Keep On Loving You. Christie Ridgway

look so good.”

      He didn’t feel so good, either. “Uh...” The room was revolving around him.

      “Do you need—”

      “Just some fresh air,” he said, trying to shake off the dizziness. “I’ll see you later.”

      Then he began to walk away, all the pleasure he’d felt in seeing the Walkers again tarnished, but he couldn’t figure out why.

      He glanced back at Mac. She was watching him leave, but the expression on her lovely face didn’t exactly shout warm welcome, that was sure.

      They said a person could never go home again... Apparently he couldn’t even go back to the place that had been the next best thing.

      Or to the girl who had once been the first in his heart.

      * * *

      ONE MOMENT MAC was watching Zan thread his way through the tables toward the exit and the next she found herself on her feet.

      “What are you doing?” her brother asked.

      “I’m not going to miss this opportunity to give him a piece of my mind,” she said. “You heard him. He doesn’t plan to be around long.”

      “Now, Mac, is this about him crashing the reception? Because—”

      “Don’t ‘Now, Mac’ me,” she said. She wasn’t going to share with her brother about that “moment” they’d had on his big night, but it still embarrassed her to recall how readily she’d responded to Zan’s encircling arms. Not that she intended to get into that with Zan—but she had other things to say to the confounding man. “Have you forgotten on his way down the hill ten years ago he warned other guys to stay away from me?”

      Brett rubbed his hand over his mouth as if to wipe away a sudden grin. “Who would take that seriously?”

      “Maybe my perfect man!”

      This time her brother laughed out loud. “How would he be perfect for you, then?”

      She ignored his logic. “And what about those postcards? Ten years of finding reminders of him in my mail, with that Z as the only message. Don’t I deserve an explanation for that?”

      Now she looked toward Zan, noting he’d been stopped by a middle-aged couple at a table on the other side of the room. The Robbinses had recently began living full-time in the mountains and were clients of her Maids by Mac business.

      Without another word to her brother, she headed in that direction, prepared to engage Zan when he wrapped up his conversation with the pair. And she didn’t feel the least bit guilty over eavesdropping in the meantime.

      “Ash came home exhausted but exhilarated from his experience with your documentary crew,” Veronica Robbins was saying.

      Documentary crew? Ash was the Robbinses’ twentysomething son, and she’d heard the woman mention him spending time traveling since an internship ended in the fall.

      “When will we get to see Earth Unfiltered?” she asked.

      “It’s in postproduction now, but the IMAX theater dates should be nailed down fairly soon.”

      “Nine years in the making,” Veronica gushed. “Footage from the remotest locations in the world.”

      “I’ve been lucky to be a part of it,” Zan said.

      From the corner of her eye, Mac studied him. Was he a documentary filmmaker? Really? That would mean that while she’d stayed home and cleaned up other people’s messes, he’d been traveling the world, gaining sophistication and savoir faire.

      Not that he looked all that urbane at the moment. He was paler than he’d appeared when he first arrived. Her brother was right, Zan didn’t look so good. Was he sick?

      Not that she should care. And she didn’t care that building a business in Blue Arrow Lake likely wouldn’t impress one of the creators of some IMAX theater-bound film called Earth Unfiltered. Zan had been born to a world of privilege but she’d been born to the mountains and considered that the best advantage of all.

      She wasn’t afraid of hard work and she wasn’t impressed by material wealth. As a matter of fact, the Walkers and other longtime locals were quite suspicious of the moneyed flatlanders who moved up the hill. Zan’s grandfather had turned his vacation place into his permanent retirement home, but even though the luxury estate had been in the Elliott family since the early 1900s, he’d never achieved homegrown status in the eyes of the full-time mountain residents.

      “I’ll see you later,” she heard Zan say to the couple, and then he was again on his way to the exit.

      She hurried after him, frowning when he bumped into a table and then into the newspaper stand. Its metal frame rocked back and forth and Zan himself seemed ready to topple. Her hand shot out reflexively, and she grabbed his arm to steady him.

      Slowly, he swung about, then stared down at her, blinking as if surprised to see her.

      He wore dark jeans and a cashmere sweater that clung to his wide shoulders and broad chest. How had he gotten so big? Maybe he’d grown taller after leaving Blue Arrow Lake. She couldn’t remember his exact height then, but surely he hadn’t made her feel so...feminine. So fragile.

      She shook off the thought. Feminine and fragile sounded like weak and wussy, and no man was going to make Mackenzie Walker that way. Especially not the guy who had left her—and left a warning behind for the other guys in town. “I have a few things to say to you, Zan.”

      “God, you’re beautiful. More beautiful than ever.”

      The words instantly flustered her. “Well...” She rubbed her hands down the legs of her ancient jeans, suddenly aware she was dressed for work in threadbare denim and a sweatshirt with pilled ribbing around her hips and at the bottom of the sleeves.

      “You were gorgeous as a girl and took my breath away dressed as a bridesmaid,” he said. “But now, like this...” His hand waved to indicate her figure.

      Mac gaped, supremely aware she was dressed like a ragamuffin. “Are you blind or are you making fun of me?”

      He blinked again. “Remember that day at the hot springs?”

      She barely resisted squirming. “The time I had to come get you and Brett because the both of you had downed too many beers and weren’t sober enough to drive? When Missy Waters puked out the car window on the way home and I threatened to make you clean it up with your tongue?”

      He winced. “Not that time. Our time. Your first time.”

      “Shh!” She glanced around. “We’re not talking about that.”

      “I dream about it sometimes. Do you?”

      Gah! The man was making it hard to hold on to her mad. “I never think of it,” she said. Oh, but she did. Wouldn’t every woman remember her first time? Summer again, both of them in bathing suits at the remote hot springs that could only be reached by starting from the Walkers’ private land.

      Upon becoming a couple, they hadn’t discussed the day, or if there ever would be a day, when she’d give him her virginity. But the knowledge that she wanted to be with him like that had hovered over her for weeks. Months. Years. Even when he’d seen her only as his best friend’s pesky younger sister.

      Maybe she’d not had all the details of that kind of intimacy quite worked out when she was a girl, but anything she’d had then, she’d wanted to be Zan’s.

      She’d been so gone for him.

      Just as she’d been that lazy afternoon at the hot springs when she was seventeen. They’d had a cooler containing green grapes, a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked from scratch and a thermos of iced tea. They’d immersed themselves in a spring, and then, when they were too hot to stay in a second more, they’d stretched out on double-wide-striped