Love Remains (2 page)

The horror at almost spilling an entire pan of baked beans on someone dissipated into frigid shock upon discovering the near-victim of her clumsiness was the one person she’d never expected to see again. Zarah Mitchell tried to regain her balance, both with the pan of beans and with her own emotional equilibrium.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated, not knowing what else to say. She’d always run the risk that she might one day see him again—she’d known that when she moved to Nashville fourteen years ago. But why here? Why now?

“Whoa! What’s the idea?” Patrick’s voice came from behind and above her. “Oh, good. I was hoping to introduce the two of you.”

Zarah couldn’t tear her eyes away from the vision in front of her—terrified he was real and terrified he was a figment of her imagination—until he reached out to take the pan from her.

“No introductions necessary, Mack. Zarah and I met each other a very long time ago.” Giving her a tight smile, Bobby turned and carried the pan to the dining room. Zarah’s chest tightened, and it had nothing to do with the relapse of pneumonia that had landed her in the hospital again for four days this week.

Bobby Patterson. Her first love. The man she compared all others to. The reason her father kicked her out of the house the day she turned eighteen.

She risked taking a deep breath, filling her lungs only until a coughing fit seemed imminent. She turned to face Patrick. “I–I’ll get something to clean this up.” She skirted around him and slipped back into the kitchen. But with five other people in the small space, relief was not to be found.

Pulling the roll of paper towels off its holder and grabbing the trash can, Zarah set about the task of cleaning up Patrick’s beautiful new wood floor. Fortunately, not much had spilled; unfortunately, that meant it didn’t take very long to clean up.

A shadow blocked the light, and she looked up. Patrick towered over her, arms akimbo, a dishrag hanging from one hand. “I was about to get that. I sure don’t understand why you feel you have to act like a maid every time you come here.”

“Not a maid.” Zarah wiped up the last of the bean sauce and tossed the wad of towels into the trash can. She used the edge of the can for leverage as she got back up on her feet. “As your co-leader in this group, when we’re at your house, I think of myself as the hostess. And when a good hostess spills something, she cleans it up. She doesn’t leave it for someone else to do.”

“Which I understand. However, I just visited you at the hospital three days ago. You don’t need to be down on no floors cleaning stuff up.”

“I appreciate your concern. But I’m fine. And I should know. This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comeback from pneumonia—you know that, too.” She turned to pick up the trash can to take it back into the kitchen, but Patrick snatched it out of her hand.

“Yeah, I know. This is the second time in four months you’ve landed in the hospital because you were too stubborn to take care of yourself after the first time your mule-headedness landed you there.”

“I promise I’m fine.” Instead of following Patrick into the kitchen, she continued down the hallway to the guest bathroom. Finding it empty, she entered and locked the door behind her. It didn’t take long to wash the stickiness from her fingers. Once her hands were clean and dry, she leaned against the marble countertop and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

After all these years, after everything she’d lived through, seeing Bobby Patterson standing there made it seem like no time had passed—though he seemed taller than she remembered and much larger and more muscular at thirty-four than he’d been at twenty.

Why hadn’t Kiki warned her Bobby was coming home? As his grandmother’s best friend for more than sixty years, Katrina Breitinger knew everything that happened in the Patterson family—most of the time before the rest of Pattersons knew it. Zarah pulled her cell
phone out of her pocket and slid it open to tap out a text message to her grandmother. Kiki knew the whole story, so Zarah could not understand why her grandmother wouldn’t have given her some forewarning that the man who broke her heart was in town.

She exited the bathroom just as someone else was about to knock on the door. She plastered on her best I-am-fine smile and made her way down the hall to face the specter of her past.

With almost fifty people gathered in the main living areas and on the deck of the seventeen-hundred-square-foot house, avoiding Bobby turned out to be relatively easy. All she had to do was stay in the kitchen. But she couldn’t hide in there all night. She had obligations. Grabbing the bottles of diet and regular soda out of their ice bath in the sink, she went out to circulate.

As expected, in the living room where most of the younger women sat around talking and eating, there was one main topic of conversation: Bobby Patterson. How tall he was. How cute he was. How muscular he was. How square his jaw was. And most ridiculous of all, an argument over whether his eyes were blue, green, gray, or hazel. Zarah could have answered the question for them. His eyes were blue, green, gray,
and
hazel, depending on the lighting and what color he was wearing. Tonight, dressed in a maroon polo shirt, his eyes probably looked hazel. In the brief time her gaze had been locked with his, the color of his eyes had not been her primary concern. But oh, how well she remembered the deep, dusky green they were the few times she had seen him in his army dress greens.

She moved from the living room into the den, where more of the guys were gathered. Off to one side stood Patrick and Bobby. Neither had plates in his hands, so she assumed either both had eaten already or, as Patrick was wont to do, they were waiting until everyone had been served before getting their own food. As a visitor, Bobby should have been one of the first people to eat tonight. But it didn’t surprise her that he would wait. He was just that kind of guy.

Bobby suddenly looked away from Patrick and caught her watching
him. She sucked in a startled breath, which caught in her fluid-filled lungs and triggered a coughing spasm. A couple of people standing nearby turned to ensure she was okay until Patrick made it to her side. It took awhile for her to be able to breathe enough to tell him she was fine. Patrick tried to make her sit down, but she refused; as a leader in this group, she knew people looked to her for strength and support. She could not show any vulnerability.

