Keep On Loving you Read online

  Her lashes dropped, her hand slid free of his. “No,” she said, and then she scooted around him and was gone.

  Again.

  Maybe for always.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ZAN WAS LATE. Mac checked her phone for the dozenth time, confirming that he was fifteen minutes past their designated meeting hour of 11:00 a.m. and that he’d neither called nor texted. “I’ve waited long enough,” she muttered and moved her hand to the ignition just as a car pulled behind hers in the driveway of the Elliott mansion.

  Poppy jumped out of the fancy SUV she was driving these days and let herself into the passenger side of the company sedan that was Mac’s ride that morning. “Why are you sitting here?” she asked.

  Mac’s gaze took in her little sister, dressed in dark jeans, an oversize yellow sweater that met her knees and a pair of warm suede boots. A knitted stocking cap in goldenrod was pulled over her honey hair. “You look like a ray of sunshine.” It made her smile.

  Poppy returned the assessing glance. “Ball cap, check. One of Brett’s old flannel shirts, check. Denim that’s about to split at the knees. You look like you’re on your way to the county dump.”

  Mac’s smile died. “Gee, thanks.”

  “Well, why are you dressing like that?”

  “I’m only meeting Zan,” she said, gesturing toward the house. “Or I was meeting Zan, but he’s stood me up apparently.”

  Poppy pressed her lips together, causing Mac to narrow her gaze. “What’s that expression mean?”

  “I only think it’s high-larious that you were shooting eye daggers at him over dinner and the next minute you agreed to do a job for him.”

  “High-larious,” Mac muttered. “It was that lasagna you made. The carbs made my brain muzzy.” The fact was, she’d been goaded into agreeing when he accused her of being afraid. Pride sometimes sucked.

  “Still—”

  “Anyway, I’m reneging. He’s not here now, and I don’t have time to reschedule.” Noting her sister was about to make another comment, she took control of the conversation. “What about you? Why are you on this side of the lake?”

  “Cabin business.”

  At Mac’s arched eyebrow, Poppy continued. “I have a friend who’s going to show me some ins and outs of website design.”

  “I thought London and Shay put together a prototype for you that some techie at Ryan’s production company was going to polish.”

  “I decided to do it myself. I’ve got the time.”

  “With a wedding coming up? And a kindergartener, not to mention a fiancé and an overfriendly dog?”

  “I’m not at the front desk of the lodge anymore. There’s a free hour here and there.”

  Poppy’s work for several years had been at a lakeside inn, which she brought up time and again when anyone questioned the success of the cabin venture given the Walkers’ lack of experience in the hospitality industry. Anyone, of course, coming down to only Mac these days.

  She sighed. “Are you ever—”

  “Never,” Poppy said cheerfully, “if you’re wondering if I’ll ever give up on making something of that land. It’s our legacy, and we’re so close, Mac!”

  Close to investing their hearts into something that could very well fail.

  “You know, you used to be a lot more fun.” Poppy poked her in the shoulder. “When did you turn so gloomy?”

  It began the day my childhood dreams drove down the hill. Though Zan had talked about leaving the mountains forever, as a girl she’d never imagined that day would come, especially not once they were together as a couple. For a while she’d wondered if she would have gone with him if he’d asked...but since he hadn’t, she’d never nailed down an answer to the question.

  “I have a practical nature,” Mac said now. “And that practical nature thinks it’s time I boot you out of my car so I can get on with my day.”

  My Zan-less day, just like so many before it.

  Hadn’t she known not to count on him? Experience predicted it.

  “Too late,” Poppy said, glancing over her shoulder. “Here comes your appointment now.”

  Which meant Mac could only gnash her teeth as her sister exited her car and Zan pulled up alongside. Poppy gave him a wave before motoring off, and when he approached Mac’s door, she only cranked her window down a few inches.

  “You’re late,” she told him.

  “What?” He looked distracted. His big hands clutched a zippered leather portfolio.

  “I tried calling you. If you had picked up, I could have explained then that you lost me. I can’t stay.”

  After a long moment, he blinked. “We arranged to meet.” He seemed to be reminding himself of that fact.

  “At your insistence.” He also appeared impervious to her glare and a little niggle of worry tickled her neck. “Are you all right?”

  Without answering, he began wandering to the front entry.

  Mac jumped out of her car to follow him into the foyer. “Zan? Are you feeling sick again?”

  He shut the door behind them both and headed for the thermostat. “It’s a little cold in here.”

  “This house is big.”

  “Yeah.” Dropping his head back, he appeared to inspect the soaring walls of the entry that rose an impressive three stories. “There’s so much of it. So much of everything.”

  Instead of the jeans she’d expected to see him wear, this morning he was in dark charcoal wool slacks, a blue dress shirt without a tie and a gray sports jacket. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her threadbare jeans, painfully aware of the ragged state of her clothing. Obviously she’d done her very best to demonstrate how little he meant to her.

  Embarrassed, she glanced over her shoulder to the door. “I really should go.”

  He looked at her now. “I...” His hand forked through his hair. “Maybe you should stay.”

  Her instincts started chattering at her now. Get out. Go away. Something not good is up.

