Keep On Loving you (29 page)

Ryan moved forward. “You own the mountain, then? The whole mountain?”

And without waiting for a reply, both he and Jace said together, “I'll buy it from you.”

Zan felt his faint grin. “Not necessary.”

“Not going to happen,” Mac said staunchly. “That's
Walker
land.”

“It's Elliott land now, I guess,” Poppy pointed out. She was looking at Zan with interest, as if she suspected he had something else up his sleeve.

Which he did.

“We're not letting flatlanders get involved in this,” Mac said, her tone vehement.

Shay looked over. “Um, Mac, Ryan and Jace and Angelica have married or are marrying into this family. Can we cut them some flatlander slack?”

Appearing affronted, Mac slumped back onto the couch. “It's our Walker legacy.”

Shay's face softened. “I know where you're coming from, but look. Now we have a chance, maybe, to get our legacy back, the whole thing, intact. That is, if Zan will consider a sale?” She turned to him.

“No.” He waited a beat. “Because I'm already giving it to you.”

“We can't take charity!”

Mac again. God, she was still fighting, but now he knew where at least some of that stubbornness was coming from.
I learned I don't need any man to keep me up.
That was the irony, of course. In failing her, he'd actually caused her to build those strong, high walls he found so very maddening.

“It's not charity. It's family.” He angled to give Poppy a small smile. “Brother of the heart, right?”

Her gaze softened and she smiled back. “Brother of the heart.”

“Poppy.” Mac rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows you're squishy to your soul.”

Zan turned to the oldest Walker. “What do
you
say, Brett? Can you accept something from your brother?”

“You're playing dirty,” Mac said angrily.

Zan didn't take his eyes off his oldest friend. “Or am I playing fair? If you're my family, then I share with you. That seems reasonable to me.”

Brett studied his face. “You staying?”

“You'll always know how to get in touch.” That was all he and his ghosts were prepared to offer. “And if you want my opinion on what to do with the place, then build your dream. Make it Walker Mountain—a place for family and visitors alike.”

Brett cocked his head. “Are you giving us a choice, Zan?”

“Not about the land. My attorney is already drawing up the papers. What you do with it and...and about the brother of the heart...not my call.”

“I know what I want,” Poppy piped up.

Then Mason did, too, and proved he was wise beyond his years. “Does this mean I have another uncle? Does this mean more Christmas and birthday presents?”

Most everybody laughed, loud enough to cover his mother's scolding.

“I like the sound of Uncle Zan,” Zan said, looking toward Mason and London. The boy grinned. The girl uttered, “Cool,” and went back to her phone, clearly this event on a scale of a mere one or two in the teenage drama department.

But to Zan, it was off the charts.

The room exploded with enthusiastic talk after that, as the assembled group discussed possibilities, timelines, and divvied up new responsibilities. The action moved from the family room to the kitchen. Poppy tried to bustle about, but Ryan took things into his own hands by sweeping her off her feet and holding her on his lap as everyone else prepared the meal.

Zan didn't do much, either, but he couldn't stop smiling, and he found himself early on ensconced in a chess game with Mason at one end of the granite island. Grimm wandered in and with a groan flopped at the feet of Ryan and Poppy's stool.

Zan was sucked back in time.

Happy voices, family voices, that included some squabbles and some teasing, but most of all communicated a pervading sense of security and contentment. It was what he'd experienced with his first family—his mother and father and siblings. It had been there those years with the Walkers, too, but he'd always stood on the edge of it...afraid of becoming too dependent on something he knew could be snatched away.

Breathing in, he realized the heaviness on his shoulders had eased some. His ghosts seemed lighter in weight and not so dark in spirit.

Or
he
wasn't so dark in spirit.

And he was able to hold on to that until they all gathered around Ryan and Poppy's dining table for the meal and he realized that one person was missing.

Mac was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

W
ITH
HER
FULL
backpack slung over her shoulder, Mac stomped toward Zan's front door. It was twenty-four hours since she'd left Poppy and Ryan's, stealing into the night as her siblings ramped up their enthusiasm for the Walker mountain and what they might create there.

They'd taken the news of the ownership in stride, unbothered by the implications, untroubled by the problems the situation wrought.

Because, she realized, it wasn't trouble or problems for
them
.

That ties between Zan and the Walkers would now never be severed didn't give them the tiniest pause—because not one of them had thought about what accepting that property might do to
her
.

In all fairness, she hadn't stopped to share that with them. She hadn't
wanted
to share that with them.

She'd wanted to maintain her poise and her dignity, sure the truth would only gain her their pity.

So she'd run off to lick her wounds and while doing so she'd come up with a plan she hoped would cut her own personal bonds with Zan.

The doorbell rang out its distinctive musical phrase. Luckily she didn't hang out with a crowd of classical music aficionados. Once Zan was gone, the likelihood of hearing this set of notes was so small she could count on not encountering anything that would prompt the unpleasant memory.

Before the last tone sounded, the porch light blazed on and Zan pulled open the door. She didn't hesitate to push her way inside, making for the parlor, where a low fire was once again burning. There, she slipped off her coat and slung her backpack onto the coffee table.

“Mac?”

