Wrecked (5 page)

“It will take about an hour or so,” Abby said.

I’m thinking longer—

“They’re pretty busy.”

“What?” Distracted, he dragged his eyes away from the curve of her ass and focused on what she was saying.

“The pizza place. They said it would be about an hour or so—asked if they should come around to the back and I told them yes.”

“That’s fine.” He dragged a hand down his face. “Ah . . . I need to get back to work.”

“I was thinking about going to grab some wine or something.”

Good idea
. Wait. “You can’t.” He turned around and headed back into the main area of the shop, found the consent forms he needed. Abby was behind him, although he hadn’t heard her. When he turned around, she was just a foot away and the scent of her went straight to his head and Zach had to wonder just what in the hell he’d done to get this kind of torture thrown into his life.

“I can’t go get wine?” A smile curved her lips as she tipped her head to look up at him.

“I can’t do the tattoo if you do—I won’t put one on anybody who has been drinking. Saves me trouble later on. And you need to read through the consent form and sign. Make it all nice and legal.”

“Ahhh . . .” She took the paper and moved over to one of the seats, crossing her legs as she started to read. “I guess I should be totally clearheaded. Otherwise, I could end up having arms like yours.”

“Nah. I might try to talk you into having
Forever Nate’s
tattooed on your ass, but that’s it.” He gave her a strained smile and turned around. Distance. Serious distance was needed here so he could get back on track.

As he headed down the hall, she called out, “Yeah, sure. I’ll do that when you have a heart with
Kate
somewhere on
you
.”

Once he was in his office, he rubbed the heel of his hand over his chest.

What in the hell would she do if she knew he already
had
her written on his skin?

Not Kate, of course.

He hadn’t fallen in love with Kate.

He loved Abby and always had.

He’d loved her when she ran away from California all those years ago . . . and he’d waited until she stopped running, so he could follow.

He’d loved her when she came to him and told him she was getting married . . . to a man who didn’t deserve her.

And now she was laying out a plan to go and have a torrid affair. With who?

Curling one hand into a fist, he crossed back to his desk.

“Why in the hell not me?”

Chapter Four

Wine
would
have been a good idea, Abby thought
. Maybe he didn’t want her drinking
before
he got started, but after? Yeah, it would have helped.

Stretched out on her belly, she closed her eyes and tried to think about
anything
but the pain.

“You okay?”

Zach’s hands on her weren’t helping her zone out, she decided. It was one hell of a distraction, but it
wasn’t
helping her zone out.

Swallowing the knot in her throat, she croaked out, “I’m as good as I think I can expect to be.”

“And how good is that?”

“Lousy.”

He laughed a little. “Why don’t you talk to me? We’re halfway done,” he said. “If you talk, you’ll get distracted and it will be done before you know it.”

“Okay.” She scrunched her eyes tightly closed and tried to think of something to say. Her mind was blank. “I don’t know what to talk about.”

“You always have something to talk about,” he teased, his voice low and easy, and she knew even without looking at him that he was smiling.

“Not right now I don’t.” Well, she
could
think of a thing or two. But those weren’t really things she could say. Were they? No. She’d thought this through. She wasn’t going down that road with Zach.

“Okay. I’ll help. What is this new life plan you’ve got laid out? Besides the tattoo?”

I plan on flipping my life upside down.

She bit her lip to keep from blurting that out. That would make him worry. She loved him dearly and she didn’t need him worrying about her right now. “It’s not a
life
plan exactly. It’s just a
for now
plan,” she said slowly. “Some things to keep me distracted until I figure out what I’m going to do with myself. There’s the tattoo thing, which you’re obviously helping with. I’m going to try to stop worrying so much. One of them, though . . . I plan on calling up Roger and telling him off.”

He grunted. “Good plan.” Something soft brushed against her lower back and she hissed a little.

Damn it, that hurt. It felt like something was slicing right through her skin.

Distraction. Talk, damn it. About anything.

“I don’t get it,” she said softly, some of the confusion and pain breaking free. “I mean . . . I thought he loved me. How could he love me and walk away like that? Over the life I
used
to have? That’s what it’s all about. I used to be an actress. I’m not anymore—I haven’t been for
years
and I’m happy with that. How can he not see that? If he loved me, wouldn’t he be able to see that I don’t
want
to act anymore?”

