Sweet Home Carolina (27 page)

“Try some of this green salad.” Zack pointed at a delicious
layering of peas and onions and other tasty tidbits. “I think it has peanut
butter and octopus tentacles in it.”

“
Ooo
, gross,” both
boys exclaimed, reaching for the bowl.

Smiling, he strolled away. He’d been a boy once. Octopus
tentacles were quite an attraction.

He checked on Amy. She was flipping hamburgers and
pretending not to notice what was happening with her ex and their children.
Mothers had eyes in the backs of their heads, though. She knew precisely what
was happening. All the better for him.

The children were not his responsibility, but removing the
competition from the playing ground was always a source of pleasure. Zack
stopped behind Josh’s swing. “Want a push? I bet you could see the stars if you
went higher.”

“Higher,” Josh yelled with delight.

Catching the swing, Zack shoved him harder, and Josh
squealed, “Higher!” Zack obliged.

Not unexpectedly, Evan stalked around the swing set and
shoved Louisa at him. “I can do that.”

“I am sure you can,” Zack murmured, taking the bundle of
dirty pink topped by blond curls from Evan’s hands. Louisa didn’t complain
about the transfer. Sucking on her thumb, she curled into Zack’s arms.

She was a heartbreaker, this one. But he was intent on
bigger game, so he needn’t worry about broken hearts. Taking the second swing, he
rocked her gently, smoothing his hand over her back, while watching Evan push
his son toward the sky. Zack figured the new shirt he’d worn just for Amy’s
admiration would suffer dirt stains from Louisa’s knees, but the pleasure of
the child’s trusting hold was worth the price.

“Not that way, Daddy,” Josh cried when his father almost
pushed him from the seat with his big hand at his back. The swing twisted
awkwardly and the boy nearly fell.

“Don’t do this often, do you?” Zack asked cheerfully.

“And you do?” Catching the chains, Evan attempted to shove
the swing from above Josh’s head.

“I climb ropes, swing swings, anything to keep in shape,”
Zack agreed with perfect honesty. “One does not need to be a child to play.”

“Men work. Children play.”

The swing careened sideways, and Zack had to abandon his
seat for fear of a crash. Josh looked a little dazed but happy, so Zack
refrained from commenting. Louisa snuggled her nose into his shoulder. “My
tummy still hurts,” she complained.

“Then let us take you back to your mama,” he suggested. “I
will learn how to flip burgers just for you,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“Nessy pa,” she agreed, happily parroting new words.

“I’ll take her.
I
know
how to flip burgers.” Having given Josh another push, Evan grabbed his daughter
from Zack’s arms.

Twisting to watch his father, Josh lost his hold on the
chains after the rough push and, with a cry of terror, flew off the seat and
slammed onto the ground, knees first.

With her brother’s first wails, Louisa puckered up and,
lifting her golden curls from Evan’s shoulders, hurled green apples and ice
cream down her father’s shirt collar.

“Honestly, Evan, you won’t die of a little upchuck. Josh is
the one who’s bleeding, not you, and he’s making less noise.”

Barely keeping a lid on her boiling temper, Amy held out a
hot washcloth to her ex while cradling a sobbing — smelly — Louisa to her
shoulder. “Just wash off his knee and put a Band-Aid on it, or hold Louisa so I
can do it.”

She didn’t even bother turning to Zack for help. The great Olympic
champion looked green and was pouring a second glass of wine at the far end of
the kitchen. He’d been doing amazingly well earlier, until the kids reached the
crying, bleeding, throwing-up part that was the downside of parenthood. She
could excuse him for not joining in. She assumed he’d had little experience in
dealing with crying children, and these weren’t his kids.

But Evan ought to be smacked upside the head with a wet
flounder for caring more about his clothes than his weeping children.

At the moment, Evan was too busy stripping off his ruined
shirt to find bandages. “This is a Joseph Abboud, dammit! I just bought it. Why
the hell are you having a party when she’s sick? She ought to be home in bed.”

“Just put the damned shirt in the wash. At least finish
cooking the hamburgers so the boys don’t start gnawing on their knuckles.”

