Loving the Chase (Heart of the Storm #1) (3 page)

Chapter Three

M
addi hadn’t changed.

She still looked fucking amazing, and now knew how to show it. Her hair was a little shorter than it used to be, but still swung dark and shiny around her shoulders. Her eyes still did that thing—going so dark when she was irritated, that the blue appeared nearly black.

Clearly, she was irritated.

Which was okay. Because it gave Zach what he needed to get through the firing squad. Somehow, the fact that Maddi seemed pissed off took some of the shock away and gave him the fire and audacity he needed to keep going.

Now it was over, and he felt like he was in a well. The blonde receptionist was talking. Her cute little mouth was moving, she was smiling and working the body language and all the things that normally tweaked Zach’s attention, but he didn’t hear her. He wasn’t there. Every ion in his body was tuned into the group of people behind him, their business chatter about legalities and making copies and arrangements and—the subject didn’t matter. Maddi’s voice was like a magnet tugging at the back of his head. How he’d managed to sit across the table from her with a straight face, uttering somewhat intelligent words, was a miracle. Actually, he had no memory of the first five minutes after she’d sat down.

He heard the group disperse, and he took a deep breath. This was ridiculous. He was reacting like someone he didn’t even recognize. He shook his head, and the receptionist whose silly name he couldn’t remember raised her eyebrows.

“No?”

Zach blinked. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

One eyebrow came down while the other stayed up. “Really? Are you that old?”

“What?”

“You already forgot what I said?” she asked, leaning over her desk a bit, showing even more of what she was clearly proud of. “I asked you if you’d like to go get something to eat, old man.”

Zach smiled.
Old.
Any other time, he would rise to that bait, turn on the charm, and go show this cocky little girl exactly what being
old
and experienced was all about. She was Zach’s kind of woman. High chemistry, low maintenance, no strings, no emotional attachments, just out for a good time. No judgment, opinions, or history.

No Madison Hayes.

That thought physically pushed him back a step. “Not today. Think I’ll take the stairs,” he said with the most charming smile he could come up with. “Nice to meet you.”

Zach turned and headed for a door with a neon “Exit” glowing above it, thinking a jog down eleven flights of steps might be just what he needed to clear his head. He’d made it down one set when he heard the door open again overhead.

“Hey.”

He stopped. “Yeah?”

Blonde Girl took the stairs slowly on the precarious heels, and from his angle, Zach could just about see all the goods. When she reached him, she wasted no time breaking personal space. She cozied right on up, and knew exactly how to fit her body against a man.

“I wasn’t actually talking about eating,” she said, her soft honeyed voice dripping with all kinds of promises.

“I know,” Zach said.

“Then why are you leaving?” she whispered, pulling him closer still.

Why
was
he leaving? Here he had a hot woman nearly humping his leg. But his head was still—

Zach pulled her hands free and backed up, bringing them to his lips. He kept his eyes on hers and maintained the fantasy. He knew how to leave a woman breathless. Except in this particular case, he was much more focused on getting down those stairs than he was on Blonde Girl’s breathing.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Sorry,” he said with a wink and two steps down.

“Facebook me,” she said, covering her disappointment with a fresh new seductive look. “Blakely Ash.”

“I don’t do Facebook,” he said, holding up his hands.

“Who doesn’t do Facebook?” Blakely scoffed. “How do you keep up with everyone?”

Zach’s
everyone
fit in his phone, and probably sadly also fit at his mother’s dinner table. He didn’t have time to be much more social than that. At least, the kind of social that required keeping up.

He was down another flight of stairs, however, before the entire sentence was even out of her mouth. But it wasn’t the woman in red he was trying to escape.

It was the woman in white and the ice daggers she’d thrown at him every time she looked his way. Those damn blue eyes and all the history in them. Eyes that knew him.

As he opened the door to the parking garage and continued the sprint to his bike, he was filled with trepidation and the need to push it away. This show—this project—couldn’t be about Maddi Hayes. She was ancient history. It was about his family and their business. About creating something that could help them grow and put what they do in everyone’s living room. That’s where his head needed to be, and where it needed to stay. He strapped on his helmet extra tight, as if that might help, and climbed on. He had a little over an hour to let the wind blow Blakely’s strong cologne off of him, and plan the approach with his brother. With his family, actually, but anyone who really knew the score knew that Eli was the gatekeeper.

Now, if he could just manage that hour without old memories invading his thought process, it would be great. He cranked the motor and felt the rumble as the big machine thundered to life.
Maddi Hayes.

Shit.

Maddi stood in the hallway as Zach said something to the receptionist and headed for the stairs. The second he was gone, she bolted the other direction, pushing open the door to the ladies room. Maddi went straight to the counter, pressing her palms against the cold black granite as two hot tears landed next to them.

“Quit, quit, quit,” she whispered as she watched the drops puddle on the granite. It wasn’t the time to be a silly melodramatic girl.

