by Jess Dee
“Like you and the redhead are fated?”
Jeez, why had he even brought up the word “fated”? Zachary’s step faltered. “I haven’t thought about her since last night. Still don’t want to. Can we leave it at that?” With every minute that passed, thoughts of his redhead became less and less frequent.
“We can. I was just wondering at the coincidence of two brothers believing they were fated to be with their partners.”
“Three brothers,” Zachary corrected. “Seth thinks my grandmother sang to him about Luke years before I ever met him at college. He thinks she knew he was coming.”
“Did your grandmother also have a gift? Could she see things?”
Zachary shrugged. “Sure seems that way. She had songs for Nathan and Seth as well.”
“Eleven years ago I’d have laughed at the idea that someone could see the future. Now I know better.”
She’d given him the opening Zachary had been looking for, and he took it. “Are you ready to talk about what happened eleven years ago?” His need to know went beyond regular curiosity. Eve had somehow inserted herself in his heart, and he wanted to find out everything there was to know about her.
It was her turn to falter, but Zachary just tightened his hold on her and kept on walking.
“I told you. A window exploded. I got hurt.” She waved her hand at her side as though it was nothing serious. The quiver in her voice told him differently.
Zachary challenged her as gently as he could. “Windows don’t just explode, Tiny. They just don’t work that way. Balloons explode when they’re blown too full of air, bombs explode when they’re set off. Windows? Not so much.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “So first a bomb went off, and then the window exploded. Same thing, really.”
Chapter Eleven
Zachary tripped. Fell right over the air in front of his feet.
“Easy.” Eve steadied him. “Do that again, and you’ll land on your nose.” She went for humor, but her laugh sounded hollow.
The blood had drained from his face. All sensation, all reason hemorrhaged out of him. “Eve…”
Christ, he couldn’t speak. Couldn’t get his throat to work properly.
He planted his hands on her arms, forcing her to turn around and look at him.
“It was a long time ago, Zachary,” she said vaguely. “Hardly worth bringing up now.”
“Wh—?” Damn it. “How?”
“See, this is why I don’t talk about it. Everyone overreacts.”
Zachary closed his eyes, realized he hadn’t breathed since she’d said a bomb exploded—a fucking bomb!—and filled his lungs with oxygen. It didn’t stop the knife-like pain that wedged between his ribs.
“Okay, Eve. Give it to me in small sentences. Explain it simply so I don’t overreact.” There was no way he’d understood her correctly. She’d said something else. Something very, very different. She had to have.
The people he knew, the people he loved, were not bomb victims.
“Can we walk while I do?”
“We can do whatever you like, just tell me.” He wasn’t sure he had the coordination to walk. Putting one foot in front of the other seemed way too complex a challenge all of a sudden. But he did it. Forced himself into motion for her.
“It was long ago,” she said. “2002.”
He racked his brain to find significance in the year and came up blank.
“I was fourteen.”
Still a child. A teenager.
“My parents took the family—me, my sister and my brother—to Bali.” She sighed. “You have to understand, a family holiday somewhere outside of New South Wales was a big deal. Huge. We never went away. It just wasn’t something we could afford. So when my dad announced we were going, it was like…a miracle.”
Some fucking miracle.
“A tropical island sounded like paradise. And it was. Utterly beautiful. Heaven on earth. The beaches, the ocean. Stunning. I spent so much time in the water and the sun, I got these blond highlights in my hair. My skin was tanned golden.”
Her skin was pale now, as though she spent little to no time in the sun.
“My brother and sister were the same. We just…we had the best time. Holidays don’t get better than that.”
Bali, 2002. Alarm bells rang somewhere in the back of Zachary’s mind.
“On our seventh night there—we went for eight—we left our hotel in Kuta to eat in the town.”
“Kuta?”
“Holiday district.” Her voice faded.
“What happened?”
She sighed again, the air rattling from her chest, and he sensed her loathing to talk.
“Tiny?” He pulled her close. “Help me understand. Please.”
“We…uh…we walked there. All of us. My brother and I ran ahead, my sister hung back with my parents. The weather was perfect. Hot, humid, just right for an island.”
Silence again.
Zachary didn’t push her. An unpleasant chill at the base of his neck told him whatever he’d thought about Eve’s experience, the reality was far, far worse.
“There was a shop with some dresses in the window. I stopped to look, saw one I really liked. Knew Bree would look hot in it, so I turned back to call her to come see it. Yelled through the streets of Kuta. My, uh, my brother, Lochlan, of course, didn’t stop. Girls’ clothing did not capture the imagination of a sixteen-year-old guy.”
She’d ceased walking now, although Zachary suspected she didn’t realize it.
“I heard the first explosion. Felt it too. It roared right through me. Deafening.” She placed a hand over her ear. “Sent me flying. But…but I didn’t hear the next one. Didn’t even know there was a next one, which is funny really ’cause that second one was much worse, apparently. Much…bigger.” She tugged on the top of her ear. “In fact, I didn’t hear anything for a while after that. Not properly anyway. The explosions, I was told, damaged my eardrums.”
