hers was trying to do when you showed up at the house that day.”
It had been nearly seventeen years since that day. An awful day. Every once in a blue moon, she’d find herself waking from a nightmare where Zach hadn’t arrived in time and—
Stop it.
It hadn’t happened.
Once her mother had started making merry with her money, she’d started making merry with lots of other things. Like drugs, booze, and her wedding vows. Oh, she’d probably been sleeping around before, but as Abigale got older, it was more obvious just how screwed up her mother was.
While her dad was out, still working a job because her mother insisted it provided a sense of normalcy, her mother had used those hours to bring countless men into the home that had been built with money Abigale had earned.
When she was fourteen, one of those men had crept into the study where Abigale had been working on a school assignment. He’d been drunk, his hands big and hard and cruel.
Her mother had been passed out on the couch and the housekeeper was out shopping.
Trapped and scared, Abigale had screamed for help.
Help had come in the form of a pissed off fifteen-year-old Zach Barnes who’d had his mom drop him off. He had his skateboard and he’d used it like a club, bringing it down on the bastard’s head.
It wasn’t the first time Zach had saved her.
It hadn’t been the last. He’d been saving her from herself, saving her from a variety of things, throughout their entire friendship. Maybe he didn’t see himself as her knight, but she sure as hell did.
He leaned forward and touched a hand to the stamped leather journal. “Writing bad poetry and sonnets about your unending love for Roger the Rat?” he asked.
“No. I gave up on the bad poetry when you threatened to show my journal to Luke Perry so he could see what I had written about him.” She snorted and drew her legs up, shifting to look at him. “I’m trying to think up the plan for my life now that it’s been thrown off track.”
He groaned and dropped his head back on the seat. Eyes closed, he dragged a hand over his face. “Sugar, you can’t plan life.” He looked back over at her and said softly, “Life is supposed to just happen.”
“Hey, I planned quite a bit of my life,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him.
His gaze dropped to her mouth.
Her heart stuttered to a stop for one brief second and then it started to race. Hard and fast, like it did on the rare occasions when she let herself take the Mustang out to the desert and just open her up. The moment shattered as he looked away and she wanted to smack herself.
This was Zach, damn it.
Yeah, she was no longer engaged to a guy who’d been . . . well . . . uninspiring in bed and maybe she needed to live a little bit. But this was Zach. Her best friend. Her oldest friend.
“But you tried to plan your personal life . . . who you’d fall in love with. It doesn’t work that way,” he pointed out. “You practically chose him out of a catalog, Abs, and that’s not how it works. Look at The Bachelor and see what a fucking joke that is.”
She rolled her eyes. “Hey, are they still calling you about that celebrity thing they want you to do?”
“Not after I told them I wasn’t a good fit since I had the bodies of two dead girlfriends stored in my freezer.” He shrugged and started to tap the book in his hand against his leg.
Her jaw dropped. “You didn’t!”
With a sly grin on his lips, he glanced at her. “Now, Abs, sugar. You know me better than anybody else in the world. Would I really say something like that?”
“Oh, shit.” She cringed and covered her face with her hands.
He started to laugh.
“You are insane!” She kicked him in the thigh. Her foot bounced off the muscled length and he just laughed harder. “One of these days, you’ll say something like that and the cops will show up at your door, Zach.”
“Hey, wouldn’t be the first time.” He shrugged.
Glaring at him, she kicked him again. “That’s not funny.” He had had cops show up at his door; the first time had been after he’d hit that bastard in the head with his skateboard. The son of a bitch had tried to press assault charges. She’d