Balancing Louisa in one arm, she rubbed the soapy washcloth
on Josh’s knee and ignored Evan as he strode half naked through the kitchen to
deposit his precious designer shirt in the laundry room. She’d grown up doing
without luxuries just as he had, but she still knew people were more important
than material things. Maybe men should nurse children so they could get in
touch with their inner nature. Providing men had any inner nature, other than a
need to succeed.

Zack remained frozen and pale near the back door,
intelligently staying out of her way. She didn’t expect him to step up to the
plate when it came to crying children. It wasn’t his responsibility. It was
Evan’s.

When she lifted her head to glare angrily at Mr. Stupid for
ignoring her second request, she noticed Zack’s handsome mouth tightening. Not
only was he looking a little green, but his usually laughing eyes looked
unhappy and stared at some point beyond her shoulder, as if not seeing the room
at all.

If she needed any reminder of their differences, the kids
had offered the perfect opportunity. Any sexual fantasies she may have
entertained fled in this crash with reality. This was simply a mundane family
scene of the sort she handled every day. It infuriated her that Evan refused to
deal with it, but Zack’s reaction was not only useless, but puzzling. First, he
had looked terrified, and now he didn’t seem to be present at all.

She was amazed he wasn’t spinning the Bentley’s wheels in
escape. “Will someone please rescue the hamburgers?” she shouted.

Abruptly drawing back to the chaos in the kitchen, Zack
finally met her gaze and set aside his glass. Looking relieved at finding an
excuse to escape, he nodded and slipped out the door.

She sighed in relief at this lifting of one small burden. He
might not handle crying children, but he did what he could, more than she could
rightfully expect.

Murmuring comforting words to her sobbing children, Amy
began the process of restoring their fragile world to normal. The men were
adults. They could damned well take care of themselves.

* * *

He was a coward.

Utterly amazed at that discovery, Zack had spent a lonely
night roaming mountain roads, unable to tolerate the haunting emptiness of
Amy’s once beautiful home. Luigi hadn’t returned from the city. And Amy had
refused to bring the children back to the house, insisting home was where their
beds were — in that tiny little apartment. Where he couldn’t go.

And he’d been relieved.

How the hell had that happened? He’d always nursed
Danielle’s bruises. He was an expert at bruises, after all. Pentathlons did not
happen without pain. He’d always been the one to get up with her when she was
ill. He hadn’t been squeamish — as Gabrielle had been — until the night they’d
died, and then he’d started seeing Danielle in his nightmares, with blood
streaming down her head, crying for him, and his heart had cracked irreparably.
He hadn’t been there for her that night. He’d arrived too late.

Crying children had sliced his cracked heart into sushi ever
since.

After ten years, the nightmares were gone, but at the
moment, his head was spinning so hard that past, present, and future were all
jumbled inside him. That had not been little Danielle getting sick last night.
He’d had nothing to do with Josh’s bleeding knee. None of it was his fault, no
more than Gabrielle’s accident had been his fault. That was guilt by
association, as the therapist said. Irrelevant.

He’d run from the painful recollection of his nightmares.

It had taken him the entire night to work that through his
head, and he’d only examined his actions because it had felt wrong to leave
Amy. He’d always been able to blithely extricate himself from personal
responsibility, but this time, he’d felt like a bloody heel.

Amy had been in grave distress last night, and like her poor
excuse for an ex-husband, Zack had
wimped
out
. He was pretty certain that was the expression the teenagers used. He’d
flipped hamburgers, talked music with Flint’s sons, and left Amy to deal with
bloody knees and sobbing angels.

He had always prided himself on his courage, but a child’s
tears left him helpless. At least he’d stayed until Flint and Joella had
returned. Evan had stormed out after a loud and furious argument they could
hear from the backyard.

Having parked the Bentley in the upper lot, empty stomach
churning, Zack walked down an early-Sunday-morning Main Street with his arms
loaded with grocery bags. The sun was just a pale orange promise on the
horizon, but he knew the path through the shadows. Even the café lights weren’t
on yet.

He’d dug out his oldest shirt, the one with the frayed
collar and cuffs he couldn’t bear to throw out because he’d worn it the day
he’d won the bid for his first job. It was his lucky shirt. He’d meant to wear
it the day he’d won the mill bid, but he’d had Amy on his mind and had
forgotten. And he’d still won. So maybe the shirt didn’t have much to do with
his success.

