That was the trouble with having been raised by a man who’d lost his wife to leukemia a week before their only daughter’s third birthday.
Coach spent more time on the field or at the gym than he did at home, and he never dissembled when it came to his players. He was fair but blunt, traits he’d passed on to his only child. It wasn’t until Mac was in junior high that she realized she didn’t fit in with Hollis and her friends, whose primary method of communication seemed to be giggling and shaking their . . . pom-poms.
Coach had done his best, but by the time Mac was a freshman in high school, she’d attended more sporting events than dances.
Nope. Not going there.
What was it about Red Leaf that resurrected every painful moment from her past? She was no longer an awkward teenage girl, harboring a major crush on the most popular boy in school.
You’re a reporter. This is a story. You have to separate feelings from facts.
But that didn’t stop Mac from wincing when she swept aside a curtain of wild grapevine and saw the gazebo. Harsh winters, the relentless scrape of the wind, and the summer sun had bleached the color from the cedar posts, leaving them as dry and brittle as bones. A thick crust of moss and decaying leaves coated the shingles on the roof.
Mac felt the strangest urge to apologize for the neglect. Whoever the Channings had hired to tend the grounds had obviously stopped caring at some point. The yard had shrunk to a small patch of green that stopped a few yards short of Lilah’s prizewinning rose garden.
Mac took a tentative step inside the gazebo and heard an ominous snap as one of the boards shifted beneath her feet.
Sunlight streamed through the lattice walls, creating an intricate stencil on the floor.
Focus.
Mac raised her camera and the gazebo shrank to one small frame.
And there it was. The tiny heart etched in the corner of the built-in bench. Most girls wanted lip gloss or nail polish for their thirteenth birthday, but Mac had asked for a Swiss Army knife.
The gift had come in handy the night she’d impulsively carved Ethan’s initials in the wood, all the while imagining the story she would tell their adorable green-eyed children.
This is the place where your dad and I fell in love. I was a freshman. He was a senior. He was the star quarterback of the football team. I was the coach’s daughter. He was gorgeous, smart, and popular. I was . . .
Totally delusional—Mac ruthlessly shut down the memory—that’s what you were.
The step creaked again—a sound that immediately caught Mac’s attention because she wasn’t the one standing on it this time.
She whirled around and her eyes locked on the man standing less than three feet away in the doorway of the gazebo.
Ethan Channing had just stepped out of her dreams and into her life.
Ethan wrestled down his irritation as the young woman in the gazebo turned to face him.
His mother had threatened to hire a professional wedding planner even though Hollis insisted that she and Connor wanted to keep things simple.
A word that wasn’t in their mother’s vocabulary. Neither was the word no. Ethan loved the woman dearly, but this was exactly the kind of thing she would do. There was no getting around it. His mother was a steamroller in Ralph Lauren and pearls.
Still, it didn’t give Ethan license to shoot the messenger. A very attractive messenger—even if she was looking at him the way a character in a cheesy horror flick would look at the ax murderer who’d just stepped out of the shadows.
“Sorry.” Ethan took a step backward, lifted his hands to show her they were ax-free. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
If possible, the woman’s big brown eyes got even bigger.
Now she was staring at him as if she knew him . . . and that was when it occurred to Ethan that he knew her too.
“Mac?” He tested the name cautiously, still not trusting his eyes. Until she nodded.
“Ethan . . . um . . . hello.”
He couldn’t believe it. Mac Davis—the scrawny, freckle-faced girl who’d perched on the bleachers taking stats or handed out water bottles during halftime—had been a fixture at every football game. But the nickname no longer seemed to fit.
Ethan’s gaze swept over her, confirming that some mysterious metamorphosis had occurred over the past ten years. Mac’s hair, once the color and consistency of copper wire, had deepened to a rich mahogany. It spilled over her shoulders, framing a heart-shaped face that Ethan would have, if pressed, once described as cute. He would have been wrong. Mackenzie Davis was . . . beautiful.
The coach’s daughter. All grown up. The thought made Ethan smile. Until he realized that Mac wasn’t smiling back. She was inching toward the doorway of the gazebo.
“Excuse me. I have to take some photos while the lighting is still good.”
This was probably his cue to let her go with a polite nod. But at the moment Ethan felt more curious than polite. “Photos?”
“For the Register.” Mac held up a digital camera as proof.