Wrecked (22 page)

* * *

“Keelie, you and I need to talk about something, and
you’re going to listen very carefully to what I have to say,” he said softly, picking up a pencil and starting to sketch out a design absently. Better to do that than look at her, because he wanted to keep his temper. Keep his cool.

“Look, if you’re going to rip me a new one because I took care of things after the break-in, then you can just kiss my ass. You had enough going on and I wanted to help,” she said. He glanced up as she surged out of the chair and started to pace, her hands shoved deep in her pockets, her strides long and angry. “Besides, I
own
half the place, remember? I have just as much right as you do.”

“You’re right.” He shook his head. “I’m not denying that. I appreciate you stepping up there a lot.”

He dropped the pencil and stood up, moving around to cut her off as she started another circuit across the room. “But this isn’t about the shop. It’s not about the break-in. It’s about something else entirely.”

She lifted a brow and then turned away, sauntered over to his desk, and leaned back against it, arms crossed over her chest. “Okay. I’m all ears.”

“You better be.”

Her eyes widened just a fraction before she shot him a smirk.

Nervous, kid? Good
. He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops as he continued to watch her for a minute, trying to figure out just how he’d made her mad enough at him that she’d decided it would be okay to fuck with his life. Hell, if she didn’t know what Abby meant to him it would be one thing, but she did.

But he couldn’t quite figure it out. He couldn’t.

“Why, Keelie?” he asked softly. “Can you just tell me why?”

Her brows arched over her mismatched eyes. “Ah . . . tell you why
what
?”

“Why are you trying to get in between me and Abby? It doesn’t concern you so why are you trying to mess with it?”

Her lids flickered and then she sneered. “Hell, what is that glamour girl telling you? I didn’t do
shit
to her, Zach. Not a
damn thing
. So whatever she said—”

“I love her,” he said softly. “My entire life, I’ve only loved
one
woman. I didn’t have crushes on any of the girls we worked with. I didn’t go chasing after anybody when I tried to make it for a while after the show ended. I didn’t fall for anybody in college. I dated some but it was more because I wanted to try and forget about her, even though I knew it wouldn’t work. She’s
it
for me, Keelie. You understand that? I
love
her. More than I’m ever going to be able to love
anybody
. And now I finally have the chance I’ve been waiting my whole life for . . . and you and Sebastian are fucking things up. The two of you are making her doubt what we have going. Why in the hell are you doing that?”

She snapped her mouth shut with a click.

Shoving past him, she started to pace. “Look, man, I didn’t
do
anything. I don’t like her, but why in the hell should I? She doesn’t see what’s staring her right in the face. She can’t appreciate you and she’s hurt you a hundred times and she doesn’t even see it.” She sent him a seething look over her shoulder and demanded, “Why
should
I like her?”

“You don’t
have
to like her,” Zach pointed out. “But damn it, are we friends or not? Because I always thought we were. If we are, why would you try to mess this up for
me
?”

“I wasn’t trying to!” She stopped and turned around, glaring at him. “She just . . . shit. She asked me what my problem was and I . . . just. Hell, she can’t
see
it, damn you. And it hurts you and I can’t stand it. How can she
not
see it?”

“Because I didn’t let her.” He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “And that’s not a good enough reason.”

“She didn’t
see
it because she didn’t want to,” Keelie muttered. “She doesn’t deserve you, Zach. You need somebody who’ll see what you have to offer, who’ll appreciate you and everything you are.”

Her voice softened as she crossed the floor to stand in front of him.

Alarm started to flare in his head as she murmured, “Love like that really can’t be hidden, Zach. Don’t you feel it when somebody loves you?”

She stopped just in front of him and that alarm screeched louder. “Keelie, look, this has nothing do with whether or not Abby saw anything before now. She’s seeing it now and this doesn’t even involve you.
This
is about the fact that you are causing me problems and when you hurt her, you hurt me. Why the hell do you want to do that?”

“Hurting you is the last thing I want to do,” Keelie said. She reached out and caught his arm.

And that alarm in his head just screamed louder.

“When you look at me, do you see
anything
more than a friend looking back at you?” she asked and her voice was soft. Full of things he’d never heard before.

And damn it all to hell, as he stared into her eyes, he realized he hadn’t been the only one hiding things.

“Keelie, the only thing I see in you is a friend,” he said, shaking his head.

