It.

“No, I’m not pissed off.” And she was being perfectly honest. She was far more heartbroken than she was angry. “Just like you said, she’ll be fine.” Heather would make sure of it, would personally assign her best trainer to work with Megan, Summer, and Gabe so that Cuddles could forget that Zach Sullivan ever existed.

“Then why are you leaving?”

Because she needed to save herself while there was still a ghost of a chance that she could recover.

Because if he could give away a puppy she’d thought he absolutely adored without so much as flinching as it cried for him, then she wasn’t sure she knew who he was at all.

Because she didn’t think she rated a whole heck of lot more than the puppy had to the man standing in front of her.

Because, in the end, it turned out love wasn’t enough. Just like she’d always known.

But since she could no longer trust him enough to say any of that, all that came was an honest, “I’m glad you’re okay, Zach.”

So glad, in fact, that she’d felt like her own life had been saved out there on the race track when he’d scrambled free of the burning car.

She was about to start crying, knew any second she’d be falling apart.

Heather couldn’t do that here. Not in front of Zach. She couldn’t let her guard down around him ever again.

All those years ago, when she’d found out what her father had done, she’d vowed to never feel that way again, to never let anyone make her feel so terribly unloved, so unimportant. She’d renew that vow, make sure she stuck by it in the future.

She needed to get out of there looking like she was still in one piece and then, when she was far, far away from him, she’d deal with the shattered insides beneath her skin.

When Zach had nearly died she’d finally admitted to herself just how much she loved him. She’d finally confessed down deep in her soul that she loved him more deeply, more truly than she’d ever thought she could love a man.

Only to have him prove her cynicism about love to be right.

She hated him for that, but hated herself more for falling for him.

“Good luck with the rest of your charmed life.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Zach’s life had turned into a god damned train wreck.

After he put the wrong fluid in a customer’s transmission and it burned to a crisp, his staff wouldn’t let him near any of the cars in the garage. He did something on his computer that gave it a virus and his executive assistant asked him, politely but firmly, to please stay away from the rest of the computers in the office while she got the hard drive repaired. His vocabulary shrank to a handful of curse words when reporters covering his accident at the race track called to ask what he thought about the pictures of Ryan and Smith holding Heather back from the track as his car burned, and now the press was pissed at him, too.

On top of everything else, Gabe had ratted him out to the entire family. As soon as Lori and Sophie learned that he’d given the puppy back—along with a clear visual of the horror on Heather’s face that Gabe had likely recounted to all of them in vivid Technicolor—they began to tag-team him with messages wanting to know what his problem was.

Lori went so far as to threaten him with bodily harm if he continued to blow it with Heather. On her last message she’d made it perfectly clear that she had plenty of brothers already, so it was an easy decision for her to stick with Heather if he was going to keep being too much of a fool to figure out how to love her right.

“We all know how you feel about her,” was what she’d said in her most recent message. Loud enough that her voice was still ringing in his ears. “Heather and I were getting to be friends, but now she won’t call me back. Jerk.”

He was tempted to delete all future messages from his siblings without listening to them, but he couldn’t. Not if they were calling to say they’d heard from Heather.

But no one said a word about seeing her, not even Gabe, who he figured was doing training sessions with Cuddles at Top Dog.

It wasn’t even my goddamned dog, was what he kept telling himself over and over. They shouldn’t be getting their panties in such a twist over my giving it back to Summer.

Only, all the old lies he’d always told himself weren’t working anymore. Not when he knew exactly why they were all so angry with him.

Because he’d lost Heather.

Hell. It was worse than that.

He’d convinced Heather to walk to the edge of a hundred-story building, went out of his way to convince her she was safe...and then he’d shoved her off.

God, that last night at his house he’d hated seeing her spark fade, hated even more that he was the cause of it, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t just shut up and pull her into his arms the way he was dying to.

Not when he’d been gripped with the need to save them both before they went too far, too deep, into a forever that could—or couldn’t, depending on the same bad luck and shitty fate that had befallen his father—be out there for them.

Exactly one week after Heather had left him, Zach pulled over in front of his mother’s house. His tire jammed into the curb with a sharp pop.

A flat.

Figured, the way his luck was going.

Just as he’d thought at the racetrack, he’d finally used up his share of good fortune.

His charmed life had officially ended the moment Heather walked out of his house.

He grabbed the brightly wrapped baby gift from the passenger seat and shoved the pink and yellow balloons tied to his mother’s mailbox out of his way as he headed for the front door. The last thing he was in the mood for today was a baby shower, regardless of how cute Chase and Chloe’s kid was.

If only he could see Emma without the rest of his family around, poking at him.

If only he could forget the way Heather had looked with Emma in her arms. So beautiful, so natural, so amazed by the perfect little life.

When he closed his eyes at night just to lie there until the sun came up, that was what he saw. Heather and the baby. The wonder on her face. The joy.

The longing.

How could he have done anything but fall in love with her?

And how could he do anything now but let her go?

The front door was half-open and he plopped his gift on the pile in the living room. Planning to see Emma, give her a kiss, and then get the hell out of there, he had just stepped out into his mother’s backyard when Gabe intercepted him.

“Here.” His brother shoved an overjoyed ball of fur at him.