person who planned this with you?”
She shrugged. “My friends. Our friends. Well, the female part of the couples, anyway.”
“I never would have guessed.”
Now, finally, Zach allowed the faintest of grins to spread across his face. He tossed the tennis ball once, twice, three times. “Okay, Ms. Moore. This is for the nun comment.”
A pitcher for his high school baseball team, Zach hit the bull’s-eye on the first throw. A bell rang. A rope pulled. A gallon of water rushed down on Savannah Sophia Moore’s pretty head. She sucked in a breath. “Oooh, it’s cold!”
By filling her lungs, she’d lifted her breasts and the wet, clinging white stripes on her shirt clearly revealed a peach-colored bra supporting a bounty crowned in tight dusky nipples.
Though Zach couldn’t drag his eyes off Savannah, in the periphery of his vision, he saw TJ refilling the bucket from a hose. When the boy picked up a sack of ice, Zach’s instinct was to tell him to leave it. But then he thought about the nun comment again and he let the ice go into the pail.
Damn, he’d missed her.
He threw the second tennis ball—another bull’s-eye. That was for unnecessary weeks of loneliness.
TJ reset the game. “Add the rest of the bag of ice,” Zach instructed. Savannah opened her mouth as if she were about to protest, but abruptly shut it, unafraid to take her medicine, silly as this whole thing was.
And yet, crazy as it sounded, this worked for him. A little innocent payback was soothing his ruffled feathers. A little peek at that pucker had put forgiveness right there at the top of his to-do list.
Once the game was reset and she sat shivering in her seat, looking beautiful and fresh and clean, though cold, Zach tossed the last ball from one hand to the other and debated. “Tell me again what you are hoping to prove.”
She clasped her fingers in her lap, her expression open, her eyes beseeching. “I love you, Zach Turner. I trust you. I hope you will consider reconciliation with me, but even if that’s not what you want, I’ll understand. Fair warning, though, I’ll still probably try to change your mind.”
Zach looked from Savannah back to the tennis ball, then back to Savannah. “So, one more shot. Do I take it?”
“I’ll give you as many shots as you want. I’m not going anywhere, Zach Turner. Never again. I’m staying put. You can trust me on that.”
He tossed the ball once, twice, three times. Then he moved toward the “jail,” opened the door, and stepped inside. Savannah slipped off her stool and stood in front of him. “Zach?”
“I cannot believe you did something this silly.”
“Did it work?”
“I think it’s safe to say that the ice has been broken, yes.” He slipped his hand around her neck, pulled her against him, and fitted his mouth to hers. The kiss was long and slow and sweet, offering apologies and making promises. It was a kiss filled with healing, smack dab in the middle of the street in—where else?—Eternity Springs. Zach was just about ready to end the kiss and suggest they retire to somewhere more private when a gush of ice-cold water fell upon them. “Yikes!”
He jerked away from her, shook ice off his shirt, and turned to see the culprit. Culprits, plural, with smug, delighted grins on their faces. “The matchmaking coven,” he muttered. And their husbands. “Aren’t y’all funny.”
Cam Murphy gave the rope attached to the bucket a little shake, making sure the last drops of water fell. “Hey, we’re just trying to keep you from having to arrest yourself. Public displays of affection can lead to indecent exposure charges, you know.”
Savannah laughed. “I need to go home and change and then … Zach, would you have time to talk?”
“How about lunch? Around one?”
“Perfect.”
“If you can steal an hour, I’ll take you out to Reflection Point. We’d have more privacy.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
He gave her a quick kiss, then turned to leave. He scooped up his last fifty-dollar tennis ball and decided he’d tuck it away somewhere. Never know when a man might need a little … retribution.
Wrapped in an Angel’s Rest beach towel Celeste had contributed to the cause, Savannah floated home. This had gone better than she’d dared to hope.
She’d been prepared for him to walk right by the booth and ignore her, no matter that her friends agreed that doing so would make him a stooge. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d thrown one ball