Zach didn’t answer.

Turning her head, she peered over her shoulder at him.

He had his head bowed, the gold-streaked strands falling down and hiding his features from her.

“Zach?”

He sighed. “Do you really want to hear what I have to say about this right now, sugar?”

“I always want to hear what you have to say.”

“Okay.” He used the cloth again on her back and then bent down, staring at her skin like there was nothing else in the world but her back and the design he was inking on her flesh. “He never loved you.”

It was a strike, square to her heart.

She closed her eyes.

“If he loved you, he wouldn’t treat you the way he did. When you walked into a room, it would have showed on his face . . . if he really loved you. Either he’d have been so busy staring at you because he just had to see you, or he would have been looking away so nobody
could
see it. Except he was going to marry you—you were his and he had every right to let the world see how he felt.” Zach dabbed at her back again, still focused on the work.

She was almost glad of the pain now, because it was easier to think about how much it
hurt
than to think about what he had to say.

“But when you walked into a room, that fucking prick was too busy either messing with his damned gadgets or looking at everybody else to see what
they
thought about you. He was in love with the idea of having Kate the cutie on his arm—the son of a bitch just loved to talk about his fiancée, the
actress
 . . . and don’t tell me you never noticed. He might have loved the idea of being with
Kate . . .
but he never loved
you
.”

He paused what he was doing and for a brief second, the world fell away as he looked up and met her eyes. “He never loved you, and the son of a bitch sure as hell didn’t deserve you, sugar.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs as his blue gaze held hers.

And then, as it started to feel like all the oxygen in the room had dwindled away, he turned his attention back to the task at hand.

It felt like he was flaying the flesh from her bones. And she decided that was just fine, because now she needed
that
distraction.

Was he right? she wondered.

She’d noticed, and tried to ignore, Roger’s fascination with her old life, but she’d chalked it up to him just wanting to
know
about her. They were getting married . . . they
should
know about each other. But what if Zach was right?

What if Roger had never really loved her at all?

And that thought, as much as it infuriated her, also made her wonder one simple thing.

Had
she
loved him?

* * *

“Okay, here are the important things,” Zach said as
he studied the design. It was cute and sexy as hell. If he found out another guy was the one who got to press his lips to that dragonfly where it curved low over the flare of her left hip, he thought he just might go insane. “I’ll send you home with some instructions on how to care for it, but you need to make sure you keep it clean. No scrubbing at it or anything—you need to be gentle when you wash it. I’ve got some ointment I’ll send home with you and I’ll go into detail about using that, too.”

She was still staring at it over her shoulder in the mirror. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth and eyeing the dragonfly like she expected it to take flight or something.

“I need to get the bandage on,” he said softly.

“What? Oh.”

She continued to stand there and he reached up, pressed his hand between her shoulder blades. “Lean forward a little.”

Hunger screamed, jerking on the leash inside him as he eased the waistband of her skirt just a little lower so he could get the bandage in place. Bent over the table like that, he could so easily imagine pulling the hem of the skirt up. Slipping his hand between her thighs. Would she sigh? Moan?

No. This was Abby and she’d freak the hell out and then she’d run away and he’d lose her—

A soft, shaky sigh caught his attention as he smoothed the bandage down. Keeping his head bowed, he checked the mirror from under his lashes and his knees almost buckled.

Fuck.

Abby was staring at their reflection and her face was flushed.

What. The. Hell.

Abruptly, he stepped back and moved away. If he didn’t move away
immediately
, he was going to grab her and do things he should never do to his best friend. The woman he loved. That was the problem. He’d loved her for too long and he was misreading the signals and—

“Do you really think all that’s true? About Roger?”

Hearing that shithead’s name on her lips snapped his temper. He turned around and glared at her. “If I didn’t think that was the case, Abs, I wouldn’t have said it. He’s an egotistical, arrogant piece of work and he never loved you. You deserved a hell of a lot better and I knew it all along. But he was what you wanted so who in the hell was I to say any different?”

“You’re my best friend,” she said quietly.