She didn’t know how the hell she’d pulled off sitting across from him so stoically. The way he’d looked at her when she’d sat down, it had almost done her in. It had taken all she had to walk away back then, on the day the tornado flattened their apartment building with her in it. To leave the area, even, because anything
Chase
was bigger than life in Cody. So she’d miraculously found the suitcase she had packed for their trip, and left that very day for her brother Monroe’s apartment in Dallas. He was out of the country serving in the military at the time, so she made herself at home until she was on solid ground again. And that ground never wandered far from the city. It certainly never wandered back to Cody.

Maddi looked up at her reflection in the mirror and laughed bitterly as more tears blinked free. She was a hot mess. Eyeliner was bleeding south, mascara was dotted north, and a fine sheen of perspiration covered her from head to toe. Not the glowing dewy kind.

Thank God the meeting had really just been a formality and the details had already been worked out, because she remembered nothing from the first ten minutes. All she could see was the absolutely shell-shocked look in Zach’s eyes and hear his voice crack a little as he tried to get his thoughts back on track.

Why had that hit her like a bulldozer?

“Shit,” she muttered, grabbing a paper towel from the dispenser and attempting repair. “You’re such an idiot. Such a—walking hormone—ugh!” She felt her eyes go hot again and tilted her head back, shoving the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth to stem the urge. “Stop!”

She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time or available space in her brain to waste energy on Zach Chase. No matter what. It didn’t matter what they had once been, and what she had seen in his eyes just five minutes earlier. She’d walked away from that for a reason. She’d run away so she never had to see him and question that decision. And that was a hundred years ago. The thin white scar curving up from the right side of her top lip drew her eyes.
Everything has a reason.

She was better than this, and too old for the drama.

“Come on Maddi, get it together,” she whispered.

Blowing out a breath, she turned on the cold water, patted her face, and held her wrists under the stream. She closed her eyes and let the cold cool her blood, her nerves, her clammy skin.

Maddi started when the door swung open, grabbing more paper towels to blot her face dry and appear normal as two twenty-somethings chatted their way in. She made for a stall to get herself together, locked the door, and leaned her head against the partition as they babbled.

Why were they all so stupid now? When she was their age—not
that
long ago—she worked hard to be taken seriously. To not be looked at as just an ass and tits. But God, to listen to these two talk about what they wore to what meeting and how they sat or leaned or moved their hair and who could get who faster—Maddi wanted to go bang their heads together until their teeth—

“I’m telling you, they’re getting it on in the back stairwell right now,” one of the airheads said, interrupting Maddi’s thoughts. “I saw her smile and do that hair thing and follow him.”

“She’s such a tease,” Airhead Number Two said.

“No, she’s told me about some of the crazy-ass shit she’s done with some of the middle management guys,” Airhead Number One said, laughing. “I promise you, there’s no teasing. She delivers.”

“Whatever, that’s gross,” Number Two said, her words mumbled as if she was putting on lipstick. “They’re old. Blakely has no standards.”

Blakely was the receptionist. Maddi tried hard not to recall seeing Zach talk to her, see her smile, or see him head for the stairs. No, no, no . . .

“Well, she stepped up today,” Number One said as their voices moved toward the door. “Did you see that guy? He wasn’t old. Well, maybe like in his thirties. Holy shit, I don’t care how old he is, I’d do him upside down in a tree if he asked. And rumor has it that he’s the next reality show they’re—”

And the door closed.

Maddi felt every nerve ending in her body light up like a million tiny fires. Drying her eyes and no longer caring what she looked like, she pushed open the stall door and the bathroom door, walking into the busy mecca of the station. Just in time to see Blakely, the perky young receptionist with Rapunzel hair and Viking boobs, enter discreetly from the stairwell door and fidget with her hair on her way to the bathroom.

Maddi forced a smile as she passed her, letting out her breath when she heard the door swing shut behind her. There was a weird ringing in her ears. Something like rage. Not at him. She had no claims on him.

It was herself she wanted to throttle. She had just had a meltdown over the love of her life, a man she said good-bye to seven years ago, who evidently just fucked the company receptionist on the back stairs five minutes after seeing her again.

She had even cried over him.

For the last damn time.

Zach walked through the front door of his mom’s house without knocking, heading past the living room, past the hall that would lead to his mother’s room and all her various hobby rooms that used to be their bedrooms, into the big open kitchen where he snatched a chip and dunked it into a bowl of nearly-gone picante and cream cheese dip. He could hear the voices in the next room—the family room, as Louella Chase liked to call it. The giant room that Zach loved the most, even as a kid, because it was the one room that fit them all. A long, handmade solid-wood table that he and his dad had made together filled the front of it, where everyone ate, and the rest was random comfortable furniture and soft rugs over the original wood floor. A stone fireplace took up the middle of the back wall, flanked with huge windows on either side that looked out on twin giant oak trees.