Zack was admiring the slope of Shelby’s breasts over room service breakfast mid-morning Saturday—and enjoying the hell out of getting chastised for where his eyes kept roaming—when her cell phone rang. She yanked her shirt on—much to his disappointment—and bounced off the bed to grab it.
“Alexander? What’s wrong?”
Alexander.
Zack really hated that guy. For a lot of things, including interrupting their morning, but most recently for not being very good in bed. A woman like Shelby deserved to be loved thoroughly and needed it regularly. She did too much for her family to not be satisfied. And he was positive she hadn’t been satisfied.
“No, I left you the insurance card,” she said. “Why?”
She got a crinkle between her eyes when she talked to her ex. An annoyed, about-to-start-counting crinkle.
Zack hadn’t heard her count since… huh.
He couldn’t remember. It was earlier this week, but that was all he had.
“You’re where? Why?” she repeated.
If her ex had even half a brain, he’d answer.
“He has what? When did the fever start? Wait… what? And you didn’t think to call the doctor last night? I swear to sweet baby cappuccinos, Alexander, if his appendix bursts, you are never seeing my babies again. You call me and tell me where they take you, because I’m fixin’ to come on down there myself. Right now.”
She pulled the phone from her ear and pounded on the screen, thumbs flying.
Zack was already on his feet. “Shelby?”
She kept thumbing. “What’s the airport code here?”
“Airport?”
“SAV. Right.”
“Shelby. What’s wrong? Is it Braden?”
She gaped at her phone. “Four o’clock?” she said to the screen. “I can’t wait until four o’clock for a flight.”
Zack reached for his shirt. His heart was pounding in a weird rhythm he’d never felt before, and an abnormal panic had his skin quivering. “Shelby. I can give you a ride.”
She swung around to face him, almost as if she’d forgotten he was there.
No—as if he didn’t belong. “That’s real nice of you, but Eglin’s at least seven hours from here, and then you’d have to drive back to Gellings, and—”
“I don’t mind.” He really didn’t.
“Zack, honey, there’s no need for me to ruin your fun time. You stay and enjoy.” Her lip quivered. She blinked quickly and visibly swallowed, then crossed to the bathroom. “I’ll get a taxi to the airport.”
Screw fun. Shelby’s son was in trouble. The dark-haired little guy who tossed balls and airplanes over the fence whenever Zack walked outside. Zack hopped into his pants and followed her to the bathroom. “Hell with a taxi, I’m driving you. Braden has appendicitis? Is that what I heard?”
She tried to squeeze past, but he blocked her way.
For the first time since her phone rang, she looked him in the eye. And the only thing he saw was raw, angry, scared—no, terrified—mama bear. “Get out of my way before I have to show you how my daddy taught me to hit like a girl.” She fisted her hand and growled at him. “And trust me, Sergeant Sugarbuns, it’s gonna hurt.”
Something was hurting, and it wasn’t anything Zack had ever felt before. Not his pride exactly. He didn’t have room to be insulted—what had he blabbered yesterday? That he wanted to see the world? Nothing holding him back or tying him down?
She was giving him an easy out. Exactly what he should’ve wanted.
But this was more than being insulted that she didn’t think he could take a day to drive her to the Panhandle so she could be with her sick baby.
This felt like being completely cut out of her life. And he was insulted that she didn’t want him there.
He wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t an officer like her twat of an ex-husband. He wouldn’t have known any better that Braden should’ve gone to the doctor last night.
He was a useless, selfish ass who only cared about seeing the world that had been here for millennia instead of embracing the world that existed inside each generation that inhabited it.
“I’m driving to Florida whether you’re with me or not,” he said.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Zack,” she said, his name soft and gentle and so un-Shelbylike that a quivery panic erupted in his chest, right about where he would’ve sworn his heart should’ve been. She opened those hazel eyes, a plea and a helplessness and a stubbornness all jumbled together in there.
“Don’t say it,” he growled. “Pack your bags. And then get in the car.”
And when she did, without any further argument, everything in his world shifted out of alignment.
