn’t be undone? Like trusting someone to actually love you right. “She trusts you, Zach. Gabe and Megan and Summer are just strangers to her. You’re her family.”
And hers, too, or so she’d thought. Finally, she’d had the family she’d never thought could be hers. A future filled with laughter. And love. So much love it had made her head spin.
Now, though, it was spinning for reasons that had nothing to do with love.
Please, she thought, the word running around and around in her head just the way it had hours earlier. Only this time she wasn’t begging God, she was silently pleading with a flesh-and-blood man. Please don’t do this.
His face was like granite. “She’ll be fine.”
Every one of Heather’s instincts told her to run. To flee. To get out and protect whatever was left of her heart while she still could. But something was obviously wrong.
Very wrong.
Zach hadn’t cracked a smile, hadn’t given her one of those smug looks she always wanted to kiss right off his face.
And, she realized with a dark hit of pain in the pit of her stomach, he hadn’t so much as touched her since they’d left the track.
He was always touching her.
She forced herself to move toward him, rather than away. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something that happened out there on the track.”
“I’m alive,” was his offhand reply. “Everything’s great.”
His eyes were so cold, so shuttered. All she’d wanted was to have him back, but not like this.
Not when he suddenly seemed to be a shell of the man she’d thought he was.
The pain in her stomach grew bigger, but the need to have the real Zach Sullivan back—her Zach—was bigger. Big enough that she kept moving closer.
“I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be in that car, trying to get out while it burned. But you walked away from it.”
Whenever she’d gotten stuck in darkness, he’d always fought for her. He’d made her laugh, he’d held her when she cried, he’d taught her how to trust again, and to believe in love when she’d thought it wasn’t possible.
Now she needed to fight for him.
“Talk to me, Zach. Tell me what’s going on.” The word please was on her tongue when the doorbell rang.
She could barely stand to watch as Zach shoved all of the puppy’s things into a grocery bag, picked up Cuddles, and pushed both the bag and the puppy into his brother’s arms.
The little Yorkie whimpered as she looked from Gabe to Zach.
“You sure about this?” Gabe asked his brother.
“I agreed to keep her for two weeks. Time’s up.”
Gabe’s eyes moved from his brother to Heather. She could see worry in them, and disappointment.
The same disappointment that was choking her until she could hardly breathe around it.
“Summer told me you needed a dog because she thought you were lonely. She was so happy that you were going to keep her. She thought you wanted the puppy.”
Heather waited for Zach to soften at the mention of the little girl...or for him to at least acknowledge the way Cuddles was struggling to get from his brother’s arms into Zach’s.
“I don’t need a dog.”
He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to for Heather to hear what he was really saying.
I don’t need anyone else.
She wanted to be anywhere but there, with Gabe’s eyes taking in her devastation. But she was glad she’d stayed, glad she’d actually witnessed Zach doing what he was doing, because it was the only way she could ever have made her heart face the truth.
She didn’t realize Atlas had gotten up from his nap on his dog bed and moved to her side until she felt his big head nudge her hand. She put her hands on his neck and shoulders, letting his steady warmth give her the strength she so desperately needed.
Hadn’t she known the other shoe would drop at some point? That it had to because it always did?
But, oh, how she’d wanted to believe that it wouldn’t.
Just as badly as she’d wanted to believe in Zach.
He closed the door on his brother, walked back into the room, picked up the shoe Cuddles had been chewing on, and dropped it into the garbage can with a thud.
All the while the puppy’s cries could be heard as his brother put her in the car.
“I told you everything.” Her voice shook with emotion she couldn’t contain. “I loved you enough to tell you my secrets. To trust you with them.” And with her heart. Which was why she had to try one more time to see if he would be honest with her about what was hurting him. “I know something’s wrong, something to do with today’s crash.” She clenched her hands at her sides to keep from reaching for him, because if he pushed her away she would shatter into a thousand pieces on his kitchen floor. “Won’t you trust me, too?”
He went completely still and for a moment as she stared into his bleak eyes, she thought he might be about to tell her why he was acting so weird.
Only, when he finally spoke, it was just to say, “Trust me, it’s better this way. It was only a matter of time before something happened to her at the shop.” He paused. “Or before something happened to me. Like today, out at the racetrack. If I hadn’t been able to get out of the car, they would have taken her back anyway. Better if it happens now, before she gets any more attached to me.”
She blinked at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “Wait a minute. Are you actually trying to convince me you got rid of the puppy for her own good?”
When he nodded, she shook her head in disbelief. “That’s crazy. Can’t you see how much she loves you? And that she doesn’t want to be with anyone else on the off chance that you’ll crash a race car one day?”
But with every word she spoke, she could see Zach shutting down more and more. To the point where it was like talking to the cement wall he’d driven into today.
Only this time, it was her heart going up in flames as he shut her out completely.
Heather had thought she’d found him; the one guy who could prove to her that they weren’t all the same. But she’d never know if she had or not, would she? Because he wouldn’t talk to her.
Just like her father, Zach made all the rules and she was expected to follow them.
This was why she’d been trying so hard to resist him, to argue away his love...and her own.
Atlas silently moved beside her as she found her bag and put her things into it. She walked into the bedroom to retrieve the extra clothes she’d started to leave at Zach’s house. The bed mocked her, told her what she hadn’t wanted to believe was true.
It had just been sex.
Friends with benefits...only, maybe they hadn’t even been friends when it came right down to it.
Zach’s eyes were dark as he watched her gather up her things, a muscle jumping in his jaw, right beneath one of the scratches she was so tempted to reach out and run a finger over. Just to be close to him one more time.
“You’re leaving?”
Before tonight, Zach would never have asked her if she was going. He simply wouldn’t have let her go, would have pulled whatever tricks out of his sleeve to convince her she was better off staying with him.
“I’ve got a big backlog of work at the office.”
Work had piled up due to all the time she’d been spending with Zach. It had
seemed worth it at the time, the tradeoff between love and growing her business.
Worth it, that is, until the mirage of love disappeared like a puff of smoke.
“You’re that pissed off at me for giving the damn puppy back?” At last, she could see the veneer he’d tried to put around himself cracking. But it was too late. Especially when he said, “It wasn’t even my dog. I never asked for it. They just dumped it on me.”
It.
“No, I’m not pissed off.” And she was being perfectly honest. She was far more heartbroken than she was angry. “Just like you said, she’ll be fine.” Heather would make sure of it, would personally assign her best trainer to work with Megan, Summer, and Gabe so that Cuddles could forget that Zach Sullivan ever existed.
“Then why are you leaving?”
Because she needed to save herself while there was still a ghost of a chance that she could recover.
Because if he could give away a puppy she’d thought he absolutely adored without so much as flinching as it cried for him, then she wasn’t sure she knew who he was at all.
Because she didn’t think she rated a whole heck of lot more than the puppy had to the man standing in front of her.
Because, in the end, it turned out love wasn’t enough. Just like she’d always known.
But since she could no longer trust him enough to say any of that, all that came was an honest, “I’m glad you’re okay, Zach.”
So glad, in fact, that she’d felt like her own life had been saved out there on the race track when he’d scrambled free of the burning car.
She was about to start crying, knew any second she’d be falling apart.
Heather couldn’t do that here. Not in front of Zach. She couldn’t let her guard down around him ever again.
All those years ago, when she’d found out what her father had done, she’d vowed to never feel that way again, to never let anyone make her feel so terribly unloved, so unimportant. She’d renew that vow, make sure she stuck by it in the future.