  But her stupid feet wouldn’t move. Instead, she stared at him, remembering another helpless moment.

  When his lips had touched hers in her office.

  Her muscles had seized then, her whole body transfixed by the familiar taste of him, the delicious sensation of his mouth once more on hers. Years of longing plus even more of loneliness coupled with the knowledge of how good they had once been together had struck her dumb.

  No had fled from her vocabulary. Stop had gone on hiatus.

  Tears had burned hot behind her eyes. But Mac Walker didn’t cry, and she’d jerked free of the spell.

  Then found her voice. That won’t happen again!

  But the truth was, she’d wanted it to happen once more, right that moment. Right this moment. Blame it on the Ghost of Love Gone By.

  Or her own fickle foolishness.

  “Let me make us some coffee,” Zan said now and started for the kitchen.

  And yes, her fool-status was confirmed, because once again she followed him.

  Upon reaching his destination, he removed the jacket and hung it over one of the ladder-back bar stools drawn up to the granite island. While he folded back the cuffs of his shirt, Mac self-consciously pulled off her ball cap and tried fluffing out her hat hair.

  “I, uh, have a house to clean this afternoon,” she said by way of excusing her attire. “I’m dressed for dirty work.”

  He crossed to the pantry without glancing her way. “You look great,” he said in an absent voice. Then he stood at the mouth of the cavernous space kitted out with multiple shelves and bins, sparsely populated.

  “Do you need help finding the coffee?” she asked, coming up behind him.

  “Shit, yeah.” His fingers pushed through his hair again. “I need help.”

  Unsu
re exactly what he meant, she brushed past him to enter the space, turning until she found the grounds that she knew Tilda had shopped for and delivered. “Here we are.”

  She carried the bag to the maker on the countertop that seemed, to her, as long as the number of years they’d been apart. “It’s a very big house,” she said, reiterating her earlier comment to break the weird silence.

  “Scared the hell out of me when I first moved in.”

  Interesting, she thought, glancing over at Zan, then proceeding to dump grounds into the filter. She’d never suspect he was scared of anything. “We’ve always thought it was haunted—and, uh, confession time. The other day when you were sick I let Poppy in to look around.” She slid him another look. “You mad?”

  He shook his head. “Nah.”

  “Why didn’t you ever invite us over?” she ventured now, adult enough to broach the subject. “When we were kids, I mean. I don’t think you were ashamed of us—”

  “Hell, no!” He reached into a cupboard and brought down two mugs. “It was nothing like that.”

  Mac pressed the on button, then turned toward him, her curiosity aroused. “What was it like, then? Brett was your best friend. I was your...”

  “Teen lover?” He waggled his eyebrows and a small grin made him appear more relaxed.

  She shot a finger at him. “Don’t try to distract me. Did your grandfather disapprove of the Walkers or something?”

  “He wasn’t a snob,” Zan said.

  “Sorry. I guess I don’t know what to think.”

  He busied himself filling the mugs. “The shame was on my side, I suppose.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your family was so...normal. Like a TV family—”

  She snorted. “You know we had our share of soap opera drama, anyway, with my dad taking off and my mom getting pregnant with Shay by someone else before Dad returned and they patched it back together.”

  “That’s when I knew you all. When it was patched back together. And I didn’t want you to see how...empty it was here, in this place. It needed more footsteps and more voices than an old man and a kid could create to make it a home. I was just sort of...warehoused here.”

  Mac clutched the mug he handed to her. “Oh, Zan.” To her, he’d always seemed to be the person who had everything. Clothes, the toy of the day. Later, cars and money.

  As she watched, he crossed to the windows overlooking the lake and stared through the glass at the expanse of wintry blue water and the surrounding peaks covered by pines and snow.

  She joined him there. “I didn’t know how it was for you. How you felt...”

  “Solitary.” Then he turned slightly to brush her hair off her shoulders. “Except for when I was with you Walkers. Later, except for when I was with you, specifically.”

  His eyes were a dangerous place to stare. When they were together years ago, they’d lie on the grass, or on a beach at a lake, or they’d stretch out on the rug in her family room and just gaze upon each other, their hands entwined. How can one person make me so happy? she’d think. How can one person feel so right to me?

  Now it was too easy to be sucked back to those feelings, that mixed sense of familiarity and fate.

  But clearly, they had not been destined to be together as the naive and dreamy girl she’d been had once imagined.

  Shaking her head, she redirected her attention out the window. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Now I feel like an ass. I wasn’t begging for your pity, Mac.”

  “It’s not pity.” Though there was a couple of inches between them, his body’s heat seemed to seep into hers, the warmth melting her bones and finding the cold place deep, deep in her chest. The barren tundra that was the surface of her heart. “It’s more like understanding.”

  When she was a young girl and especially at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, he’d seemed so put-together to her. Confident. Fearless. Complete.

  And now she saw that maybe he’d been driven away because he was searching for something he was lacking—and not because she wasn’t enough, the anxiety that had nagged her when he’d first left.

  Tucking her hands beneath her elbows, sadness trickled through her—and maybe the very smallest beginnings of forgiveness for the young man who’d broken her heart.