The Shelby he knew didn’t take orders. The man he wanted to be wouldn’t issue her orders. But if she was willing to go, on his terms, it meant one of two things—either he’d broken her, or Braden was in bad, bad shape.
And he didn’t know which scared him worse.
They stuck to the interstate for faster driving. And it was among the tensest seven hours of Zack’s life.
Shelby said hardly anything. Not to him, anyway, no matter what he tried. She texted on her phone most of the way—her girlfriends, he assumed. And when she did talk, it was on the phone with her ex. They were approaching Tallahassee—still three hours from Eglin—when Shelby got the news that Braden was finally heading into surgery.
She didn’t cry, but she did hold up a don’t speak hand signal every time Zack opened his mouth.
It was almost six o’clock when Zack finally pulled up to the hospital. He parked as close as he could get to the door, but when he turned off the ignition, Shelby put a hand on his arm.
“Thank you,” she said.
You’re dismissed.
She didn’t say it, but Zack heard it all the same. “Shelby—”
She cut him off with a plea from those beautiful hazel eyes, broken and worried and defeated. “Zack, you’re more than I could’ve hoped for, and I had a really nice time. Thank you for last night. I—I needed that. And thank you for driving me here. But now I need to go be Supermom. My babies come first. They’re all I have left. It’s not you. It’s my life.”
And he didn’t fit.
He shouldn’t have wanted to fit.
But he did. He wanted to go inside with her and check on Braden. He wanted to help Hailey.
He wanted to hold Shelby’s hand and promise her everything would be okay. And then, when everything was better, he wanted to take her back to Savannah.
He wanted to hear her laugh on a powered glider over the Atlantic. He wanted her to sass him instead of admit that the Spanish moss on all the old gnarled trees was pretty.
He wanted her to put some life in his life. Some challenge. Some perspective.
“I’ll come in with you,” he said.
She shook her head. “That’ll get old, Sergeant Wanderlust. You’re fixin’ to move and I’m fixin’ to keep making my life.” She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “You go enjoy the beach. One of us should.”
“Shelby—”
“Don’t make this harder, Zack.” She lifted her chin, but there was a wobble to it. And he could tell by the flash of pride in her eyes that she didn’t want him to see it. “Just let me go.”
Even though it went against every impulse and urge he possessed, he did.
He let her go into the hospital by herself.
And he felt like the biggest jackass on the face of the planet when he did. Worse than her ex-husband. Worse than anyone.
Not because he let her go.
But because he didn’t deserve to go with her.
Shelby rushed into the hospital on wobbly knees.
She wouldn’t cry. She was a Dukakis, dangnabbit.
There was no crying. She’d made it the last seven hours without crying, she wouldn’t start now.
Her phone dinged when she entered the hospital.
Out of surgery. Went well. Hadn’t ruptured. Expect full recovery.
She sank into an orange leather couch inside the door, dropped her head in her hands, and then she let the tears flow.
For her poor sweet baby boy. For her baby girl, who was probably confused and scared.
For herself.
Zack Montgomery would’ve made a very good boyfriend. He was attentive, he was fun, but most of all, he was better at taking care of people than he knew.
He’d driven her all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across nearly the whole of Florida so she could get to Braden. He was a good man. Next to her daddy, he may be the best man she’d ever known. The kind of man she wanted Braden to be when he grew up.
One day, Zack would find a woman who rocked him to his foundation. He wouldn’t see her coming, but then she’d be there, free and perfect and childless, and they’d travel off to see the world together.
And Shelby would stay home and raise her babies.
But after she had both her babies home, she’d do a few things differently. She’d take them places on the weekends. Zack was right. The kids could learn to travel. She could teach them. She had her girlfriends, after all. They went camping sometimes. Or up to Atlanta to the zoo or the aquarium or the Coke museum. They’d help her learn how to show her babies the world.
But her girlfriends couldn’t give her what Zack had last night.
They couldn’t make her feel adored. Powerful. Womanly. Worthy. Not the way a man could.
Not the way Zack did.
But Zack wasn’t hers. He never had been—not really—and so Shelby stood up, dusted herself off, dashed to the bathroom to wash away evidence of her tears, and went in search of the surgical floor.
