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She came up for air, giggling, a faint blush creeping over her olive skin.
“You crazy man.”
“Crazy ’bout you.”
Zane’s ribs squeezed tight. He was thrilled his best friend had found true love but couldn’t help a twinge of envy taking root in his stomach. He’d had that once. And he’d hoped to have it again, with Brie. He glanced at his girlfriend to see her reaction to Calum’s public demonstration of affection, only to find her staring at her phone, brows pulled into a frown, thumbs tapping furiously on the keyboard.
He shook his head and swallowed his irritation. “Night, you guys. Thanks again for a great birthday.”
“Yeah, night.” Brie held up a hand, but her eyes were on that damn phone of hers.
He should be happy she’d managed not to look at it while they were eating dinner, although he’d bet she’d used the trip to the bathroom as an excuse to check her emails.
Suppressing an exhausted sigh, he climbed into the driver’s seat. No matter how much he wished things were different, they remained forever the same.
Lori tossed her keys and her purse on the hall table, peeled off her coat, and hung it on the stand by the front door. She trudged into the living room, flopping onto her favorite chair that overlooked her tree-lined street.
She felt as if she’d been sliced and diced and burned to a crisp for good measure.
Zane.
She’d seen Zane.
Around one-point-six-million people lived in Manhattan, and that excluded the millions of tourists who poured onto the tiny island every year, and yet somehow, fate had plunked her in the same restaurant as Zane a mere two months after she’d returned to New York.
God, he looked good. Better than good. He looked beautiful. The years had been good to him, whereas she felt like she didn’t fit into her skin most days.
And he’d been with a woman. A beautiful woman. Maybe he knew her in a professional capacity. It could have been a work meeting, just like hers.
Yeah, sure. The way she possessively touched his arm screamed coworker, right?
A knife twisted in her stomach. She wrapped her arms around herself as if she was trying to stop her insides from falling out.
As much as she hated to acknowledge it, she was living on borrowed time. Statistics showed that only fifty percent of heart transplant patients survived more than a decade, and she was three years past that. Age was on her side, but sooner or later, the donor heart would fail, and she’d be right back where she’d started; to have a future, someone else must die. Her donor heart might fail next week, next month, next year, or even five or ten years from now. But it would happen. It was inevitable, a fact she’d grown to live with and accept.
Staying out of his world had been the main reason she’d settled in California when she’d returned from India. Because of her illness and subsequent recovery, her father had extended his tenure by six months to allow her time to recover.
Once she was back on her feet, her parents returned to their old place in Greenwich Village, but by that time, she’d fallen in love with her adopted country, and without the possibility of life with Zane to pull her back to America, she’d stayed put. Six years in India had given her a new perspective on life, and seven years building her business in California had provided her with financial security and a fulfilling career.
She’d had no intention of returning to New York, other than to visit her parents, but an opportunity she couldn’t pass up had arisen, and here she was.
She pushed to her feet and retrieved her laptop from the small second bedroom she’d converted into a home office. Returning to the living room, she set the computer on her lap and opened it, ready to break a promise she’d made to herself when she was just a teenager; never to look up Zane.
But that was then, and this was now, and seeing him had stirred up thoughts and feelings that were clamoring for her to satisfy her thirst for knowledge. She had to know whether Zane had followed his dreams to run his own company.
Opening the web browser, she typed in Zane Quinlan and hit return.
The right-hand side of the screen drew her attention to several images of Zane’s beautiful face. Some smiling, some more serious, but each one ripped through her chest. Sometimes she couldn’t believe she’d ever found the strength to let him go. At other times, she wondered how she’d live another day without him.
She scanned his Wiki page. He had started his own company, a liquor firm called Necron that, from what she could gather, was pretty much taking over vast swathes of the United States as the number one drinks supplier to hotels, restaurants, and some enormous supermarket chains. Pride filled her chest. She clicked on the link that led to his company website. Under “Meet the Team,” she spied a familiar name: Calum Brook: Sales Director. A smile edged across her face. Zane’s friend from college, the one he’d commandeered to be his ride or die. No one escaped Zane when he decided they were important to him.
Except her.
Then again, she hadn’t given him a choice. He’d bought her lie about finding someone else. Fallen for it. Hook, line, and sinker.
She moved through the various sections, but as she arrived at the place marked “Personal Life,” she paused. Did she really want to know if the woman Zane had been in the restaurant with was his partner? He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that meant nothing in this day and age. Could she stomach the idea that he might be married and have children, living a happy life that didn’t include her?
Oh, to hell with it.