She slid her hand higher. “Just a friend, Zach? Is that all we can ever be?”

He caught her arm and nudged her hand down. “That’s all we
are
.”

“Because you’ve never given us a chance for something more. Maybe it’s time you did.”

And then she leaned in. Right as she touched her lips to his, the door opened.

* * *

Abigale smoothed a hand down the green silk shirt
she wore and took a deep breath.

It was quiet in Zach’s office. Very quiet.

The shop wasn’t very busy and if she hadn’t seen his car, she might have wondered if he was there.

With her heart knocking against her ribs, she went to push the door open.

And then, her heart stopped knocking against anything as it turned to ashes. All those ashes drifted away on the wind as she stared at the scene before her. If the scene had been written by some of the best in the biz, they couldn’t have done it any more perfectly.

A gritty urban scene, she thought absently. The rugged, street-smart male with his face all battered from his latest battle. His hands curled around the woman’s wrists as he stared down at her face. The woman, dressed in skintight black pants and a white tank under a fishnet top, stared up at him and the emotion on her face was as sharp as a blade. Even the lights around them seemed to be chosen to play it all up to perfection as Keelie leaned in and pressed her mouth to Zach’s.

For that one brief moment, time froze.

And then it shattered, just like her heart.

Zach was the first one to notice, his head swinging around her way and those wicked, warm blue eyes locked on her face. That intensity that Abby had been so convinced was there just for her was in his eyes, all right. But a second ago, he’d been staring at Keelie with a hell of a lot of focus, too.

“Abby,” he said, his voice rough.

She just stared at him for a moment and then she shot Keelie a dark look. To her surprise, the woman didn’t meet her glare with a cocky smile, and she didn’t glare back.

Instead, to her surprise, Keelie lowered her head and stared at her feet.

Abby opened her mouth to say something. Anything. But the pain ripping through her just wouldn’t let her speak.

All she wanted to do was cry.

But screw that.

Grabbing the doorknob, she jerked the door shut with a slam and then she took off, running down the hallway.

She was almost at the door when she heard Zach roaring out her name.

But she didn’t slow down.

Chapter Eighteen

For one brief moment, Zach wondered if maybe he’d
taken one of those damned pain pills and just forgotten about it, because that might explain why in the hell everything had just started to trip out on him.

But the pain pills had always made things just glide and float, even if they did fuck his head up.

They didn’t turn the world into a nightmare and that’s what this was, he thought, jerking back from Keelie and staring at her like he didn’t even know her.
What the hell—

And then he realized they weren’t alone.

Swinging his head around, he thought,
Not Abby, not Abby, not Abby . . .

But he already knew who it was.

It was Abby, standing there, staring at him like he had just jerked her heart out of her chest and smashed it to the ground. And he imagined that just might be how she felt. He knew the feeling pretty damned well, but any time he’d ever seen her kissing that fuckhead boyfriend of hers, Abby hadn’t ever belonged to Zach. He couldn’t call it a betrayal.

This, though . . .

“Abby . . .”

She just stared at him for a long moment and then, without saying anything, she jerked the door closed.

“What the hell . . .”

“Zach . . .”

He shot Keelie a narrow look and then took off running out the hall after Abby. But she was running away again.

And this time, she was running from him.

“Abby!”

She shoved through the door before he could catch up to her and he watched as she bolted down the sidewalk. “Damn it,” he snarled, shoving the door open. But she was inside her car. And then, seconds later, she was tearing off into the traffic on 4th Avenue.

Stunned, sick inside, Zach stared down the street after her. He’d wasted valuable seconds trying to chase after her, instead of going around to get his car from the back. There was no way he could catch her now.

He’d just have to talk to her at home.

Skimming a hand back over his hair, he nodded to himself. “Yeah. At home.”

Shoving back inside, he ignored the wide-eyed looks coming from the patrons, he ignored Javi’s concerned comment, and he ignored Keelie, who was standing in the hallway, a nervous look on her face.

In his office, he grabbed his keys and turned back around.

Keelie was in the doorway.

“You need to move,” he said quietly.

“Look, let me call her or something,” she said, misery on her face.

“You need to move,” he said again.

“Damn it, Zach!” She stared at him, tears glinting in her eyes.

Part of him wanted to feel bad for her, but he just couldn’t care that much right then. “Stop,” he said quietly. “I don’t want the
poor Keelie
routine. I don’t give a flying fuck that you didn’t know she was there—it doesn’t
matter
. You know I’m dating her and you know I’m serious about her. Serious . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head.

