Christie Ridgway – Keep On Loving You (страница 9)

Once she heard her sister motor off, she breathed a little easier. Poppy was so damn sentimental, thinking it might hurt Mac to see Zan through this sickness.

She didn’t need to shirk this task she’d taken on—especially when doing so would only underscore her sister’s mistaken idea that she’d never gotten the man out of her heart. Sure, walking away from him now might have proved her indifference, too, but there was more to Zan than the man who’d left her.

Being able to remember that was part of the proof that she was over the guy.

Before that time as her lover, he’d been the boy who’d fixed the chain on her bike innumerable times. The guy who’d helped her with her Spanish homework in middle school—he was aces with languages. The very same person who’d jollied her out of her doldrums when the boy she’d liked between eighth grade and high school had left her for some summer girl.

She could safely perform a favor for someone who was no longer anything more to her than an old family friend, right?

With that still at the forefront of her mind, she made her way back into the master bedroom as evening darkened the sky. Upon a little exploring, she figured out how to start the gas fireplace across from the bed. Then she managed to get Zan under the covers...keeping her gaze trained away from anyplace intimate.

Soup and crackers didn’t interest him, but though he at first batted away her hands she was able to get some water and pain relievers down his throat. His eyes were half-open and dull through the process. If he knew who tended to him, or had an opinion about it, he didn’t comment.

When she tired of watching TV downstairs, she headed back to his room. The gas fireplace was simple enough to turn on and made her spot on the couch beneath the windows even more cozy. She was plenty comfortable with the blanket and pillow she’d spied on a shelf in the closet and wearing a flannel shirt she’d found hanging there as a nightgown.

With light from the flames in the fireplace flickering against the plaster walls, she snuggled into the cushions. Unused to a day without much physical activity, she thought she might have trouble finding sleep, but with Zan’s breathing as her lullaby, she drifted off.

To jerk awake at the sound of his strangled voice.

“No. God, no.” Zan thrashed, fighting with the covers.

Mac jackknifed up and struggled out of the blanket wrapped around her legs. The wool rug was soft against her bare feet as she made for the bed.

“Simone,” he said, stopping Mac’s headlong rush. “Please, baby. Simone.”

Simone? She ignored the new twist of her heart. “Zan,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “You’re having a dream.”

“Don’t leave me,” he begged.

Licking her lips, she crept closer to the bed. “It’s me, Mac,” she said. “You’re at the lake house. In the mountains.”

“Noo,” he moaned again.

In the light from the fireplace, she could see that his eyes were pinched tightly shut. “Zan.” She reached out a tentative hand, brushed his hair from his warm forehead. “It’s all right.”

“Simone.” He sounded urgent, anxious, and his head turned in her direction. His eyes opened, but they stared at Mac, unseeing. “Come back, baby. You’ve got to come back.”

“Shh.” She stroked his hair again. “You’re having a dream.”

“Didn’t happen?” His eyes closed again and his body seemed to relax.

“Didn’t happen,” she whispered.

When he seemed to slip back into slumber, she leaned over the bed to straighten the sheets and duvet around him. In a quick movement, he snatched her off her feet and yanked her into his body.

“Zan—”

“Shh,” he said, echoing her from moments before. Tucking himself around her, he pinned her to him with a heavy arm across her waist. “Sleep now,” he muttered. “Go to sleep.”

Wriggling away was futile. Every time she tried to move, he mumbled into her hair and tightened his grip. Just a few minutes, she told herself, relaxing into his hold, even as she registered the dangerous sense of rightness she felt with his body curled around hers. Once he returned to deep sleep, she’d slide away.

Leave him alone with his memories of Simone.

Simone, baby. Had Mac stiffened? Because he nuzzled her hair now. “Shh, shh, shh,” he said, his voice low, slumberous.

The sound of it was mesmerizing, yet there was still that alertness inside of her, her guarded heart keeping its barriers high and strong. But as time passed and he breathed deeply and slowly behind her, it was impossible not to melt a little against his heat.