“Shit.” He went to pass a hand over his face and stopped. He still had his gloves on. Stripping them off, he tossed them into the red trash can near the door and headed over to start cleaning up. “Yes. I am. You asked me what I thought and I told you. But I can’t tell you what is in that fucker’s head. You can always ask him when you call him to tell him off, although I doubt he’ll tell you the truth. He doesn’t even
see
the truth anyway.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

In the middle of gathering up his supplies, he paused. Zach closed his eyes and started to mouth every single foul, nasty curse he could think of. He had four brothers. He could think of a
lot
of cusswords. Halfway through one that involved anatomical improbabilities and a goat, a hand touched his shoulder.

“Zach?”

Damn it, he couldn’t do this. Moving away, he started grabbing his supplies at random. Dumping trash, slamming the tools here, there. Being fucking careless with them, but he couldn’t look at her yet. If he did, she might see—

He went to dump the trash and turned around.

Abby was right there, dark brown eyes locked on his face, her shirt still knotted just under her breasts, leaving her belly bare.

“What is this?” she teased. “You make me play twenty questions all the time.”

Edging around her, he focused on cleaning up. “I’m thirty-two years old, Abby. Yeah. I’ve been in love,” he said, keeping his voice flat and his eyes on the task at hand. “It didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“She never seemed to notice that I was staring at her when she walked into the room.” Eventually, he had to stop staring, because other people
did
notice . . . and then she started dating Roger, got engaged. She wasn’t his and he spent night after endless night wondering about all the chances he might have had.

Was he going to let that happen again?

Had fate dropped one more chance into his lap?

From the corner of his eye, he saw Abby approaching and he tensed. She leaned in and he blamed it on insanity, the devil, or his own desperate desire, but something pushed him. Turning his head at the very last moment so that the kiss she’d meant to brush against his cheek hit his lips.

It was light, quick, and soft . . . and he felt her gasp. The taste of her went straight down to his dick, tightening every muscle in his body, sending his heart into a full-on gallop.

Lust and love tangled inside him and he fisted his hands on the metal tray in front of him to keep from reaching for her.

A second later, it was over and Abby backed away. Fast. So fast, she practically tripped over her feet.

He pretended not to notice as he went back to work.

“Um. Well. Whoever she is, she’s got to be wrong in the head for not noticing you.”

* * *

Two a.m. . . . and all’s not well
 . . .

Abby lay on her right side, staring into the darkness and trying not to think. It wasn’t working well because every time she closed her eyes, she could only think about Zach. And that bare whisper of a kiss.

She should be sleeping.

If not sleeping, she should be working on the books. Running your own business meant there was
always
something to keep you busy.

If not
that
, she could be writing out a nice little script for what she planned to tell Roger when she called him.

But what was she doing?

Thinking about Zach.

Her heart stuttered in her chest as one very, very vivid memory flashed through her mind. As he’d been slipping the bandage onto her hip, she’d glanced over. Something about the look on his face, taut and unyielding, had sent her pulse racing up into the near-dangerous zone. His other hand had rested higher on her back and she could recall the way his touch had felt.

And damned if she hadn’t wanted to move back against him.

What would he have done?

“He would have thought you’d lost your mind.”

Groaning, she snatched the phone.

Zach was her best friend. But he was a guy and there were some things she just couldn’t discuss with a guy. Even when the guy was somebody you’d laughed with over bad porn back when you were teens.

For certain things, a girl just needed the ear of a girlfriend. For those things, she called Marin. Marin, another former child star, had thrived on the life and was currently one of Hollywood’s darlings.

Punching in Marin’s cell, she rolled onto her back and then yelped as her newly tattooed skin came in contact with the bed.

“Ah . . . Abby? Is that you?”

“Hey, Marin,” she said, easing into a sitting position and groaning. “Yeah, it’s me. I need . . .” she stopped and blew out a breath. Then she groaned as her eyes caught the clock. She’d totally forgotten how late it was. “I’m an idiot, calling this late.”

“Well, I’m awake anyway. Just got in. Why are you calling?” She paused and then asked softly, “Still upset about Roger the Rat?”

“You and Zach need to stop,” Abby muttered. “I’m going to start picturing him with a long tail and big teeth.”

“And the problem with this is . . .? Seriously, baby, you need to quit worrying and hurting over him. I know that—”

“He’s not why I’m calling.” Zach’s blue eyes flashed through her mind, and her skin, still hot even though it had been hours . . .

“Okay. So why
are
you calling at two in the morning?”