Abruptly, he started to laugh, although there wasn’t anything at all humorous about this. Not a damn thing was funny. But just then, he felt like if he didn’t laugh, he just might lose it.

“Serious,” he said again. “Yeah. I’m serious about her.”

Saying he was
serious
about Abby was kind of like calling Arizona
hot
in the dead of summer. Slanting a dark look at Keelie, he said softly, “I love her, damn it. She’s my world. What the
fuck
possessed you to pull something like that?”

“What possessed me?” she asked, staring at him. Then she sighed and shook her head. “The same thing that possesses you to chase after the same woman for seventeen years. I love you.”

I love you
.

Those words didn’t want to come together in his head. Oh, he
knew
what they meant, but coming from Keelie? Swearing, he shoved the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. “What the hell . . .”

“Yeah. What the hell. That pretty much describes all of this pretty damn well, Zach.”

He lowered his hands to stare at her but she wasn’t looking at him. She started to pace, her long legs scissoring as she stalked across his office, her head bent, eyes on the floor. “You wanted to know why and there you go. And now, maybe I get it. Because you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I’ve loved
you
for years. And you didn’t know, did you?”

“No. Look . . .” He blew out a breath, trying to think past the haze of anger. But he just couldn’t. Not then. “I’m sorry, Keelie. I can’t talk about this right now, but it . . . it wouldn’t ever work and you know it. Even if she walks away from me and never speaks to me again, I’ll never . . . well. You’re a friend, but that’s it.”

“I always thought . . .” She licked her lips and shook her head. “Part of me thought you knew and just pretended otherwise because you didn’t want to embarrass me. Okay. I guess maybe sometimes people don’t know.” She flicked him another look and moved out of the doorway. “I’m sorry, Zach.”

“I’m not the one who just had my heart ripped out,” he said quietly.

He headed down the hallway, his mind already intent on finding Abby, on what he would say to her, on what he
could
say.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been kissing Keelie, that he hadn’t been putting the moves on her or anything.

What mattered was that Abby had been hurt and he had to fix it.

Behind him, Keelie moved to stare after him. As he disappeared through the door, she rubbed the heel of her hand over her chest and sighed.

“No,” she said, even though she was talking to thin air. He wasn’t the one who had just had his heart ripped out. She had to agree there. That pleasure belonged to Abby . . . and herself.

But in the end, her heart was a problem of her own making. Something she’d have to deal with.

She hadn’t been very fair to Abby, she decided. She had to find a way to fix that.

But figuring out
how
to do that was going to be hard.

* * *

“You haven’t talked to Abby, have you?”

“Give me a minute, Zach.”

Marin’s assistant Leo put the phone on speaker, but judging by the sound of Zach’s voice, she might have to rethink that decision. Facedown on the massage table, she glanced at Leo and said, “I need some privacy, Leo.” She wasn’t too concerned about the masseuse, Rosa. Rosa was paid to be discreet and uber-professional.

Leo could be as well, when it suited him. That was one of the reasons she kept him around. He let things slip and it was usually the
right
kind of things, things that helped with publicity and the like, but her friendship with Zach and Abby wasn’t fodder for that particular mill. Leo didn’t always get that, and she wasn’t going to take that chance. Not with her two closest friends.

Once the door closed, she blocked out the brutally strong fingers that were trying to separate her muscles from her spine and said, “The last I talked to Abby was a few days ago. Everything okay, Zach?”

“No. When she calls you, tell her . . .” He stopped, sighed.

Something about the way his voice sounded set off a warning inside and even though he didn’t say anything for a long, long moment, dread curdled inside Marin.

“Zach?”

“Never mind,” he said, his voice flat now, emotionless. “But when you talk to her, see if you can find out where she is.”

“Ahh . . .” She lifted a hand and Rosa stopped, huffing out a sigh of frustration. Fine. Let her be frustrated. Marin lifted up onto her elbows. “What do you mean, find out where she is?”

“We had a fight. She’s gone. She isn’t at home, she won’t answer her phone, and I haven’t seen her in hours. Just see if she’ll tell you. I need to see her, okay?”

The misery she heard lying just under the flat tone of his voice made her heart hurt.
No. Not this
,
she thought dismally. Things had finally clicked for them. Those two belonged together. That was something she had always known. What—
No. Just stop. It’s a fight. Fights are normal. Couples have those sorts of things, right?

