Author: Bella Andre

He was always touching her.

She forced herself to move toward him, rather than away. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Something that happened out there on the track.”

“I’m alive,” was his offhand reply. “Everything’s great.”

His eyes were so cold, so shuttered. All she’d wanted was to have him back, but not like this.

Not when he suddenly seemed to be a shell of the man she’d thought he was.

The pain in her stomach grew bigger, but the need to have the real Zach Sullivan back—her Zach—was bigger. Big enough that she kept moving closer.

“I can’t imagine how it must have felt to be in that car, trying to get out while it burned. But you walked away from it.”

Whenever she’d gotten stuck in darkness, he’d always fought for her. He’d made her laugh, he’d held her when she cried, he’d taught her how to trust again, and to believe in love when she’d thought it wasn’t possible.

Now she needed to fight for him.

“Talk to me, Zach. Tell me what’s going on.” The word please was on her tongue when the doorbell rang.

She could barely stand to watch as Zach shoved all of the puppy’s things into a grocery bag, picked up Cuddles, and pushed both the bag and the puppy into his brother’s arms.

The little Yorkie whimpered as she looked from Gabe to Zach.

“You sure about this?” Gabe asked his brother.

“I agreed to keep her for two weeks. Time’s up.”

Gabe’s eyes moved from his brother to Heather. She could see worry in them, and disappointment.

The same disappointment that was choking her until she could hardly breathe around it.

“Summer told me you needed a dog because she thought you were lonely. She was so happy that you were going to keep her. She thought you wanted the puppy.”

Heather waited for Zach to soften at the mention of the little girl...or for him to at least acknowledge the way Cuddles was struggling to get from his brother’s arms into Zach’s.

“I don’t need a dog.”

He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to for Heather to hear what he was really saying.

I don’t need anyone else.

She wanted to be anywhere but there, with Gabe’s eyes taking in her devastation. But she was glad she’d stayed, glad she’d actually witnessed Zach doing what he was doing, because it was the only way she could ever have made her heart face the truth.

She didn’t realize Atlas had gotten up from his nap on his dog bed and moved to her side until she felt his big head nudge her hand. She put her hands on his neck and shoulders, letting his steady warmth give her the strength she so desperately needed.

Hadn’t she known the other shoe would drop at some point? That it had to because it always did?

But, oh, how she’d wanted to believe that it wouldn’t.

Just as badly as she’d wanted to believe in Zach.

He closed the door on his brother, walked back into the room, picked up the shoe Cuddles had been chewing on, and dropped it into the garbage can with a thud.

All the while the puppy’s cries could be heard as his brother put her in the car.

“I told you everything.” Her voice shook with emotion she couldn’t contain. “I loved you enough to tell you my secrets. To trust you with them.” And with her heart. Which was why she had to try one more time to see if he would be honest with her about what was hurting him. “I know something’s wrong, something to do with today’s crash.” She clenched her hands at her sides to keep from reaching for him, because if he pushed her away she would shatter into a thousand pieces on his kitchen floor. “Won’t you trust me, too?”

He went completely still and for a moment as she stared into his bleak eyes, she thought he might be about to tell her why he was acting so weird.

Only, when he finally spoke, it was just to say, “Trust me, it’s better this way. It was only a matter of time before something happened to her at the shop.” He paused. “Or before something happened to me. Like today, out at the racetrack. If I hadn’t been able to get out of the car, they would have taken her back anyway. Better if it happens now, before she gets any more attached to me.”

She blinked at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “Wait a minute. Are you actually trying to convince me you got rid of the puppy for her own good?”

When he nodded, she shook her head in disbelief. “That’s crazy. Can’t you see how much she loves you? And that she doesn’t want to be with anyone else on the off chance that you’ll crash a race car one day?”

But with every word she spoke, she could see Zach shutting down more and more. To the point where it was like talking to the cement wall he’d driven into today.

Only this time, it was her heart going up in flames as he shut her out completely.

Heather had thought she’d found him; the one guy who could prove to her that they weren’t all the same. But she’d never know if she had or not, would she? Because he wouldn’t talk to her.

Just like her father, Zach made all the rules and she was expected to follow them.

This was why she’d been trying so hard to resist him, to argue away his love...and her own.

Atlas silently moved beside her as she found her bag and put her things into it. She walked into the bedroom to retrieve the extra clothes she’d started to leave at Zach’s house. The bed mocked her, told her what she hadn’t wanted to believe was true.

It had just been sex.

Friends with benefits...only, maybe they hadn’t even been friends when it came right down to it.

Zach’s eyes were dark as he watched her gather up her things, a muscle jumping in his jaw, right beneath one of the scratches she was so tempted to reach out and run a finger over. Just to be close to him one more time.

“You’re leaving?”