And when she found Hailey sitting with Alexander’s mother, she squeezed her sweet girl until she burped. And when she finally saw Braden in the recovery room, loopy and half-asleep and confused, she cried again.
She hated crying.
But what she hated more was that she wanted a shoulder to cry on.
One shoulder in particular.
He’d be out at a bar. Or at the beach in Destin. Playing volleyball.
Flirting with single, available, childless women.
Women who needed a lot less than Shelby did. Women who demanded less than Shelby did.
Women who were easier than Shelby was.
Shelby slept in Braden’s hospital room that night, and she stayed at an old friend’s house for the next three nights until Alexander got tired of having her in his way and told her to go home.
And to go ahead and take the kids with her.
Which she did—gladly—because three days with him had turned her back into the person she didn’t like much at all.
The problem was, she couldn’t remember who she was back home in Georgia anymore either.
Zack didn’t go to the beach after he left the hospital. He didn’t want the beach. He didn’t want a bar. He didn’t want to go paragliding over the Gulf of Mexico.
He wanted—
Something.
Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Or possibly something he was afraid to name.
In any case, he drove three more hours back to Gellings, crashed hard Saturday night, and spent Sunday finishing the cabinets.
And watching for visitors to Shelby’s house. Penelope might need Zack if Shelby didn’t get home Sunday night as they’d originally planned. Or he might find one of her friends willing to tell him how Shelby and her babies were.
Sunday morning, the dishwater blonde he recognized as Mari Belle stopped by with a dark-haired preteen girl in tow. Sunday afternoon, Zack was out back, racing in the thick heat to get the last two cabinets finished before the looming thunderclouds erupted around him, when Shelby’s back door opened and Penelope darted out with Anna and Jackson on her heels.
Anna was chatting about something, Jackson nodding while sweeping a quick glance around the yard, his sharp gaze lingering on Zack.
He wasn’t a slacker officer type, Zack would give him that. Zack nodded to the major and held himself back from blurting out a desperate plea for news on Shelby and Braden.
“Oh, hey, Zack,” Anna called. “Having a nice weekend?”
Yeah. If nice was having hot lava in his gut and an unshakeable vision of Shelby hugging the life out of her little boy. “Just peachy,” he called. “How’s Shelby?”
Jackson cut him a knowing look, but if Anna heard the insuppressible worry in his voice, she hid it well. She crossed the yard to lean on the fence. “She’s coping. Braden’s on the mend. She sounds tons better today than she did last night. Poor thing. But you know Shelby. She’ll be fine, because she won’t let herself be anything else.”
“She’ll pretend to be fine,” he said. “And she’ll be stubborn as a goat and refuse to admit when she needs help.”
Anna’s honey-blonde brows went up, and a smile teased at the corners of her lips. “We must know different Shelbys.”
“Or you don’t know her at all,” Zack fired back, just like a teenage girl in the throes of teenage girl relationship drama.
Damn woman was zapping his manhood.
Anna’s lips spread in a full smile. “I’m teasing. We know the same Shelby.”
Zack clamped his jaw shut and breathed through his nose.
“Go easy on him, Anna Grace,” Jackson said. “Not easy coming to terms with losing something a man doesn’t know he wants.”
“I can appreciate that,” Anna said. She gave Zack a smile that could’ve been a sympathetic pat on the head. “But don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.” She turned back around. “All done, Penelope? Let’s get you back inside before the rain comes. Nice seeing you, Zack.”
Nice. Right. If she considered torturing him nice.
“Braden’s really okay?” Zack asked.
He didn’t know the little boy as well as he thought he should, but he appreciated the kid’s love of airplanes and of sticking grass and twigs in his sister’s hair. And Hailey—she reminded him so much of a couple of his nieces that he wished he was heading home for the Fourth.
“He’s going to be fine,” Anna said. “Probably spoiled rotten for a little bit, but then, what good is appendicitis if you don’t get presents and treats out of it?” She waved at him over her shoulder. “Hope the rain holds off until you’re done.”
Didn’t matter to Zack one way or another.
Not when it was already storming in his soul.