So they wouldn’t see how weak and shaky the coughing spasm had left her, she carried the empty soda bottles back to the kitchen. It was all she could manage to pull the appropriate recycling bin out from the pantry and toss the empty plastic bottles into it. A couple of big black trash bags slouched on the floor in front of the sliding glass door that connected the kitchen to the deck. She sank into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and stared at the trash bags for a moment. As soon as she caught her breath, she’d get back to work.

After what felt like a long time, Zarah forced herself to stand up. She pulled the red drawstrings at the top of the bags closed, tied them, and shoved them with her feet under the table—which was where Patrick always put them during a party. She put a fresh bag in the large trash can and hooked another onto the knob of the pantry door—both of those would be full soon, too. With every muscle in her body weak from fatigue and exhaustion, she trudged to the sink, slipped on the pair of pink rubber gloves she’d given Patrick for his last birthday, and started washing the empty serving dishes and utensils that had already been brought in from the dining room.

“I thought I might find you in here.”

Patrick’s voice startled her, and she dropped the heavy metal pan she’d been scrubbing with a
clank
against the dishes still in the sink.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that. You want to give me a heart attack on top of my pneumonia?”

Patrick laughed his signature booming laugh, erasing the concerned scowl from his expression. “Come on. Everyone’s wondering where you are.”

Yes, much as she didn’t feel like it, she should be social at this thing. Building relationships with the younger women was the only way she would be able to mentor them and teach them to treat single men like brothers rather than prizes to be competed over. She understood the desperation that many of the young women felt; she’d felt it herself in her mid-twenties when the majority of her friends from college got married. Thank goodness, though, for Flannery and Caylor. At one and two years older than Zarah, her former roommates were also still single. The three of them, best friends since Zarah had moved into their apartment her junior year of college, shared all the agonies and joys of unmarried life together—something many single women did not have: a shoulder to cry on, listening ears, and more than one person who understood where she was coming from.

“Zarah, come sit with us.” A group of older single women waved her over to join them. Uncomfortably, she eyed the space they made for her on the sofa, knowing her size-fourteen hips would never fit in that narrow gap.

The boom of Patrick’s voice reverberated through the house, though Zarah could not make out what he was saying. But as more people flowed into the room, crowding it even further, the intent of his announcement became clear. He herded the last few people into the room ahead of him, then made his way through the crowd at the perimeter to stand in the middle, a stack of papers in his hands.

Zarah groaned. Patrick and his games. While she appreciated the fact that his seemingly endless supply of mixer games had helped them build this singles’ group from a Sunday school class of about eight to the vibrant active group of almost sixty they had now, she personally hated playing these games. And he knew it. Which was why he’d come and gotten her out of the kitchen—because he loved to torture her.

The papers passed from hand to hand around the room as Patrick gave the instructions. People Bingo, he called it. The point, he said, was to learn new and interesting facts about other people in their group. Each of the twenty squares had hobbies, activities, places, and
stuff like that written in them; and they were each tasked with going around the room and finding someone who had been there or done that. When two of the ladies on the sofa, who enjoyed these kinds of games and usually won them, jumped up to participate, Zarah sank down gratefully into the space they vacated. Until her tired muscles hit the soft cushions and pillows, she hadn’t realized how much they were knotting up.

She wanted to close her eyes, to let the exhaustion she’d been holding at bay all day at work and all evening carry her away. But she couldn’t; she had to pretend she was having fun playing Patrick’s game.

So with great effort, she pushed herself up off the sofa and joined the melee. She read through the list of items needing to be matched to people.

Born on the East Coast. Knows how to knit. Still has their appendix and tonsils. Has been skydiving. Knows karate. Has been to Las Vegas
.

Her eyes fell onto the box in the middle of the far right column:
Served in the military
.

She glanced around the room. As far as she knew, the only two people in this room who had ever served in the military were Ryan and Bobby. She made a beeline for Ryan.

She avoided the cluster of women—both young and old—who used this as an excuse to converge on Bobby and find out whatever they could about him. The great thing about such a cloud of admirers was that they created such a buffer, it gave Zarah the confidence to move freely around the room without worrying about another unexpected tête-à-tête with him.

But she did catch snippets of his answers to some other questions. Yes, he’d served in the army for ten years, achieving the rank of sergeant. Yes, he had been stationed overseas during his ten years, including two tours of duty in the Middle East. No, he had never been to Vegas, even though he’d lived within a few hours’ drive when he’d been posted at Fort Irwin. No, he had never been skydiving, unless repelling out of
helicopters in his air-assault training in the army counted for skydiving. No, he had been born right here in Middle Tennessee.

“No, I’ve never been married.”

Zarah looked down at the sheet trying to find where that question came from, but could not find a box labeled
Has ever been married
. She shook her head; the audacity of some of these women.

Bobby continued speaking. “But my grandmother keeps nagging me to introduce her to my fiancée.”

Chapter 2

B
obby watched Zarah out of the corner of his eye as he made the outrageous statement. Though he hadn’t thought it possible, she lost what little color she’d had in her face before swaying and grabbing the back of the club chair she stood behind.

Okay, maybe the joke hadn’t been that great of an idea. Patrick had mentioned Zarah had been sick recently, but he hadn’t said with what or how severely. Bobby began to think that whatever it was had been pretty serious. Zarah looked like she was about to collapse.

“Oh, so you are…engaged?” a voice asked from the gaggle around him.