He had Amy on his mind a lot these days. He hoped it was
just because he was in desperate need of sex, because their lifestyles would
never suit them for anything else. In any other circumstances, he would have
backed off to regroup with a partying woman, away from the marrying kind.

But today, he felt the need to prove that he wasn’t a
coward. It mattered that Amy didn’t think of him as one.

He almost tripped over his feet.
Amy mattered
. How in hell had that happened?

If he had any sense at all, he’d run the other way before
he’d committed himself to more than the mill. What else was he liable to commit
to while under the influence of Amy?

More than he could handle.

Never
. He never
backed down.

He’d been small as a boy and had learned martial arts to
prove to the bullies in boarding school that size didn’t matter against courage.
As a pampered only child, he hadn’t been allowed by his parents to compete in
the rougher contact sports like soccer. In retaliation, he had excelled at
fencing, artillery, and equestrian athletics.

He had a history of standing up to naysayers, of tackling
impossible projects and overcoming overwhelming odds.

He’d spent these last ten years rebuilding his shattered
life to an image of his own choosing. He’d even dared to let Amy’s charming
children get close to him, without sliding into a blue funk. He hadn’t fallen
into an abyss of despair or terror after the Porsche accident.

But he’d run away because of a bloody knee and a little
vomit? Impossible. If his nightmares had returned, they were now one more fear
he must conquer.

He climbed the loft stairs and heard the cries of “Mommy!” that
indicated the household was awake. Light streamed from the apartment’s second-story
window overlooking the mountain. He assumed Amy had been up for a while, maybe
longer, if he correctly remembered nights with a sick child.

He’d had grand plans for this day, but he understood that
Amy would never leave an unwell Louisa to come out and play with him. He had an
immense amount of work he could be doing instead of coming here. He usually
used this time of day to review e-mails and return phone calls to his European
projects.

But this was Sunday. He was entitled to a day off.

Balancing the plastic bags on both arms and in his hands, he
rapped on the door. A tousle-haired Josh, still in his pajamas, opened it.

“Good morning, Josh. How’s that knee today?” Not waiting for
an invitation, Zack shouldered the door wider and strode past the wide-eyed
little boy. “Good morning, Amy,” he called over the sound of rushing water from
the apartment’s small bathroom.

He smiled broadly at a chirp of surprise from the bathroom.
The water suddenly shut off while he placed his bags on the galley kitchen
counter.

He lifted Josh to the counter so the boy could show him his
colorful bandage. Zack’s heart stuttered painfully at the towhead’s eagerness
to display his hurt and declare himself too big to cry.

Zack nodded gravely as he emptied a bag. “How would you like
to try my favorite breakfast, Sir Josh of the Brave Knee?”

“I like Cocoa Puffs,” Josh declared.

“You can have Cocoa Puffs anytime,” Zack scoffed. “Only
today can you have Zack’s Amazing Raspberry Scrumptious Cheese Crepes.”

Sensing Amy’s presence, Zack took a deep breath to steady
his nerves before he turned around.

“Crepes?” she asked. Layered curls falling over her
forehead, she expressed suspicion and surprise in a deliciously sleepy
combination.

Her unfettered curves looked wondrously sexy even in striped
seersucker boxer pajamas, and he had to rein in his sudden rush of lust with
concern.

“Coffee first,” Zack affirmed, examining the dark circles
beneath her eyes. “Do you prefer Hawaiian or Peruvian?” He produced both kinds
to show her.

Holding a pale cherub against her shoulder, she rubbed her
eyes and stared as if he were a mirage. “I prefer tea, I think. What are you
doing here?” A puzzled frown marred her brow.

“Did we not have a date for today?” Wiggling his eyebrows
mockingly, he returned to rummaging in the sacks, producing several
cellophane-wrapped boxes. “I could only find a supermarket open last night.
Their tea choices leave much to be desired. Do any of these appeal?”

She stared back and forth from the stack of tea boxes to him
until he feared she was about to heave him out upon his presumptuous ass. He
breathed a sigh of relief when she finally replied.