the confident eyes of a woman now, he decided. Clear, intelligent…and unforgiving.
He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets. He’d thought his mood couldn’t get any blacker when Etta met him at the door with the damn tux. He’d been wrong.
“Well,” Etta said wistfully, magically appearing as though he’d conjured her up. “That certainly didn’t go as well as I’d planned.”
With difficulty, Zach pulled his gaze from Kristin and glanced down at his great-aunt’s rueful expression. “What didn’t go well? The auction?”
She slipped an arm through his. “No, dear, your meeting with Kristin. I’d hoped it would be a little friendlier, but I suppose with all that’s between you, it was too much to hope for. Maybe you should stop by her shop tomorrow and try again.”
Everything in Zach stilled as he stared down at his elfin aunt, and his mind took him on a slow, sure path to trickery and deceit. “Aunt Etta, what did you do?”
“Come dear,” she said, patting his arm. “Let’s have some dessert.”
Zach stood his ground. “I don’t want dessert, I want an explanation. What did you do?”
But she was already walking toward a table where blueberry cheesecake and coffee sat untouched in front of six empty chairs. Swearing beneath his breath, Zach followed, seated her, then took the chair next to her. “You set me up! There was no sick bachelor. That’s why you wanted me here a day early.”
Without a trace of apology, Etta placed a white linen napkin on her lap. “Honestly, Zachary, we should all be grateful you decided to go into the construction business. You’d have made a dreadful detective. Didn’t you wonder why your tuxedo fit so well? The jacket, the trousers—the size fourteen shoes?”
No, he hadn’t, but then, he’d never expected Etta to bamboozle him, either. “Could we forget my deductive powers for the moment? Why in hell would you feel the need to drag me down here and put me through this?”
“Because I’ve waited years for you to marry a nice girl and bring some children into this world before I’m gone, and I’m running out of patience. When you offered to come home and get the farmhouse ready to sell, I decided that a bit of meddling was justified if it got you and Kristin talking again. It’s time.”
Zach narrowed his eyes, trying his best to follow Etta’s reasoning. “You expect me to marry Kris?” He’d have to be certifiable to want a woman who’d put his heart through a Cuisinart not once, but twice.
“Good heavens, no! She’s still mad, and I don’t blame her.” Etta shook her fork at him. “You need closure, young man. That’s what they say on the talk shows. Kristin does, too, if that three-hundred-dollar bid is any indication. The two of you need to resolve this unfinished business between you so you can get on with your lives.”
“Aunt Etta, I don’t need closure, I need ten more hours in the day. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to marry and start a family right now. I’ve got a construction business to run. As a matter of fact,” he added, glancing toward the exit, “I—”
He stopped abruptly as a couple separated from the small crowd that had gathered at the front of the room. Then, as he watched, Chad Hollister escorted Kristin though the wide archway and out of sight.
The words she’d said not ten minutes ago came back to him. This time he gave them more credence. Actually, I’d planned to bid on someone else, but I was in the ladies’ room when he was auctioned off.
Chad Hollister was “someone else?” Chad Hollister?
“As a matter of fact, you what?” Etta prompted.
Zach sent her a grim look and pushed to his feet. “As a matter of fact, I do have unfinished business. I was tearing off the front porch when you phoned with this trumped up emergency of yours. I need to get back to it.”
“Zachary, it’s dark, and the power and water won’t be turned on until Monday. What are you planning to use for light? Fireflies?”
He smiled. “No, Aunt Smarty-pants, I brought a generator with me. You’re catching a ride back to the high-rise with your friends, right?”
“Yes, and I wish you’d reconsider staying there with me. At least until the utilities are reconnected.”
“Again, thank you for the offer, but I’m fine where I am. With my work habits, you don’t need me stomping through your apartment in the middle of the night disrupting your sleep.”
He bent to kiss her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening for dinner. We’ll drive into Lancaster—maybe go to that Amish farmhouse restaurant with the great chicken.”
“Go see Kristin,” Etta said ignoring his invitation. “She bought the souvenir shop on Main Street where she worked in high school and turned it into a lovely place—Forget Me Not Antiques.”
“Aunt Etta—”
“It’s not often a person gets a chance to right the wrongs from their past.”
Zach met her eyes candidly. “If I had any wrongs to right, I’d do it. I don’t. See you tomorrow for dinner.”
Ten minutes later, he’d left the tux behind and was striding across the parking lot beneath a starry summer sky, and feeling damn good to be in jeans again.
He wasn’t a tux man. He was a sweat and calluses, hammer and nails man. Now, Hollister—he was a tux man. Hollister with his fake smile, military bearing and swaggering attitude. Good God, what did Kris see in that jerk? Position? Education? It sure as hell couldn’t be personality. Hollister had been mean-spirited and cocky from the day they’d met in the same tenth grade homeroom—a kid with money who’d enjoyed lording it over the kids without. Not that Zach gave a fat fig who she dated. He’d just always thought she’d be more selective when she hooked up with someone else.
Climbing inside his truck and firing the engine, he drove toward Etta’s old farmhouse on the outskirts of town.
Though he tried to ignore it, his past swung hard at him from every bend in the road. He approached the tiny stone church Kristin had coaxed him into attending, back when he’d decided to change his bad boy image and do whatever it took to keep her. He’d taken some serious heat from his friends for that, but he hadn’t cared. The sign out front evoked a near-smile. Come In. We’re Prayer Conditioned.
Traffic got heavier when he reached the brightly lit shopping plaza that hadn’t been there in his youth, then tapered off again when he turned down a secondary road toward the “poor end” of town. He passed four houses that needed work, then slowed the truck when he got to the empty lot where the hovel he’d once lived in had stood.
There’d been no flowers on the table in that place, no clean sheets on the beds, no mother with hot meals after school. She’d cut and run when he was seven and they were living somewhere in New Mexico. A long string of different states and different flophouses had come after that, and somewhere along the line, he’d missed two whole years of school.
By the time they’d finally made their way back here—back home, his father had called it, though no brass band had shown up to meet them—Zach was fifteen and understood
