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

who understood it. What their dad had done. Yes, it was horrible, and he’d gone out doing what he’d always warned them not to do. Get too close. But he understood it. The buzz, the rush, the physical pull of such a magnificent monster when it’s so close it’s looking at you. Taunting you. Breathing on you.
    He kept those thoughts to himself, but he often wondered if he was cut from the same crazy.
    Maddi had said he was.
    Maddi. What were the damn odds that a phone call from a television network would have brought her back across his path. Maddi, with her judging, accusatory eyes. Eyes that still fucking had the power to take his breath away, all these years later. As he lay there with one leg swung out on top of the covers, alone, unable to sleep and with no warm body to calm his busy brain, Zach couldn’t help but think about her.
    There was never any doubt that she was the one. She was the love of his life—until she wasn’t.
    He never had a shortage of women now, but none of them came home with him to his little house in the trees. None of them sat in his living room, laughing or talking or watching movies or reading books. None of them lay by the fireplace. Or cooked in his kitchen. None of them graced his bed.
    Zach’s interludes were entirely off-site. His home was his sanctuary. He’d built it from the ground up, solid and thick and unyielding. The one place it felt safe to be him.
    Staring at the red 2:34 on his bedside clock, he sighed in disgust and got up. Looking inside the glow of his refrigerator did little to help. Everything in there required effort and preparation, and he just wanted something quick.
    He grabbed a lone apple hiding in a drawer and a bottle of water and closed the fridge, knowing where he was going. He turned on his dad’s old ham radio next to his recliner and let the chatter commence as he settled in with his apple and stretched out. Even at almost three o’clock in the morning, someone was always talking, and it was the one thing that settled Zach’s buzzing thoughts. Harlan Boudreau was there as usual, arguing with the other old farts about the upcoming weather.
    Zach smiled.

    It was coming. The biggest, darkest, thickest, loudest tornado Zach had ever seen. Daring him the way he always dared its cousins. Zach knew he was asleep. It was as real as standing outside himself and telling himself to get the hell up, but as usual he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even pull in a deep breath; it was like the monster was sucking all the pressure from the air and shoving it into his chest.
    Debris flew all around him, sticks and limbs and shingles and pieces of buildings bounced off him without apparent consequence, but the air—the air was almost too much to bear. His heart raced, struggling for oxygen, struggling to force his limbs to move—to get him out of harm’s way. But all he could do was stand there, paralyzed, watching it swallow up the world in front of him until—Maddi screamed his name.
    Zach sat up with a jolt, sucking in air like it was a golden commodity. Covered in sweat, chest heaving, he kicked angrily at the footrest of the recliner and sank back down.
    “Shit,” he muttered, wiping at his face and raking his fingers through soaked hair.
    The radio squawked with chatter to his right, and he grabbed his now room-temperature water bottle, sucking down what was left.
    “Never gets old,” he said in a whisper, closing his eyes against the pounding headache and the memory of the dream. “Never gets fucking old.” He’d had that same dream for so many years, he should be able to fast-forward and rewind at this point.
    Zach never quite understood it, although his mother always had her crazy theories. She had crazy theories about a lot of things, but dreams were kind of her forte. She’d say it was all the fear he never felt when out in the field, manifested into a dream. Maybe so, but adding in Maddi was too much. Her face had been twisted in fear, her dress