Zachary was frozen. Ice slid down his ribs, splintering in his chest.
Fuck, he’d never reacted like this before. Never felt someone else’s pain as deeply as he did Eve’s. What was it about her that heightened his every emotion, his every thought?
“Turns out…” Again, she waved her hand vaguely in the air. “Turns out, the window I’d been staring in saved my life. It, um, left me scarred. Really badly scarred, and it cost me heaps of blood, but…” She ran her fingers over her cheek. “It saved my life. If I hadn’t been looking in it, I’d have been standing a hundred meters down the road.” She pointed, as if staring that hundred meters down the road. “With my brother.”
Zachary followed her finger, looked in that direction, and then comprehended what she’d said. That’s when he clicked. That’s when he remembered his walk along Coogee Beach in Sydney, the monument built on the cliff tops honoring the more than eighty Australians who’d lost their lives in the Bali bombings.
Nausea slammed into him.
Christ.
Fuck.
No. Just, no.
“Eve…” He had to clear his throat. “Your brother?” He shouldn’t feel like this. Shouldn’t be so completely gutted.
She shook her head. “Lochie didn’t stop to look in that window. He just went on ahead. Without me.”
Tears prickled the back of his eyes, and God help him, Zachary was not a crier. His throat closed, forcing air to wheeze through it.
Talk.
He needed to say something. Needed to ask questions, comfort her. But fuck, he couldn’t. He wasn’t capable.
Last night, backstage, Zachary had sensed a connection between himself and Eve. It had grown over the last twenty-four hours. But this now, his reaction to her story, this was something a whole lot bigger than a connection. This was something inexplicable.
Eve’s grief was his own.
“Parents?” he finally managed to croak. “Sister?” Bree. She hadn’t been with her brother. Couldn’t have been. She’d spoken to Eve this mornin
g.
“They found me. Found the glass too.”
“Did…” Jesus, this was hard. “Did they find your brother?”
Her voice was whisper soft. “No.”
Still Eve stared where she’d pointed, one hundred meters down the road of her memories. Did she see him? Her brother? Standing there? Or…
Nausea struck again, violently.
Or…not standing there anymore?
“The DVI officers did,” Eve said vaguely. “Days later.”
“DVI?” Fuck, he didn’t want to know.
“Disaster Victim Identification.”
Zachary offered to carry her back to the hotel. Repeatedly. But Eve suspected her legs were steadier than his.
She’d had eleven years to come to terms with the bombings. Eleven years to learn to live with her scars and without her brother. Zachary had only minutes to comprehend the horrific details she’d shared with him. He was as shocked as she’d known he’d be.
The walk back was slow, very slow, because Zachary kept stopping, shaking his head and swearing.
“What happened after?”
“They flew me to Perth. The hospitals in Bali were full. They couldn’t cope with that kind of…devastation. My injuries were serious enough to get me on a plane, and my sister, who’s three years older, came with me. My parents stayed in Kuta to search for Lochie.” It no longer amazed her that she could discuss the bombings yet remain so distanced from it.
Her many hordes of therapists had helped her understand. The posttraumatic stress made it impossible for her to remember with anything besides emotional detachment. If she’d continued to relive it with such intense emotion—as she had for weeks and months after the explosions—she simply would not have been able to cope from day to day.
The disassociation was her way of getting on with her life. Accepting what had happened and moving on.
“Briana, my sister, faced endless press interviews. She didn’t exactly love them. They were…difficult. Upsetting. But she did them in case anyone recognized Lochlan and came forward with news about him. And when I was well enough, I was targeted by the press too. Not in a bad way. There was no harm intended. Just a need to show everyone how tragic, how terrible the bombings had been. But after…after they found my brother—” or what had been left of him, “—we couldn’t face the questions anymore. Couldn’t face the interviews. We asked for privacy, and they tried. They did. But every day it seemed there was that one reporter who got in, anyway. Who just had one small question for us.”
Zachary growled a throaty growl. “And I thought I’d had it bad with the press.”
“Don’t compare the two,” she told him logically. “That’s not fair to you. Your experience was different. They tried to crucify you. With me, my family, I think they were just as horrified by our experiences as we were. They looked for the human angle of the bombings. And their interest passed, in time. After the funeral.”
Pain stabbed her belly.
Okay, so Lochie’s death was the one thing she hadn’t learned to detach herself from. She still missed him every day.
Right, focus on something else. Anything else.
“That’s when I had my first vision,” she told him.
“After the bombs?”
“When I got back to Perth. They’d drugged me on the trip home because the pain was so bad. I woke up when they took me off the plane. Bree was there, holding my hand. Initially I thought I was still dreaming, because when the vision struck, it was one of me and Bree and Lochie playing when we were kids. They were building with Lego, and I was meticulously taking their buildings apart. But the memory wasn’t mine. It couldn’t have been. I was too young to remember it. Maybe only one or two.”
“You were seeing the memory from your sister’s perspective?”
“I was. It took a very long time for that realization to sink in. It made no sense at all. None. But every time Bree held my hand, something similar happened. And she held my hand a lot then. We needed each other. Needed that contact.”
“Did she know what was happening?”
