Zach's Law by Kay Hooper Read Free Book Online

she said, indicating the remains of her own coffee.
    “You must have a cast-iron stomach,” he commented, sitting down.
    “Probably. I’m a good cook aside from coffee, however, so you don’t have to worry about food poisoning.”
    She had made enough to feed an army, and after the first tentative taste confirmed her promise, Zach, in silent appreciation, cleared away most of what she’d prepared. Teddy waited until he had nearly finished before she quietly dropped her bomb.
    “What was her name?”
    After an instant’s hesitation he grunted, “Who?” and sat back, sipping his coffee.
    Teddy met his stony gaze squarely, her own eyes calm and reflective. “That woman whose first lover you became. The one who somehow burned you. Did she get too demanding, Zach, was that it?”
    “Drop it, Teddy.”
    She smiled just a little and softly quoted: “ ‘He went back through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. But he never told anybody.’ Kipling. You don’t tell anybody, either, do you, Zach? You just go your own way, alone and dangerous and stoic. Have you ever let a woman get close to you? Have you ever let down your guard that much?”
    “Once.” He hadn’t meant to say it, and the bleak sound of his own voice startled him. And then he saw that her eyes had softened, gone impossibly tender, and even though he
knew
it wasn’t real, he couldn’t look away from her small, vital face.
    “I’m sorry she hurt you.”
    He found himself responding without thought, lost in the satiny brown depths of her eyes. “It wasn’t her fault.”
    “What happened, Zach?” she asked gently. She almost held her breath, painfully aware of just how important it was that he tell her about this.
    “It … happened, that’s all. It just happened.”
    “Tell me.” She had unconsciously lowered her voice almost to a croon, instinctively using the tone that almost magically caused animals to trust her. Even wild ones. And she never thought—then—that it was the jungle-born part of Zach that was responding, that it was there he caged the hurts of his life.
    Still without thought, he told her.
    “I had set up a security system for an American businessman in South America. His family was there, and he worried about their safety. Rightly, as it turned out. His daughter was kidnapped.They’d breached my security system, and I felt responsible. So I went after her.”
    Teddy felt her eyes widen at his flat tone, the utter simplicity of his words. What he had done was matter-of-fact and reasonable to him, as if every man was sometimes called upon to wade into shark-infested waters to retrieve something the swirling currents had carried away from him.
    “They had taken her deep into the jungle, but I managed to get to her. And get her safely away from them. But they were after us, and we had miles of jungle to cross before we reached safety. It was hellish and dangerous, and the conditions were primitive in a way she’d never experienced before. She had no one to turn to but me. So she did.”
    Zach’s mouth twisted, but he never looked away from Teddy’s eyes. “I found out too late she’d never had a lover. Still, it didn’t seem to matter. She said she’d never been in love before, either. And even though I knew the jungle was no place for love, I believed her. I believed her.”
    Because I felt it too
.
    He didn’t have to say it, but Teddy heard it. She drew a deep breath. “What happened?”
    His smile was bleak and rather frightening. “We got back to civilization. And with the mists of the jungle gone, I didn’t fit her image of what her husband should be. I was hard, she said. I frightened her. So I left.” And his next words seemed wrenched from him with a raw, torn sound. “I found out later—she had an abortion.”
    Teddy stared into the diamond-bright sheen of his gray eyes and felt a throb of pain for him. No wonder, she thought dimly, he was rabid about being a