Loving the Chase (Heart of the Storm #1) by Sharla Lovelace Read Free Book Online

car traveling down the highway half a mile up.
    She’d tried watching TV when she couldn’t sleep, but it was just annoying. She tried reading and couldn’t stay with it. She needed life around her, not quiet, and at two o’clock in the morning, life was a little scarce.
    The only thing not quiet was her mind.
    Zach Chase. Damn it. Never in a million years did she think that after seven years, that chapter of her life would circle back again like a rerun. Not that it was. At all.
    “You’re so full of shit,” Maddi muttered, raking back her hair with her fingers.
    All she’d been able to think about since he’d left the damn office was Zach. The way he’d looked at her, the memories that ran through his eyes, the hit to the gut she’d felt when he talked about his family—they were once her family. She thought she had put all that behind her and stopped missing them, but hearing their names poked at her like a cattle prod.
    All day, Maddi’s mind had been taking trips. Back to their young love, their older love, the day he proposed, the day they were supposed to—
    And there she would stop. Because she’d put that day in a box and buried it deep a long time ago. Nothing good would ever come of digging it back out again. She picked up her phone and checked the time. 2:34 a.m. Sigh. Scrolling over, she tapped the weather icon and checked the forecast.
    Storms coming in the next few days. Storms. Zach. Storms. The two went hand in hand. So remember the stairwell with Blakely , she prompted herself. That’s where she had to stay. That particular storm would keep her head straight.

    Zach stared at the ceiling most of the night. That wasn’t abnormal—his mind typically fought shutting down at night—but this was different. They had a chance, for once. A chance to really do something with what was basically handed to them at birth. An opportunity to really make their passions into a true business if they would just listen to him. And Eli was treating it like a snake oil salesman had darkened their door.
    What would their dad have done if he were still alive, and presented with this?
    Josiah Chase had been all about the chase. Back when he and his best friend Harlan Boudreau were chasing storms around in a beat-up pickup truck. They were naturals—they didn’t have fancy equipment or computers or radar. They had their instincts, like Zach. They chased based on their gut and street smarts and probably a little stupidity and bravado mixed in. They met Louella Bennett at a drugstore soda counter and chased her, too, until she let Josiah catch her. With her photography bug, their little team expanded to three, and what was originally just a hobby became something more. Something that could help people—something they could all learn from. Something they could teach their children.
    Zach was only nineteen when his dad met his match. A category EF4 tornado, nearly a mile wide, made a jig Josiah didn’t account for, and he missed a dodge. His need to be as close as possible cost him his life. Eli, at twenty-three, had been on that run with him, in the truck bed taking readings with a handheld wind gauge before his dad screamed at him to get down and threw the truck in reverse. It had been too late, and the funnel pitched the truck, throwing Eli yards away into a ditch. He’d watched the truck get smashed like a Tonka toy with his dad inside, and survived with just a nasty cut on his face and two broken fingers.
    It’s what made Eli the ass he could be. Zach knew that, and when he wasn’t pissed off at him, he understood it. That day had changed a lot of things. Their mom retired, stopped taking pictures, and took up quilting, as if the camera had some part in killing him. Gran was devastated, him being her only child, and she turned everything into a Josiah shrine. Suddenly, he was perfect, and she threw money at the same endeavors that she refused to accept when he was alive.
    Zach felt like he was the only one