Before tonight, Zach would never have asked her if she was going. He simply wouldn’t have let her go, would have pulled whatever tricks out of his sleeve to convince her she was better off staying with him.

“I’ve got a big backlog of work at the office.”

Work had piled up due to all the time she’d been spending with Zach. It had seemed worth it at the time, the tradeoff between love and growing her business.

Worth it, that is, until the mirage of love disappeared like a puff of smoke.

“You’re that pissed off at me for giving the damn puppy back?” At last, she could see the veneer he’d tried to put around himself cracking. But it was too late. Especially when he said, “It wasn’t even my dog. I never asked for it. They just dumped it on me.”

It.

“No, I’m not pissed off.” And she was being perfectly honest. She was far more heartbroken than she was angry. “Just like you said, she’ll be fine.” Heather would make sure of it, would personally assign her best trainer to work with Megan, Summer, and Gabe so that Cuddles could forget that Zach Sullivan ever existed.

“Then why are you leaving?”

Because she needed to save herself while there was still a ghost of a chance that she could recover.

Because if he could give away a puppy she’d thought he absolutely adored without so much as flinching as it cried for him, then she wasn’t sure she knew who he was at all.

Because she didn’t think she rated a whole heck of lot more than the puppy had to the man standing in front of her.

Because, in the end, it turned out love wasn’t enough. Just like she’d always known.

But since she could no longer trust him enough to say any of that, all that came was an honest, “I’m glad you’re okay, Zach.”

So glad, in fact, that she’d felt like her own life had been saved out there on the race track when he’d scrambled free of the burning car.

She was about to start crying, knew any second she’d be falling apart.

Heather couldn’t do that here. Not in front of Zach. She couldn’t let her guard down around him ever again.

All those years ago, when she’d found out what her father had done, she’d vowed to never feel that way again, to never let anyone make her feel so terribly unloved, so unimportant. She’d renew that vow, make sure she stuck by it in the future.

She needed to get out of there looking like she was still in one piece and then, when she was far, far away from him, she’d deal with the shattered insides beneath her skin.

When Zach had nearly died she’d finally admitted to herself just how much she loved him. She’d finally confessed down deep in her soul that she loved him more deeply, more truly than she’d ever thought she could love a man.

Only to have him prove her cynicism about love to be right.

She hated him for that, but hated herself more for falling for him.

“Good luck with the rest of your charmed life.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Zach’s life had turned into a god damned train wreck.

After he put the wrong fluid in a customer’s transmission and it burned to a crisp, his staff wouldn’t let him near any of the cars in the garage. He did something on his computer that gave it a virus and his executive assistant asked him, politely but firmly, to please stay away from the rest of the computers in the office while she got the hard drive repaired. His vocabulary shrank to a handful of curse words when reporters covering his accident at the race track called to ask what he thought about the pictures of Ryan and Smith holding Heather back from the track as his car burned, and now the press was pissed at him, too.

On top of everything else, Gabe had ratted him out to the entire family. As soon as Lori and Sophie learned that he’d given the puppy back—along with a clear visual of the horror on Heather’s face that Gabe had likely recounted to all of them in vivid Technicolor—they began to tag-team him with messages wanting to know what his problem was.

Lori went so far as to threaten him with bodily harm if he continued to blow it with Heather. On her last message she’d made it perfectly clear that she had plenty of brothers already, so it was an easy decision for her to stick with Heather if he was going to keep being too much of a fool to figure out how to love her right.

“We all know how you feel about her,” was what she’d said in her most recent message. Loud enough that her voice was still ringing in his ears. “Heather and I were getting to be friends, but now she won’t call me back. Jerk.”

He was tempted to delete all future messages from his siblings without listening to them, but he couldn’t. Not if they were calling to say they’d heard from Heather.

But no one said a word about seeing her, not even Gabe, who he figured was doing training sessions with Cuddles at Top Dog.

It wasn’t even my goddamned dog, was what he kept telling himself over and over. They shouldn’t be getting their panties in such a twist over my giving it back to Summer.

Only, all the old lies he’d always told himself weren’t working anymore. Not when he knew exactly why they were all so angry with him.

Because he’d lost Heather.

Hell. It was worse than that.

He’d convinced Heather to walk to the edge of a hundred-story building, went out of his way to convince her she was safe...and then he’d shoved her off.

God, that last night at his house he’d hated seeing her spark fade, hated even more that he was the cause of it, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t just shut up and pull her into his arms the way he was dying to.

Not when he’d been gripped with the need to save them both before they went too far, too deep, into a forever that could—or couldn’t, depending on the same bad luck and shitty fate that had befallen his father—be out there for them.

Exactly one week after Heather had left him, Zach pulled over in front of his mother’s house. His tire jammed into the curb with a sharp pop.