“We discussed it, heaps. Decided it was just the drugs. I was on ridiculous painkillers, strong stuff. We both thought I was hallucinating. Tripping on the morphine or something.” Only she hadn’t been. And the visions weren’t limited to Bree. When a nurse took her pulse one morning, and held her hand in the process, Eve had suddenly seen identical twin boys in her mind.
Not understanding the power of what she’d seen and how she’d seen it, Eve had asked about the twins. The nurse had left without saying another word. Eve hadn’t seen her again.
“It took a while to figure the hand-holding triggered the visions, and even longer to recognize the symptoms—the tingles in my palm, the electricity shooting up my arm.” She shrugged. “I guess there’s no better teacher than experience.” That same experience had taught her to give up the affectionate practice of holding hands.
“How did you deal with it all? You were so damn young.”
“Therapy, Pacey. Years and years of counseling. I am very in touch with my inner child. She and I?” She held two fingers together. “We’re like this. Best mates.” Although the counselors had never understood the whole hand-holding-vision thing, and after a while she’d stopped talking about it. It had just been easier to keep that talent to herself instead of being subjected to their extensive psychoanalysis.
They reached the hotel and Zachary took her up to his suite. When the words and the conversation ran out, he spent the rest of the evening making slow, sweet love to her.
He handled her with such exquisite tenderness, Eve’s throat clogged with the tears she’d refused to shed while telling him about Bali.
He held her after, held her very close. “Thank you. For telling me about Bali. About your brother. For letting me in.”
Eve had never felt more adored, more protected. It had been a very long time since she’d spoken to anyone besides her family about Lochie, but telling Zachary had seemed…right. Something about him made her want to share her innermost thoughts, her emotions. She was, she knew, more than a little in love with the man. He’d burrowed into her heart and made a permanent place for himself there.
Which would have been perfectly wonderful if Eve didn’t know she still hid such a massive part of herself from him. Though she’d let him in and shared her trauma and her past, she’d still hidden her face. Zachary had yet to see the real Eve Andrews.
But did she need to show him her scars? Did she need to reveal the truly ugly side of herself? Couldn’t she just leave Zachary with the illusion that she wasn’t a monster?
Because as wonderful as he was and as beautifully as he held her now, this closeness between them, this love that she felt, could never lead anywhere.
In the end, Zachary was fated to be with another. She’d seen it in his vision—and it made her chest hurt now.
Eve knew, perhaps better than anyone, that visions were never wrong.
She lay with him for a long while, long after he’d fallen asleep, treasuring the time spent in his arms. When she could put it off no longer, when sleep tugged at her eyelids, she slipped from his bed, dressed and made her way to her own room.
When morning came and Zachary remembered the bath, Eve did not want to be near him. Not when the water he used to fill the tub could expose every one of the scars she’d chosen not to reveal.
It was Eve, all showered and made up, who banged on Zachary’s door the next morning. And when he opened it, looking sultry and sleepy, the sight of him made her heart leap straight into her throat.
He spent a good minute or two chastising her for leaving, and a good hour or two making love to her. But at ten they were forced to go their separate ways. Zachary had to prepare for the concert that night, and Eve had a birthday party she’d promised to attend—as a princess.
He kissed her thoroughly, promising to miss her the entire time they were apart. She left after pocketing a pair of Zachary’s green
contact lenses, thinking they’d add a nice touch to her princess outfit, and smiling at how perfectly mushy her sexy drummer could be.
Then Jake drove her to her sister’s house, where Eve was drawn straight into the arms of her sister’s family. Bree left Hannah in her dad’s care, locked the two of them in her room, and as Eve transformed herself into a fairytale princess, complete with tiara, wig and Zachary’s contacts, Bree drilled her about roses, visions, blowjobs and Jonah Speed.
Zachary spent more than an hour missing his cues and fucking up one song after another.
His concentration was shot to hell, and damn it, he missed Eve. Wanted her with him. Wanted her beside him now. Today. And tomorrow. And the next day.
Jesus, he never wanted to be apart from her. That connection between them? It was stronger than ever.
As he banged an out-of-tune riff on his drums and was vaguely aware that the rest of the band had stopped to glare at him, he pictured Eve, motionless on the ground, shattered glass lying around her and a piece of the broken window lodged in her chest—saving her life in a grotesque twist of fate.
He missed a beat and dropped a drumstick as the imagined dark patch beside her became a pool of Eve’s blood.
Never had he felt so impotent. So fucking helpless. Eve had been injured in a bomb blast, lost her brother to the attack, and there was not a damn thing Zachary could do about it. Even now, Eve was the one who’d helped him deal with it. He hadn’t made a dime’s worth of difference—except to make her relive the whole fucking experience.
“Zachary!” It was Luke who snapped him back to reality.
He blinked.
The need to protect Eve, to keep her safe, had him itching. He never wanted to let her out of his sight again, never wanted her in a position where she could be a victim again.
And yet…and yet… Fuck, he’d made her a victim of a different kind. A victim of the paparazzi.
Yeah, big difference between a bomb blast and a kiss with a celebrity, but still.