Turning, she took him in from head to toe. She'd seen him in suit-type clothes and she'd seen him in mountain clothes, looking either
GQ
magazine-suave or as if he'd walked straight out of a Patagonia catalog. These garments were something entirely new—well, not new at all. He wore a ratty white T-shirt advertising a marathon in San Diego from twenty years before and a pair of sweatpants that had been washed to a bleached-out blue. The ragged hems trailed threads that brushed the floor.

Because the shirt clung to his shoulders and the waistband of the pants hung sexily at his hip bones, he looked good, of course. But still a surprise.

One of her brows rose.

He must have understood the question in the gesture and his jaw worked for a moment. “Stuff of my dad's.”

Okay, sucker punch to the gut. Because now she was seeing Zan's dad, a tall, lean man who dressed like that when he was rolling around with his kids before the fire or when tucking them into their beds upstairs. After story time, he'd sit on that couch, and fitting his wife to his side, watch the flames and dream about their future.

Zan, dressed in his dad's old clothes, was not Wanderer Zan, but Domesticated Zan, a side that rounded out Classy Zan and Caveman Zan in a manner that she wished she didn't know.

Unless he was still
your
Zan
, a little voice said.

Breathing in deep, she squelched the thought and reminded herself of the purpose of the visit.

“Well—” she began.

“Are you here about the land?”

She glared at him, remembering all over again that not only had he broken his promise by telling early, but he'd actually given the land away. “Would it matter if I was?”

He rubbed his hand over his face. “I guess not. Mac—”

“I know why you did it.” The anger leached out of her, leaving only a dull sadness behind. She sighed. “And I know why they agreed so readily.”

Her sibs thought accepting Zan's property would keep him joined to the place and to them. They expected him to return regularly and be the brother they had missed and wanted once again in their lives.

She knew better.

Zan had arranged to transfer that property for exactly the opposite reason. It was his way to pay back the Walkers for what they'd given him when he was young. Now with that debt wiped clean, he could go on without another thought to them.

“So then what brings you here?” Zan asked.

“These,” she said, and her hand snagged the straps of the backpack to yank it open. Upending the canvas, she dumped 117 postcards onto the rug in front of the hearth. The firelight played over the glossy, colorful images from faraway places, highlighting those that had landed on their faces so their white underbellies showed, only marked by the distinctive
Z
.

She started to fume all over again. “Why did you do it?” she demanded. “Why did you send them?”

She could only see the top of Zan's head as he stared down at the heap. “To let you know I was thinking of you, I suppose,” he said slowly.

“One hundred seventeen times?”

“A hundred times that. A thousand. Ten thousand.”

The quiet admission didn't do anything to quell her temper. “Ten
years
, Zan. You rambled about for ten years, yet you still felt compelled to...to keep the knot tied with postcards. Why did you do that when it was you who left?” She nudged the pile with her foot, setting those on top sliding. One slithered all the way to Zan's bare toes.

Bending, he picked it up. A snowy mountain range. The Andes? She couldn't remember. “Yes, I did leave.” His long fingers ran over the postcard's edges, and then he folded it into a crude airplane. It was a poor design, because when he let it go, instead of sailing it spiraled to the ground, nose first.

“And that leaving...” he began, staring down at the ground. Then he looked up, his gaze direct on hers. “My parents and brother and sister were on their way here.”

“What?” Mac blinked and her stomach pitched. “Here?”

“A ski weekend. It was hardly more than a couple of driving hours from our house at the beach, but they had a friend with a private plane.”

God! “I...I didn't know, Zan.”
God.

“Turns out, I'm the only one of the family who made it to Blue Arrow Lake that winter.”

Mac's legs folded as both her indignation and her strength ebbed. She dropped to the rug, right beside the hill of postcards. Pressing her hands to her eyes, she thought about the boy that was Zan, arriving at the place that had been the destination his loved ones had died trying to reach. “No wonder you always were bent on going away from here.”

“Yeah.” He sat on the rug now, too, 117 postcards between them. “You were right when you wondered if I was trying to escape by leaving this place. I thought I could leave the ghosts of them behind. Turns out, they came with me. All over the fucking world.”

Mac closed her eyes at the bitter pain in his voice. “They wouldn't want to be a burden. They would never want to hold you down.”

He went on as if he didn't hear her. “They weren't the only thing I was running from. It was all of you, too, of course.”

“I don't understand why,” she whispered.

“Because I was a Walker hanger-on, obviously. A pretender.”

Her eyes popped open and her head came around to stare at him. “What do you mean? Did you only pretend to...to care for me?”

“Fuck, no, Mac.” He pushed both hands through his hair. “But it was only a matter of time, right? Sure, I was your first lover, but you'd move on. Shay and Poppy and Brett, their lives would move on, too, and ultimately away from me. You'd have each other forever. Me, I would have no one if I stayed.”

Everything ends.

“Zan—”

“It was easier for me to go away than for me to be left behind again.”

God!
She drew up her knees and dropped her forehead to them. It made so much sense in a twisted, miserable sort of way.

“So, Mac...the postcards?”

Her plan. Remember the plan! Lifting her head, she glanced down at the small souvenirs of his travels. “It's time to get rid of them.”

