Rhythm of My Heart: Speed, Book 3 (18 page)

“Turns out…” Again, she waved her hand vaguely in the air. “Turns out, the window I’d been staring in saved my life. It, um, left me scarred. Really badly scarred, and it cost me heaps of blood, but…” She ran her fingers over her cheek. “It saved my life. If I hadn’t been looking in it, I’d have been standing a hundred meters down the road.” She pointed, as if staring that hundred meters down the road. “With my brother.”

Zachary followed her finger, looked in that direction, and then comprehended what she’d said. That’s when he clicked. That’s when he remembered his walk along Coogee Beach in Sydney, the monument built on the cliff tops honoring the more than eighty Australians who’d lost their lives in the Bali bombings.

Nausea slammed into him.

Christ.

Fuck.

No. Just, no.

“Eve…” He had to clear his throat. “Your brother?” He shouldn’t feel like this. Shouldn’t be so completely gutted.

She shook her head. “Lochie didn’t stop to look in that window. He just went on ahead. Without me.”

Tears prickled the back of his eyes, and God help him, Zachary was not a crier. His throat closed, forcing air to wheeze through it.

Talk.

He needed to say something. Needed to ask questions, comfort her. But fuck, he couldn’t. He wasn’t capable.

Last night, backstage, Zachary had sensed a connection between himself and Eve. It had grown over the last twenty-four hours. But this now, his reaction to her story, this was something a whole lot bigger than a connection. This was something inexplicable.

Eve’s grief was his own.

“Parents?” he finally managed to croak. “Sister?”
Bree
. She hadn’t been with her brother. Couldn’t have been. She’d spoken to Eve this morning.

“They found me. Found the glass too.”

“Did…” Jesus, this was hard. “Did they find your brother?”

Her voice was whisper soft. “No.”

Still Eve stared where she’d pointed, one hundred meters down the road of her memories. Did she see him? Her brother? Standing there? Or…

Nausea struck again, violently.

Or…not standing there anymore?

“The DVI officers did,” Eve said vaguely. “Days later.”

“DVI?” Fuck, he didn’t want to know.

“Disaster Victim Identification.”

Zachary offered to carry her back to the hotel. Repeatedly. But Eve suspected her legs were steadier than his.

She’d had eleven years to come to terms with the bombings. Eleven years to learn to live with her scars and without her brother. Zachary had only minutes to comprehend the horrific details she’d shared with him. He was as shocked as she’d known he’d be.

The walk back was slow, very slow, because Zachary kept stopping, shaking his head and swearing.

“What happened after?”

“They flew me to Perth. The hospitals in Bali were full. They couldn’t cope with that kind of…devastation. My injuries were serious enough to get me on a plane, and my sister, who’s three years older, came with me. My parents stayed in Kuta to search for Lochie.” It no longer amazed her that she could discuss the bombings yet remain so distanced from it.

Her many hordes of therapists had helped her understand. The posttraumatic stress made it impossible for her to remember with anything besides emotional detachment. If she’d continued to relive it with such intense emotion—as she had for weeks and months after the explosions—she simply would not have been able to cope from day to day.

The disassociation was her way of getting on with her life. Accepting what had happened and moving on.

“Briana, my sister, faced endless press interviews. She didn’t exactly love them. They were…difficult. Upsetting. But she did them in case anyone recognized Lochlan and came forward with news about him. And when I was well enough, I was targeted by the press too. Not in a bad way. There was no harm intended. Just a need to show everyone how tragic, how terrible the bombings had been. But after…after they found my brother—” or what had been left of him, “—we couldn’t face the questions anymore. Couldn’t face the interviews. We asked for privacy, and they tried. They did. But every day it seemed there was that one reporter who got in, anyway. Who just had one small question for us.”

Zachary growled a throaty growl. “And I thought I’d had it bad with the press.”

“Don’t compare the two,” she told him logically. “That’s not fair to you. Your experience was different. They tried to crucify you. With me, my family, I think they were just as horrified by our experiences as we were. They looked for the human angle of the bombings. And their interest passed, in time. After the funeral.”

Pain stabbed her belly.

Okay, so Lochie’s death was the one thing she hadn’t learned to detach herself from. She still missed him every day.

Right, focus on something else. Anything else.

“That’s when I had my first vision,” she told him.

“After the bombs?”

“When I got back to Perth. They’d drugged me on the trip home because the pain was so bad. I woke up when they took me off the plane. Bree was there, holding my hand. Initially I thought I was still dreaming, because when the vision struck, it was one of me and Bree and Lochie playing when we were kids. They were building with Lego, and I was meticulously taking their buildings apart. But the memory wasn’t mine. It couldn’t have been. I was too young to remember it. Maybe only one or two.”

“You were seeing the memory from your sister’s perspective?”

“I was. It took a very long time for that realization to sink in. It made no sense at all. None. But every time Bree held my hand, something similar happened. And she held my hand a lot then. We needed each other. Needed that contact.”

“Did she know what was happening?”

“We discussed it, heaps. Decided it was just the drugs. I was on ridiculous painkillers, strong stuff. We both thought I was hallucinating. Tripping on the morphine or something.” Only she hadn’t been. And the visions weren’t limited to Bree. When a nurse took her pulse one morning, and held her hand in the process, Eve had suddenly seen identical twin boys in her mind.

Not understanding the power of what she’d seen and how she’d seen it, Eve had asked about the twins. The nurse had left without saying another word. Eve hadn’t seen her again.