His mind is on another woman, she reminded herself, which sent her wiggling again.

Zan’s arm hitched her closer and his breath tickled her ear, raising goose bumps along her neck. “Rest, Mackenzie Marie,” he said. “Rest.”

Mackenzie Marie? Zan knew it was her he held?

He knew it was her. But the thought didn’t give her any ease at all. Because as she lay wrapped in his arms, a new, uncomfortable awareness grew. Someone else was most definitely sharing the bed with them—and it wasn’t Simone.

Instead, it was the ghost of her past love for him.

Her breath caught. Oh, how she wished it wasn’t true, but there was something here beyond the tepid remains of a former friendship. Though she had recovered from his leaving her ten years before, though she was sure she was telling the truth when she asserted she was over Zan, with him pressed close to her back and his arm tucked under her breasts, her heart beat in an erratic rhythm and her skin felt both tender and much too warm.

What they’d once had no longer could be dismissed from her mind and memory. With his return, it was resurrected as a renewed, palpable presence in her life.

She swallowed a humorless chuckle. It turned out the Elliott mansion—or perhaps just Mac herself?—was haunted, after all.

She could only hope the ghost would disappear when Zan once again went away.

* * *

ZAN CAME AWAKE by degrees, with each passing moment a new muscle screaming at him, protesting that he was conscious, that he was breathing. Had he been hit by a truck? He’d seen the aftermath of such an accident, but—

Something stirred in his arms.

He blinked, wincing at the pain in his eyelids, and took in the back of a woman’s head. Her dark hair. Inhaling, he breathed in her scent.

Mac.

What the hell?

Snippets came back to him. Running into her and Brett at Oscar’s. His own pleasure at the meeting. Her frosty attitude.

The antagonism had disappointed him. The only good thing he’d considered about coming back to Blue Arrow Lake under the circumstances was the chance to reconnect with the Walkers. If he had to be bound to someplace for a couple of weeks, at least it was where the companions of his childhood were firmly rooted.

But Brett, and then Mac, hadn’t been particularly welcoming.

Yeah, it had stung.

So he’d stood to leave, and then... It went blurry after that. He remembered the dizziness, the sudden heat followed by the sudden cold. Mac again, grabbing him before he could get out the door.

I have a few things to say to you.

But it went mostly blank after that, so he could only suppose he’d looked sick enough that even a hostile Mac took pity on him...and somehow ended up in bed with him.

Now, at the thought, another muscle was making itself known. A morning erection was nothing new, of course, but this one was starting to ache like a sore tooth. With his body curved around Mac’s, if he didn’t take a stern stand with himself he’d be grinding into her most excellent ass at any moment.

A fine way to reestablish a friendship with her...not.

Willing himself not to move, he shifted his gaze out the window, where he could see the blue sky and an even bluer lake, surrounded by peaks bristling with dark evergreens. In his mind’s eye he saw the day he’d first arrived here, a boy trudging up the steps beside the grandfather he knew, but not well. In a just-the-facts style, the man had pointed out the amenities—the billiards room, the in-home theater, the Olympic-size pool in its glass capsule a few steps from the main house. Then there’d been the boathouse and docks. The speedboat he’d be able to drive at twelve, the small sailboat he could learn to maneuver straightaway, the paddleboat they could buy if Zan wanted one.

He’d wanted nothing but to return to the house at the beach. It had been spacious but not showy. The ocean views grand, as had been the life he’d led as the youngest of three kids. He’d skateboarded with his big sister and boogie-boarded with his older brother, and his mother had made cookies and his father had good-naturedly cursed the grill that seemed to burn everything he’d laid upon it.

The community of Blue Arrow Lake had seemed as alien as the moon to him, as void of warmth, until that boy in his class at school had said, “You fish?” and Zan had found a way to hang on.

And people to hang on to until he finally surrendered to his itchy feet and restless soul and turned his truck down the mountain.

The woman in his arms stirred now.

Zan kept himself completely still, though he was supremely aware of the softness of her breasts just above the band of the arm he’d flung over her.