  “You’ve become a mystery to me, Mac. I don’t know what to make of this quiet, contemplative girl.”

  “It’s because I’m a woman now,” she said, glancing over at him. “All grown up, Zan, with ten years of my own experiences.”

  He was shaking his head. “Is it wrong of me to miss that eager young thing?”

  With a roll of her eyes, she grimaced. “You mean worshipful young thing.”

  “I worshipped you right back.”

  Yeah, because every guy left behind the girl to whom he gave his devotion. That thought only made her sad again. “Maybe we should leave the past alone.”

  “I don’t know if we can do that, Mac.”

  She gave him a sharp look. The tension she’d felt when he’d arrived was back. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re still all tangled up.” He sighed. “God, Mac. It’s so effing messy.”

  Mac frowned, her instincts once more on high alert. How she wished she’d driven away when he’d been five minutes late. But fifteen minutes in, Poppy had shown up, and she was the most stubborn Walker of them all. There was no way Mac could have kicked her out of her car, because her sister was unmovable when she wanted to be. Plus, doing anything that rained on the Poppy parade always made Mac feel like shit.

  Her little sister was getting married in just weeks and deserved the world to be kittens and puppies. With a side order of cotton candy.

  Yeah, Mac knew her sister had a spine of steel, but you just couldn’t help wanting to make her world beautiful.

  Steeling her own spine, she met Zan’s gaze. “What’s going on?”

  Looking away from her, he cleared his throat. “I have some news. Uh, bad news.”

  * * *

  ZAN CURSED HIMSELF the moment he heard “bad news” come out of his mouth. But that damn thing had been flapping its lips without his permission since Mac had followed him into the house. Still reeling from the meeting he’d had with his grandfather’s attorney, he’d had no rein on it.

  “What kind of bad news?” Mac asked, narrowing her eyes until they were slits of icy blue.

  The gaze was sharp enough to jab some sense into him. Coming clean, right here, right now, wasn’t the thing to do. More thinking time was necessary. And perhaps he should first divulge the issue to a different Walker altogether.

  “The bad news is also the actual mess,” he lied, hoping she’d buy it. “Three stories of dust and furniture and other stuff that needs to be dealt with.”

  “Zan—”

  “Let me show you what I mean,” he said, heading out of the kitchen and toward the staircase. “I know you said you’d looked around, but surely you didn’t see all of it.”

  He could feel her and her suspicions trailing behind him.

  “Zan...” she began, and then a distinctive melody intoned—the bell.

  He continued toward the front door, ready to kiss whoever it was on the other side. A gray-haired, middle-aged man stood there, in dark pants and a white shirt with the embroidered logo of a courier service.

  His eyes went wide as his gaze shifted behind Zan. “Mackenzie?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Zan saw a strange look—discomfort? embarrassment?—cross her face. He turned back to the delivery person. “Yes?”

  It took moments to sign for the package and to guess it was more materials pertaining to his grandfather’s estate. Through the manila envelope it felt like paperwork, anyway. Most likely proof of things he owned that he’d never wanted.
>
  The courier was lingering on the front step, his gaze once again shifting to Mac. “Jeff’s doing fine,” he told her.

  “That’s, um, great,” Mac said, hunching her shoulders and shoving her hands in her jeans pockets. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Jeff’s dating a woman who works for the county,” the man added. Before she could respond to that, he switched his gaze to Zan. “Alexander Elliott, huh?”

  “Yes.” Zan sent a questioning glance to Mac, who was staring at the toes of her sneakers.

  “I’ve heard about you.”

  Still puzzled, Zan nodded. “Okay.”

  “I didn’t move my family here until about eight years ago, but everybody’s heard of Zan. Of Zan and Mac. Mac and Zan. The two of you...legend.”

  “Uh, okay.” It was true that their community had taken an interest in their young romance from the very start.

  “My son, Jeff, he knew about the Zan and Mac legend, but that didn’t stop him from—”

  “Isn’t it time you get on with your deliveries?” Mac said, halting the flow of the man’s words. “You have some sort of time guarantee, right, Wes?”

  The older man was silent a moment, then gave Zan a once-over before opening his mouth again. “Mac’s a good woman, you know. Hardworking. Loyal to family. Could have any unmarried man in a hundred-mile radius. And nobody really blamed her, not me and Jeff’s mother, not even Jeff himself, when—”

  “Let me just walk you back to your van, Wes,” Mac said, interrupting again and bustling past Zan to link arms with the older guy. She chattered away at him as she drew him off the porch and back to his vehicle.

  Bemused, Zan watched the show, wondering just what had prompted her need to hurry the courier on his way. When she jogged back up the steps as the van drove off, he studied her face. Once upon a time he would have known every expression. Or, more likely, once upon a time she’d been much easier to read.

  He sighed. “You really did grow up, didn’t you?”

  “We haven’t all been here, in stasis, just waiting for your return, Zan.”

  God, had that been his expectation? “That would make me an arrogant SOB, wouldn’t it?” Then he held up a hand. “Don’t answer—instead, tell me more about the adult Mackenzie Marie.”