He was staring into the fire, his face expressionless. “I feel a symbolic annihilation coming on.”

“I thought about the shredder in my office, but they'd dull the blades,” she said. “I don't have a fireplace, but—”

“I do.”

And it had seemed fitting, that their destruction should be witnessed by them both. He wanted to burn the bridges between them, and he would watch while she did that, too.

Climbing to his feet, Zan reached for a log in the holder on the hearth. “We'll get the flames roaring, then.” He tossed it in, then used the poker to stir up the embers and resettle the wood.

After a few minutes the fire was leaping and snapping and putting off so much heat that Mac scooted back a couple of inches. She swallowed. “I guess it's ready.”

He settled back on the rug. “Looks like it.”

She stole another glance at him, his handsome profile limned by gold and red light, another memory she'd have to eradicate after the 117 that would go up in smoke tonight. Blindly, she reached for a postcard.

Her fingers closed over the nearest, then froze. Her entire arm couldn't move.

Zan's head turned to look at her. “Do you need help?”

“Um...maybe.” She was still clutching the postcard she'd selected in a rigid grasp.

“How about I do the first?”

Her fingers tightened as did every muscle in her body. “Okay.”

Then she watched him reach for a card. As his fingers closed over tagboard, her muscles snapped, releasing her body from its prison. She lunged. “Not that one.”

He glanced at her, eyebrows raised, but let her pluck it from his hold.

“I like that one,” she said, retaking her place without looking at it. “I'll...I'll save it for last.”

“Then why don't you choose? Tell me which one and I'll toss it in.”

Toss
it in? That sounded so casual. So cavalier. This was her past he was conferring to the fire. Her secret pain and her secret dreams that had been triggered every time the mail carrier arrived.

They were about to burn the 117 reasons she'd never married anyone else—the reasons that had to be destroyed or she'd never be free.

She darted another look at Zan, then at the pile of cards. Could she destroy them? Did she really
want
to be free?

Maybe not. Maybe not this way. Burning the postcards would mean she was attempting to also forget those precious, joyous moments of her youth.

No way did she want to lose the memory of their first kiss after that silly, teenage tussle.

Or the first time he'd taken her to the movies and instead of being one of a group of Walkers and Zan, arguing over who got the seats with the rail in front, it was just Mac and Zan, and they'd climbed to the top row, making it
their
place.

She didn't want to extinguish her recollection of the day they'd first made love and she'd been so excited she'd bit her hand to stop her cries until he'd pried it away from her mouth and encouraged her to make all the noise she wanted.

All those Mac and Zan memories.

She didn't want to forget their legend, not one single second of it.

“Mac.”

Her head turned, and he was staring at her. “Yes?”

“You're not moving.”

“I guess... I guess I don't want to burn the postcards anymore.”

“What do you want?” he asked, his torso turning toward her so that his left shoulder and left biceps—both hard and buff—were outlined in that golden light. Her heart yearned, but so did other parts of her.

“Mac, baby, what do you want?”

Him. Forever. But she could never let him know that because without her pride, her mere bones wouldn't keep her standing.

So creating another memory of them together would have to do. A final memory. The idea of it tightened her throat and made her eyes burn, but she managed to pin on a sassy smile. “I don't know. If you can rustle up a deck of cards, maybe we can play that strip poker you mentioned the other night.”

His spine went rigid and he didn't smile back. Her effort at sassiness petered out in an instant and for a long moment he just looked at her. Then he scooted closer and cupped her face in his hand. “No games this time, Mac. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered, turning her head to kiss his palm. “No games.”

But he still let it be her show and she crawled over the postcards to him. They scattered across the carpet as she moved, scenes of all the places he'd been, crushed beneath her knees and then their bodies as she undressed him. With her hand, she shoved him down so he was on his back and she let her hair curtain them both as she kissed him, kissed him deep and deeper, wet and wetter. His hand clutched her hip as she rolled her lips over his stubbled chin and down his neck.

Then he was pushing up her shirt as she continued to explore his naked chest with her mouth. She tossed it away, and then he one-handedly worked at the hooks of her bra. It fell away, too, as she licked a trail down his belly.

His hand fisted in her hair, drawing it to one side so he could watch her take him into her mouth. She lavished her attention there, pulling him in, memorizing the taste of him on her tongue.

Glancing up, she saw his gaze fixed on her. She sucked harder, giving the performance of her life, her final performance, and she got into it, because this wasn't a play or a game, of course, but a wordless demonstration of all she felt for him.

He groaned, his fist tightening on her hair, and then he was drawing her away from him. She tried resisting and persuading, drawing her tongue along the hard shaft, but he kept tugging her upward and then he had turned the tables, his body on hers.

The postcards dug into her naked back, but she forgot about them as he drew off her jeans and panties. Zan crawled between her spread thighs and she looked into his face, committing the tenderness there to memory.

With an old wrestling move taught to her by her brother, Mac flipped Zan once again. She hovered over him, knees straddling his hips, her hands caressing his chest. Then she reached down, circled his hard and damp cock with her fingers and fit it to the pulsing groove between her legs.