30. Zack
30
ZACK
Adam:
You planning on leaving your cabin today or nah?
Brax:
Don’t make us come get you.
Zack:
Fuck all the way off.
Adam:
Suit yourself. Brax?
Brax:
Meet you there in 5.
H eartbreak was bullshit and I wasn’t going to put up with it.
No, I was going to stay right here and become one with my old, cracked-leather sofa until it passed. Which, if I followed the usual trajectory of Hale men, should be any year now.
Brothers being brothers, they couldn’t even give me that.
At first I figured if I ignored the pounding on my door, they would go away, but that just pissed them off and made them louder. I pushed off the couch powered by a surge of righteous fury and wrenched open the door.
“What?” I demanded.
“That’s what we want to know,” Adam said as they shouldered past me into the cabin.
Brax crossed his arms like a principal facing down an unruly child. “What the fuck are you wearing?”
I stood tall and proud in my pink bunny slippers, black boxer briefs, and the cardigan Hannah left in my truck draped over my bare shoulders like a shawl. It was a tossup whether the unrelenting scent of her was my hell or salvation.
“It’s my house. I wear what I want. If you don’t want to look at it, you know where the door is.”
“You’ve been holed up in here for two days. What’s going on?” Adam asked.
“Two days? Dad fell down a whiskey bottle for a year when Mom died.” I jabbed my finger at Adam. “You were in a decade-long bad mood when your first wife left you.” I spun to Brax. “And you spent years following Essie around like a playground bully until you finally tricked her into marrying you.”
“That was your idea,” Brax reminded me.
“I had just finished two rounds of surgery and was high as a kite on pain meds. My point is, so what if I’ve been rotting on my couch for two days? I’m well within the grace period of Hale men acting like fucking disasters over women.”
“Wait…wait.” Adam braced a palm against the wall like he was about to keel over. “Are you saying this is about a girl ?”
Brax let out a disbelieving guffaw. “No. It can’t be. The only girl trouble Zack has is remembering all their names.”
I split a baleful glare between then and sank back onto the couch, my butt finding the indentation that was slowly becoming permanent. “You know, I’m getting real tired of people telling me what I feel or don’t feel.”
You don’t love me, Zack. You only think you do because of all the sex.
Hannah’s words still echoed in my brain. Bullshit. Complete bullshit. I knew I loved Hannah the way I knew my blood ran in the soil of these Colorado plains. It was a goddamn fact .
Still, she had sounded so sure. And that made me question things. Not my feelings; I knew where I stood. But maybe where I stood was a long way from where Hannah stood. Maybe for her, what we had was nothing more than sexual chemistry.
And then I remembered her tears.
My girl felt something for me, and it terrified her.
I couldn’t even blame her for that. The way I felt about her…shit. It scared me, too. And I hadn’t even been forced to marry a family member at fourteen years old.
So, yeah. Love was fucking terrifying.
I dropped Hannah’s sweater over my face to black out the world, especially my two annoying brothers who didn’t seem to understand the conversation was over.
“It can’t be a girl.” Adam sounded like he was trying to convince himself it was true. “The only woman he’s spent time with since the accident is that librarian. Hannah.”
“Hannah?” Brax echoed. There was the heavy thump of his boots against the wood floor and then the sweater was unceremoniously yanked off my head. “What did you do to her, Zack?”
Nothing except teach her how to orgasm with a man and fall in love with her . “Nothing,” I grunted. I lunged for the sweater.
Brax held it out of reach and glowered down at me. “Then why did she look like hell today when she came to my office to sign rodeo paperwork?”
“She looked like hell?” My gut twisted. Was I happy that there was the slimmest possibility that Hannah was as miserable as I was? Of course not. But I wasn’t unhappy about it, either.
“Dammit, Zack,” Adam snapped. “She’s friends with James and Essie. You can’t just—” He scrubbed a hand over his scruffy jaw. “She’s a librarian, for fuck’s sake. She’s not one of your buckle bunnies who wants a quick fuck and won’t care if you never call her again. She’s nice.”
Rage boiled over.
“Don’t you fucking tell me what she is. I know her, okay? I know she cares so much about libraries because she believes income should not be a barrier to knowledge. I know she calls her cat a slut and doesn’t mean it as an insult. I know she likes to make up stories about strangers and she loves that women win in romance books and if a friend needs help, she’ll drop everything to drive across the fucking country to rescue a horse. And for the record, she’s not nice, but she is kind.”
I stood to face my slack-jawed brothers and stepped toward Brax. “Now give me that fucking sweater or I’ll rearrange your insides so bad it will make what Hurricane Red did to me look like nothing.”
Silently, Brax handed me her sweater and I immediately wrapped it around my shoulders and breathed in Hannah’s scent.
“Holy shit,” Adam said. “Holy shit, you’re in love with her.”
“It doesn’t matter if I am,” I muttered, turning my back to them both. “She doesn’t feel the same way.” She didn’t think she did, anyway. And even if that was just the fear talking, she deserved to have me take her at her word. She had done the same for me, over and over—until now, anyway.
You could marry me .
If I could have gone back in time and duct taped my mouth shut, I would have. Not because it wasn’t true. I hadn’t meant to say it, but I meant every fucking word of it. But she wasn’t ready to hear it.
“So what are you going to do about it?” Adam asked. “You can’t stay in here forever. It’s only been two days and it’s already starting to smell stale in here.”
“Don’t forget what the doctors said,” Brax put in. “Lying around in bed all day is only going to make everything hurt worse.”
“I’m not lying in bed. I’m rotting on the couch.”
But he wasn’t wrong. Everything hurt. It was just that none of those aches and pains in my muscles could hold a candle to the ache in my chest.
If Hannah were here, she would have been on me to make that appointment with a massage therapist. And then she’d remind me about the other promise I made her.
Fuck.
I’d promised .
I heaved to my feet with a groan.
She had broken my heart, but I’d be damned if I would break a promise to her.