“Zach, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

In response, she got a long stream of colorful cuss-words that might have made her blush, except she’d already heard those variations and others from Zach or his brothers over the years.

“That’s very inventive, sweetheart, but that’s not a response,” she interrupted.

“Shit.” He muttered something else and then abruptly said, “I got to go. Let me know if you hear from her.”

As the phone disconnected, she groaned and dropped her head down. Immediately, Rosa’s nimble hands went back to work on her spine. “Wait, Rosa . . . I need to make a call.”

“The massage isn’t going to help with the tension if you don’t let me do my job.”

Yeah, well, she wasn’t going to relax when she was worrying about her friends, either.

* * *

Speeding down the highway, ignoring the thick, dark
blanket of the sky overhead, Abigale propped her left elbow on the door and rested her head on her hand, swallowing the knot in her throat.

She’d thought . . .

Stop thinking
, she thought darkly.

Thinking
hurt
. When she
thought
, she remembered what she had just seen. She’d gone to Zach’s
thinking
she’d figured out something amazing. Gone there thinking that maybe, just maybe, that
thing
she’d been looking for her entire life was already hers.

Have you ever been in love?

The expression on his face when he looked at her, then the careful way he
hadn’t
looked at her when he answered that question.

I’m thirty-two years old, Abby. Yeah. I’ve been in love. It didn’t work out.

Her heart ached and she tried to cut off that tide of memories.

She never seemed to notice that I was staring at her when she walked into the room.

Emotion swelled inside her throat and it was a miracle her eyes stayed dry. No matter
what
she did, she seemed to recall a hundred, a thousand times when he’d been staring at her when she walked into the room. When he’d look up at her, that slow smile would light his face. It was like he’d been waiting just for her and until he saw her, he couldn’t really smile. Not
that
way. It was the kind of smile that said . . .
the day’s complete now
.

And something
about
that smile
made
her day complete. It had been like that for a long, long time, too. She just hadn’t fully understood it.

She’d been falling for her best friend, all right.

Falling . . . already fallen. Flat-out in love with him. She’d gone to tell him. Confront him and demand he tell her how
he
felt, although she thought she already knew.

Yet if he was in love with her, then
what in
the hell
had she seen when she walked into the office back at Steel Ink?

And damn it, that hurt. Thinking about it hurt so much, she wanted to pull off the side of the road and just curl up into a ball. She didn’t want to think about crying, though. If she started to cry, she’d never stop and she knew it. So the answer, really, was to just
stop thinking
.

The phone rang and she had to sniffle, had to grip the steering wheel in an iron grip just to keep from snatching it up and answering it. “Rebel Yell.” Zach’s ringtone. She ought to reprogram it to something like “Your Cheating Heart.”

“Fuck!”

Focusing on the road, she realized she was almost at the state line. She’d been driving for hours and New Mexico loomed up ahead of her.

She had absolutely
no
idea where she was going. Sighing, she grabbed her phone. Holding the button down, she waited for the beep and then said, “Find a hotel close to me.” She was
not
going back home. There was no way she could even think about it and never mind the fact that it was almost eleven p.m.

If she went home, she’d find Zach waiting there. She knew that. And she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet.

She had to wait until she was up to talking to him without wanting to punch him. Kick him in the balls.

Rip Keelie’s two-toned hair out. Actually,
that
idea held a lot of merit and she wasn’t completely brushing that aside.

But she needed to pull over, get some sleep, and reevaluate. Look at things again in the morning. She didn’t know. The only thing she
did
know was that she wasn’t ready to go back and talk to Zach.

With something to distract her, the next few minutes passed with a little more ease. The nearest town with any decent hotel offerings was Lordsburg, New Mexico.

Sighing, she flicked another glance at the phone and grimaced. A Hampton Inn. She brought it up on her GPS and rubbed at her tired eyes.

Okay, she was going to Lordsburg. She could check into the hotel, collapse on a bed. Maybe find a liquor store and have a drink or two and rage about what she’d seen.

Try to
understand
what she’d seen . . .

The phone rang again.

“What the . . .”

As the strains of “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan filled the air, she was torn between disgust and fury. There was absolutely no justice in life. On the night when she really just wanted to be left alone to wallow in her rage and misery, Roger decided he was going to call.