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“Is everything okay?” she asked when he’d sat back down.
“Chase’s wife, Chloe, is a couple of days past her due date. I left him a message earlier to make sure everything was okay. She’s fine, but antsy.”
Yet again she was amazed by how close he was to his family, especially given his outwardly footloose-and-fancy-free personality. Amazingly, the fact that he clearly wasn’t looking for a wife of his own didn’t stop him from appreciating—and worrying about—his siblings’ wives.
She couldn’t put the puzzle of Zach Sullivan together...and it only added to her worries where he was concerned. If only he were black and white, then she would know exactly where to shelve him in her head, rather than having the very real concern that he was creeping into her heart by bits and pieces every time they were together.
“How many nephews and nieces do you have?”
His excited smile made her go warm all over. “This will be the first.”
A man who loved puppies and babies was hard to resist. Almost impossible, actually.
But she needed to keep doing just that, darn it....
“Do they know if they’re having a boy or a girl?”
“If they do, they haven’t told any of us.” He grinned at her. “We’ve actually got a betting pool going.”
“Your family is betting over the sex of your brother’s child?”
He refilled her glass as he said, “It was my mother’s idea.”
She laughed out loud at that, the feel of that spontaneous joy bubbling up from her chest surprising her the same way it always did when she was with Zach.
“She really does sound like a remarkable woman. Stunning, raised eight kids, and now has her first grandchild on the way.” She shook her head. “A gambler, too, from the sounds of it.” She thought about the gorgeous man in the black and white photo who looked so much like Zach. “I’m assuming your father encourages all the Sullivan family madness?”
The laughter left his eyes. “He died when I was seven. Just a couple of weeks before my eighth birthday.”
She gripped the stem of her glass tighter. He hadn’t said anything during breakfast at his house when they’d been looking at the black and white photo.
“I’m sorry, I just assumed—” She tried to clamp her mouth shut, but still the words, “That must have been so hard on you,” slipped out. He’d said before how much like his father he was, that he got his love of cars from him. A young boy who clearly worshipped his father had to have been devastated by his death.
He shrugged, but she could almost see the weight on his shoulders as she forced the movement. “We pulled together, all looked out for each other.”
She did some quick math from the picture she’d seen, and realized he’d been right there in the middle as the fifth child out of eight, not the oldest, not the youngest. She knew how easy it was to get lost in a family, even when you were the only child.
Had that happened to Zach?
“How did it happen?”
“He had an aneurysm at the office. We found out he was dead when we got home from school. He was only forty-eight.” He lifted his eyes to hers and what she saw in them tore at her heart. “It will be twenty-three years next week.”
She had to reach for Zach’s hand. Even though it had been more than two decades since his father’s death, she could see that it still hurt him. Deeply.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Every time they’d been together, he’d tried to touch her. But now that she was the one who’d reached for him, he pulled away and reached for his beer, gulping it down before putting the empty glass back on the table.
“Shit happens,” he said. “Sucks, but what can you do?”
It wasn’t hard to guess that the flippancy came from trying to cover how bad he felt. And really, who was she to question people’s coping mechanisms? After all, when she found out that her beloved father was a two-faced bastard, she’d turned into a seventeen-year-old cutter.
Still, she felt there was more Zach wasn’t saying and was absolutely certain that his father’s death had affected him on some deeper level than he would be sharing with her over Indian food tonight. And no matter how much she tried to remind herself that it was dangerous to let him get too close, his unexpected vulnerability struck right at the heart of her.
After the waiter delivered steaming platters of naan bread, Tandoori chicken, and curry, he looked up at her and said, “Your parents are still together. What else should I know about you?”
Most men barely listened when a woman talked about herself. Trust Zach to remember every freaking word, no matter how casually tossed off it had been during an impromptu training session in the park.
She broke off a piece of the flat bread and took a bite of it, even though it suddenly tasted like sawdust. When she’d washed it down with a sip of beer, she said, “There’s not much else to tell.”
But he wasn’t that easily daunted. “Where did you grow up?”
“Washington D.C.” She stared down at a plate full of food she no longer had the desire to eat.
“You’re a long way from home,” he commented.
Yes, she was. On purpose. She’d wanted to get as far away from her parents as possible. “I like the West Coast.”
He raised an eyebrow at her curt words and she realized she wasn’t playing it nearly cool enough as he said, “Any siblings?”
