Casually as she could, she slipped into her shoes and attempted to wrangle her hair. “And what is it you think I want?”

Reaching out, he grabbed her hand again, stilling her frenetic movements, waiting until she looked at him. “Love,” he said quietly.

She managed a light laugh. She realized she might be pathetically needy when it came to that particular emotion, but love hadn’t exactly been prominent in her life. She’d come here to Santa Rey a little bit in limbo, but the one thing she’d known was she’d wanted that to change. But she’d made Zach a promise not to get attached, not to have messy emotions.

She’d failed on both counts.

“Brooke.” He stroked a strand of hair from her face, all the while holding her gaze with his so that she couldn’t look away to save her life. In these eyes were affection, heat…and a brutal honesty. “I don’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you, but—”

“It’s not your fault—”

“I wanted a physical relationship with you, you know that. And now I’m holding back, you know that, too. It’s just that if you’re going to add love into the mix—” He grinned ruefully. “Well, you can’t. I don’t seem to have the parts required to do love. So you can’t fall, not for me.”

Her throat tight, she nodded. “I know.”

Only she also knew it was too damn late.

15

ZACH SLEPT on and off for two days. Or rather he tossed and turned for two days. He spent his third night at home surrounded by the guys, grateful not to still be in the hospital like Blake, who’d suffered a more serious head trauma, his leg broken in four places, and two cracked ribs, and was by all accounts cranky as all hell.

Zach was glad for the company. Sort of. But mostly he kept thinking about the fact that Brooke hadn’t come back, and that this was her last week in town, and that he was an idiot.

“Why are you moping around like you lost your puppy?” Sam asked.

“I’m not.”

The guys all exchanged a careful-with-the-deluded-patient look, and he sighed.

Yeah. He was moping.

Because he’d sent away the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“You’ve got pizza, beer and us,” Eddie joked. “What else could you need?”

“Brooke.” This from Aidan, his mouth full of pizza and a knowing look in his eyes. “He wants Brooke.”

“No.” Sam shook his head. “Our Zach’s not much of a repeater.”

Zach opened his mouth, but in lieu of absolutely nothing to say in his defense, shut it again.

“If I had Brooke looking at me the way she looks at you, I’d become a repeater,” Dustin said as he reached for more pizza.