“It took a while to figure the hand-holding triggered the visions, and even longer to recognize the symptoms—the tingles in my palm, the electricity shooting up my arm.” She shrugged. “I guess there’s no better teacher than experience.” That same experience had taught her to give up the affectionate practice of holding hands.

“How did you deal with it all? You were so damn young.”

“Therapy, Pacey. Years and years of counseling. I am very in touch with my inner child. She and I?” She held two fingers together. “We’re like this. Best mates.” Although the counselors had never understood the whole hand-holding-vision thing, and after a while she’d stopped talking about it. It had just been easier to keep that talent to herself instead of being subjected to their extensive psychoanalysis.

They reached the hotel and Zachary took her up to his suite. When the words and the conversation ran out, he spent the rest of the evening making slow, sweet love to her.

He handled her with such exquisite tenderness, Eve’s throat clogged with the tears she’d refused to shed while telling him about Bali.

He held her after, held her very close. “Thank you. For telling me about Bali. About your brother. For letting me in.”

Eve had never felt more adored, more protected. It had been a very long time since she’d spoken to anyone besides her family about Lochie, but telling Zachary had seemed…right. Something about him made her want to share her innermost thoughts, her emotions. She was, she knew, more than a little in love with the man. He’d burrowed into her heart and made a permanent place for himself there.

Which would have been perfectly wonderful if Eve didn’t know she still hid such a massive part of herself from him. Though she’d let him in and shared her trauma and her past, she’d still hidden her face. Zachary had yet to see the real Eve Andrews.

But did she need to show him her scars? Did she need to reveal the truly ugly side of herself? Couldn’t she just leave Zachary with the illusion that she wasn’t a monster?

Because as wonderful as he was and as beautifully as he held her now, this closeness between them, this love that she felt, could never lead anywhere.

In the end, Zachary was fated to be with another. She’d seen it in his vision—and it made her chest hurt now.

Eve knew, perhaps better than anyone, that visions were never wrong.

She lay with him for a long while, long after he’d fallen asleep, treasuring the time spent in his arms. When she could put it off no longer, when sleep tugged at her eyelids, she slipped from his bed, dressed and made her way to her own room.

When morning came and Zachary remembered the bath, Eve did not want to be near him. Not when the water he used to fill the tub could expose every one of the scars she’d chosen not to reveal.

It was Eve, all showered and made up, who banged on Zachary’s door the next morning. And when he opened it, looking sultry and sleepy, the sight of him made her heart leap straight into her throat.

He spent a good minute or two chastising her for leaving, and a good hour or two making love to her. But at ten they were forced to go their separate ways. Zachary had to prepare for the concert that night, and Eve had a birthday party she’d promised to attend—as a princess.

He kissed her thoroughly, promising to miss her the entire time they were apart. She left after pocketing a pair of Zachary’s green contact lenses, thinking they’d add a nice touch to her princess outfit, and smiling at how perfectly mushy her sexy drummer could be.

Then Jake drove her to her sister’s house, where Eve was drawn straight into the arms of her sister’s family. Bree left Hannah in her dad’s care, locked the two of them in her room, and as Eve transformed herself into a fairytale princess, complete with tiara, wig and Zachary’s contacts, Bree drilled her about roses, visions, blowjobs and Jonah Speed.

Zachary spent more than an hour missing his cues and fucking up one song after another.

His concentration was shot to hell, and damn it, he missed Eve. Wanted her with him. Wanted her beside him now. Today. And tomorrow. And the next day.

Jesus, he never wanted to be apart from her. That connection between them? It was stronger than ever.

As he banged an out-of-tune riff on his drums and was vaguely aware that the rest of the band had stopped to glare at him, he pictured Eve, motionless on the ground, shattered glass lying around her and a piece of the broken window lodged in her chest—saving her life in a grotesque twist of fate.

He missed a beat and dropped a drumstick as the imagined dark patch beside her became a pool of Eve’s blood.

Never had he felt so impotent. So fucking helpless. Eve had been injured in a bomb blast, lost her brother to the attack, and there was not a damn thing Zachary could do about it. Even now, Eve was the one who’d helped him deal with it. He hadn’t made a dime’s worth of difference—except to make her relive the whole fucking experience.

“Zachary!” It was Luke who snapped him back to reality.

He blinked.

The need to protect Eve, to keep her safe, had him itching. He never wanted to let her out of his sight again, never wanted her in a position where she could be a victim again.

And yet…and yet… Fuck, he’d made her a victim of a different kind. A victim of the paparazzi.

Yeah, big difference between a bomb blast and a kiss with a celebrity, but still.

“What the hell is going on with you this morning?” Luke demanded.

Zachary rubbed his now-empty fingers together. He swore he felt the stickiness of Eve’s blood on his hand.

“Take five,” the band manager said, looking around the room. “Get a drink, get a breath of fresh air, and be back here at 11:15.”

The room emptied, leaving just Zachary, his brothers and Luke.

Nathan gave him an assessing look. “You okay, bro?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t look so,” Seth agreed.

“You look kind of like I felt when Sophie disappeared,” Nathan said quietly.

Luke narrowed his eyes. “Has Eve disappeared?”

“No. Not permanently. She’s at her sister’s now.”

“Did the press get hold of her?” Luke’s voice was low, threatening.

“Not that I know of.”

“This
is
about her?” Seth wanted to know.

Zachary nodded.

“Spill it, bro.” Nathan demanded. “Get it out so we can get on with the rehearsal.”

“She doesn’t have red hair.”

“Yep. We’d noticed that,” Luke said.

“Or green eyes,” Seth added.

“And yet…”

“And yet you’re in love with her.”