With a wince, he sat up in bed. “Brooke-”
“No.” She shook her head. “Please don’t say anything.”
“I’m sorry.”
Oh, God. “Don’t be silly. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Yes, I do. I’m sorry that I can’t give you what you want.”
Casually as she could, she slipped into her shoes and attempted to wrangle her hair. “And what is it you think I want?”
Reaching out, he grabbed her hand again, stilling her frenetic movements, waiting until she looked at him. “Love,” he said quietly.
She managed a light laugh. She realized she might be pathetically needy when it came to that particular emotion, but love hadn’t exactly been prominent in her life. She’d come here to Santa Rey a little bit in limbo, but the one thing she’d known was she’d wanted that to change. But she’d made Zach a promise not to get attached, not to have messy emotions.
She’d failed on both counts.
“Brooke.” He stroked a strand of hair from her face, all the while holding her gaze with his so that she couldn’t look away to save her life. In these eyes were affection, heat…and a brutal honesty. “I don’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you, but-”
“It’s not your fault-”
“I wanted a physical relationship with you, you know that. And now I’m holding back, you know that, too. It’s just that if you’re going to add love into the mix-” He grinned ruefully. “Well, you can’t. I don’t seem to have the parts required to do love. So you can’t fall, not for me.”
Her throat tight, she nodded. “I know.”
Only she also knew it was too damn late.
Chapter 15
Zach slept on and off for two days. Or rather he tossed and turned for two days. He spent his third night at home surrounded by the guys, grateful not to still be in the hospital like Blake, who’d suffered a more serious head trauma, his leg broken in four places, and two cracked ribs, and was by all accounts cranky as all hell.
Zach was glad for the company. Sort of. But mostly he kept thinking about the fact that Brooke hadn’t come back, and that this was her last week in town, and that he was an idiot.
“Why are you moping around like you lost your puppy?” Sam asked.
“I’m not.”
The guys all exchanged a careful-with-the-deluded-patient look, and he sighed.
Yeah. He was moping.
Because he’d sent away the best thing that had ever happened to him.
“You’ve got pizza, beer and us,” Eddie joked. “What else could you need?”
“Brooke.” This from Aidan, his mouth full of pizza and a knowing look in his eyes. “He wants Brooke.”
“No.” Sam shook his head. “Our Zach’s not much of a repeater.”
Zach opened his mouth, but in lieu of absolutely nothing to say in his defense, shut it again.
“If I had Brooke looking at me the way she looks at you, I’d become a repeater,” Dustin said as he reached for more pizza.
Yeah, but Zach was a moron. Brooke wouldn’t be looking at him like that again. He’d made sure of that.
“You’re only saying so because you got laid by the woman of your dreams,” Sam pointed out. “Cristina.”
“Cristina?” Zach blinked. This was news. “Since when?”
“Since last night,” Sam informed him. “Dustin fixed her car and then she slept with him.”
Not one to kiss and tell, Dustin tried to hold back his stupid grin and failed.
“Cristina’s not going to settle down,” Aidan warned Dustin. “She’s not the type.”
“She might, for the right guy,” Dustin said, pushing up his glasses. “It could happen.”
“You’re asking to be crushed,” Aidan told him. “Like a grape. Again.”
“Actually,” Zach said quietly, “you never know.”
“Then why aren’t you seeing Brooke?” Aidan asked. “With only one week in town left, that makes her the perfect woman in my eyes.”
“So why don’t you date her?” Eddie jeered.
“Maybe I will.”
Suddenly the pizza Zach had consumed sat like a lead weight in his gut. He tried to picture Brooke moving on and dating any one of these guys. His friends.
Then he had to admit it wasn’t the pizza weighing his gut down. “No.”
Aidan raised a brow. “What?”
“Nothing.” Zach tossed his pizza aside. “She can date whoever she wants.”
“Really?” Aidan said dryly. “So you wouldn’t care if I ask her out?”
Zach opened his mouth, shut it, scrubbed a hand over his eyes and sighed. “We’ve been friends for a long time.”
“Years.”
“Yeah. And I’ve always said you should go out with whoever floats your boat, but…”
“But?”
“But if you go out with Brooke, I’ll have to hurt you.”
Dustin laughed and clamped him on the shoulder in commiseration.
Aidan just arched a brow that said, You’re in deep.
Didn’t he know it.
Later that day, the bad news came from Zach’s doctor-he wasn’t cleared to go back to work until his cast came off, which was a minimum of three weeks away.
Three more weeks without work just might kill him, not that the doctor seemed to care, and not that the chief seemed to, either, when he called to check on Zach.
“Enjoy the time off. We’ll be waiting for you.”
“I want to come in,” Zach said. “I could handle light duty-”
“No. We want you back, Zach, but sound.”
Sound. What the hell did that mean?
But as the mind-numbing boredom set in, Zach had to admit he didn’t feel so sound. He sat on his couch with the remote, but nothing on daytime TV interested him. Nothing on his bookshelf interested him. Hell, even the porn didn’t interest him. He couldn’t go surfing because of the cast and bandages. He couldn’t work.
All he could do, unfortunately, was think. Way too much thinking going on. About Brooke, about…Brooke.
It was another whole day before he remembered.
The arson fires. He’d actually come close to figuring something out…something really important. He called Aidan. “Where was I with the arson stuff?”
“Close to screwing up your career.”
“Come on. We’ve fought hundreds of fires, and out of all of those, I’m only talking about four-”
“Five.”
“-So how in the hell is that screwing up my career-”
“Five fires.”
“What?”
Aidan sighed. “Let’s get real crazy, okay? I think that the warehouse fire was arson.”
“Why?”
“Gut feeling. Too many things went wrong. And guess what Tommy told me when I mentioned it?”
