Marriage On The Cards: Marry Me, Mackenzie! / A Proposal Worth Millions / Heart Surgeon, Hero...Husband?. Susan Carlisle

your life because of me! I couldn’t see any reason to screw up your life, Dylan...not when I didn’t even know if I wanted to keep the baby.”

      “I didn’t marry Christa,” Dylan challenged her. “But, you did keep the baby.”

      “Yes. I did. I thought about adoption. I thought about...abortion. In the end, I decided to keep her.”

      Dylan stabbed his leg with his finger. “That’s a decision we should have made together.”

      “I admit that I may have called it wrong...”

      “Called it wrong...?” he repeated incredulously.

      “But I was young and I thought I was doing the right thing for all of us.” Mackenzie touched her finger to her chest. “I got Hope and you got to marry the woman you loved.”

      “I didn’t even know what love was back then...” Dylan shook his head. “At least now I know why you were so anxious to get rid of me at the barn the other day. You didn’t want me to meet my own daughter.”

      “Not like that I didn’t.” Mackenzie set the record straight. “I didn’t want that for Hope...and I didn’t want that for you.”

      In a rough voice, Dylan asked, “Were you ever going to tell me, Mackenzie? Or were you just going to let me go the rest of my life not knowing?”

      “No.” Mackenzie clasped her hands together. “I was going to tell you. I had decided to start looking for you this year...”

      Dylan’s eyes were glassy with emotion. “You’re telling me...that if we hadn’t run into each other at Ian’s party, you were going to track me down? Why? Why now?”

      Mackenzie took a deep breath in and when she let it out, her shoulders sagged.

      “It’s what Hope wanted. When we were filling out her Make-A-Wish application, she wrote—I wish I could meet my dad.”

      “Wait a minute...” What she had just said didn’t sink into his head right away. “Make-A-Wish? Isn’t that for sick kids?”

      “Yes.” Mackenzie waited for Dylan to ask the next logical question.

      “Are you trying to tell me that Hope is sick?”

      “Hope has been battling leukemia for the last two years.” Mackenzie managed to say those words without tearing up.

      As Dylan often did, he went silent. He stared at her for a long time with puzzled, narrowed eyes.

      “Do you need a drink?” he finally asked. “I need a drink.”

      Dylan stood up suddenly and walked toward the kitchen. He stopped when he realized that she was still sitting on the couch. “Are you coming?”

      Wordlessly, Mackenzie stood up on shaky legs and followed Dylan into the kitchen.

      “Can I interest you in a cold malt beverage?” Dylan pulled a bottle of beer from the side door.

      “Sure. Why not?”

      “Why not, indeed,” Dylan said cryptically as he popped the tops off the beers and handed her one. “We’re both consenting adults here.”

      “Thank you,” Mackenzie said. She brought the bottle up to her mouth but Dylan stopped her.

      “What should we toast to?” He held out his bottle to her.

      “Anything you’d like,” Mackenzie said tiredly. She was exhausted. She was exhausted all the time, and had been for years. The stress of Hope’s illness and the stress of trying to run a business had been catching up with her for a long time. And now she had a sinking feeling that dealing with Dylan was only going to add to her exhaustion.

      Dylan tapped her bottle with his. “To Hope.”

      “To Hope,” Mackenzie seconded.

      “Could you go for some fresh air?” Dylan asked.

      Mackenzie nodded and Dylan opened the French door leading out to the deck. “After you.”

      Mackenzie stepped onto the large deck and was immediately drawn to the edge of the railing that overlooked the beach. She stared at the sun setting over the small, rolling waves and tried to relax her shoulders. Dylan, who used to be so simple to read, wasn’t so easy for her to read tonight. She had no idea what type of emotional shift she might encounter. Next to her, but not too close, Dylan rested his forearms on the railing, bottle loosely held in one hand.

      “So...” Dylan said in a calm, almost contemplative tone. “Hope has cancer.”

      “Yes...” Mackenzie nodded. “She has acute lymphoblastic leukemia. ALL. She was diagnosed when she was eight.”

      “Leukemia. What is that? Blood cancer?”

      Mackenzie nodded. “At first I just thought that she was pushing herself too hard between school and the barn. She was tired all the time, losing weight. She just wasn’t herself. When she started to complain about an ache in her bones and a sore throat...” Mackenzie lifted one shoulder. “I thought she was coming down with the flu. I mean...who would immediately jump to cancer?”

      Dylan sat down in one of the chairs encircling a fire pit. Mackenzie joined him.

      “I remember being really stressed out that day...the day we found out. I had to rearrange my entire morning so I could get Hope to the doctor. Traffic was ridiculous, I was on the phone with the bakery...on the phone with clients...I remember thinking that it was the worst possible time for Hope to be catching something on top of everything else.” Mackenzie pushed strands of hair out of her face. “And all I could do was start adding things to do to my already gigantic to-do list—stop by the pharmacy, arrange for someone to stay with Hope...blah, blah, blah...”

      Mackenzie stopped to take a swig from her beer. She shook her head as she swallowed the liquid down. “I had no idea how frivolous everything I’d just been obsessing over was about to become.”

      Dylan listened intently, while Mackenzie talked. “The doctor sent us to the hospital, tests were run and she was diagnosed that day. And just like that...literally in what seemed like the blink of an eye...our world imploded. No parent is ever prepared to hear the words your child has cancer.” Mackenzie rubbed fresh tears out of her eyes. “But even more than that, I’ll never forget the look on Hope’s face when she asked me—ʽDid she just say that I have cancer?’ I’ve never been that scared in my life. Hope was admitted to the hospital, and ever since then, our lives just became this never-ending revolving door of chemo and steroids and tests and checkups and hospital stays...”

      When Mackenzie realized that she was the only one talking and that she had said much more than she had ever intended, she stopped herself from blurting out more by taking a swig of her now-tepid beer. She picked at the label on the bottle, wishing that Dylan would do something other than sit in his designer lounge chair and stare at her.

      “I don’t know why I just told you all of that,” Mackenzie said to fill the silence.

      At first, Dylan really didn’t know what to say. He had been dragged from one emotional spectrum to the next in the span of an hour. At the beginning of their meeting, all he felt for Mackenzie was anger. But while Mackenzie was telling her story, and with the ocean wind blowing the wispy tendrils of her hair across her pretty face, she reminded him of the girl she had once been. The girl he remembered so vividly from his childhood—the chubby bookworm with thick glasses who used to read her books in the backseat of one of her father’s vintage cars. All the boys in the neighborhood ignored Jett’s sister, but he never did. Maybe it was because he liked how different she was than the rest of the girls. Or maybe it was because he had only seen her smile once after her mom died. He had never thought to analyze it. He had always just liked Mackenzie.

      “Because we used to be friends,” Dylan said.

      “Were we?” Mackenzie