It was as if time shifted, moving slower and slower until it froze for a full heartbeat as recognition crashed into Mackenzie’s chest. The familiar voice, smooth and husky, filled the room.
Mackenzie felt her balance falter, tasted the panic as it wrapped around her throat, suffocating her. The fear was even worse. It felt like leaded bullets lodged in her chest, and each pump of her heart shot a fresh dose of panic throughout her body.
“Is dat for me, Uncle Hunter?” Caroline asked, and every single one of Mackenzie’s fears was muted, shoved to the furthest corner of her brain, until she had only a single focus.
Escape.
“Maybe you should open the lid and tell me,” he said with that easygoing amusement in his voice that charmed women into doing stupid things. Thankfully, Mackenzie was too busy searching for her shoes to be charmed. Because she knew the power of that voice—and was convinced it should be outlawed.
She patted the floor with her palm, her heart doing some serious patting of its own, the thumps so loud it was impossible to decipher where Caroline had run to. But from the sound of the rustling taffeta and wet kisses, wherever she’d gone had landed her right in Hunter’s arms.
Mackenzie slipped one shoe on, but with the other nowhere to be found, her panic began to rebuild. Then a wet nose nudged her hand toward the coffee table and—
Thank God—her shoe.
“You’re getting a steak for supper,” Mackenzie whispered to Muttley, who licked her hand.
An ear-piercing squeal lit through the room, so loud Mackenzie could feel the vibrations in her sternum. It was followed by a sound even sweeter.
A tiny little yip.
“It’s a puppy! You gots me a puppy!” Caroline was jumping up and down, her feet and dress slapping with each movement.
Muttley, on the other hand, chose now to act like a working dog. He sat completely still, his ears perked but his body relaxed, almost bored. As if he couldn’t be bothered by the addition of another dog.
“She’s a pomapoo, so she’ll look like a fluffy slipper with a wagging tail. And she’ll never lose that cute little yip,” Hunter said proudly.
“Ever?” Caroline asked in wonder.
Yipyipyip!
“See, isn’t that cute? A powder puff that prances. Brody is going to love walking her downtown.” Hunter sounded way too pleased with himself, which meant he was up to no good. Not that Mackenzie cared—she was too busy grabbing her own dog.
“Can I keep her?”
Hunter chuckled. “It wouldn’t be a present if you had to give her back.”
The commotion stopped, and the energy in the room shifted, became uncertain. Mackenzie strained to hear Caroline’s voice. “But Mommy and Daddy said I has to wait until I this many.”
“Good thing it’s your birthday tomorrow, because you’ll officially be older.”
“I will!” Caroline swished back and forth, and then she was on the move again. The rustling of taffeta and yips became louder and louder until she squealed, “Snuggles, Miss Mack! We wants snuggles.”
The air shifted as Caroline leaped up into Mackenzie’s lap, securing her to the chair and eliminating any hope of a stealthy exit. A wet nose and hot doggy breath greeted Mackenzie’s hand, then her arm, until she felt the puppy stretch to reach her face.
“Miss Mack, I gots a pomapoo,” Caroline repeated.
“I can feel.” Mackenzie made a conscious effort to bury her fear, push it down until she was alone. A talent she’d spent a lifetime mastering.
“It’s just like the one I wanted. See.” Caroline took Mackenzie’s hand in her much smaller one and ran it over the puppy’s body, showing Mackenzie what her new puppy looked like. The little thing’s entire body trembled with nervous excitement. Not all that far off from what Mackenzie’s heart was doing. “She’s cream wif a brown spot around her nose, and her eyes are black. And she gots a glittery collar and little booties on her feet. And feel right here, her tail’s curly.”
Mackenzie loved the way Caroline always included her. If she wasn’t describing the colors blooming in the garden, she was guiding Mackenzie’s hands over some object, making sure Mackenzie saw what everyone else did.
Mackenzie squeezed the toddler a little tighter. “What are you going to name her?”
Mackenzie could almost hear Caroline considering all the options. With an excited gasp, she said, “Duchess.”
“That’s a perfect name,” Hunter said with a smile. “I can already see her in a cute tiara and tutu prancing down the hallway of your daddy’s office.”
“Duchess!” Caroline bounced up and down on Mackenzie’s lap. “Can I show her to Muttley?”
Muttley yawned, unimpressed with Duchess.
“Maybe later. He’s working right now.” Working on getting Mackenzie out of there.
“Dat’s Muttley,” Caroline informed the room. “I know you want to pet him, but you can’t. See, his harness is on ’cause he’s working.”
And wouldn’t you know it, Muttley was suddenly sitting obediently at Mackenzie’s feet, alert and awaiting his command.
“You don’t say,” Hunter said, all that easygoing charm suddenly gone.
“He looks all sleepy, but he’s working. Right, Miss Mack?”
“Yup.” Mackenzie stroked Muttley’s head, seeking connection and comfort.
“Miss Mack is his boss,” Caroline whispered.
“Lucky dog,” he said, and Mackenzie’s nipples went on the alert.
Yup, time to go.
Mackenzie lifted the little girl off her lap. “Why don’t you go show Duchess to your mom?”
“Mommy! Mommy!” And just like that, Caroline was off, racing down the hallway, Duchess’s little claws sliding across the hardwood floors in her wake.
The invisible buffer, the only thing allowing Mackenzie to hold it together, left with Caroline. Even worse, the approaching clicks of boots on the slate floor sent a wave of pure terror racing through her body as a masculine and earthy scent caressed her cheek and confirmed her suspicions.
She hadn’t been alone in Brody’s office—Hunter had been with her. Which meant that Brody had sandbagged her. Supper hadn’t been a sweet gesture. It had been a setup. Plain and simple.
And Hunter? He’d taken one look at her . . . and walked out.
Something she wanted to do right then, except she didn’t know where to go.
The silence between them grew unbearable. Her stomach pinched from the intense anxiety pumping through her veins. Unable to keep still, she stroked Muttley.
“Is this another coincidence?” She threw air quotes around the word. “Or did Brody tell you I was going to be here?”
“It’s good to see you too, Trouble.” His tone said quite the opposite.
Refusing to let that affect her, she zeroed in on the sound of his voice and lifted her gaze. She knew she’d found his eyes when she heard his breathing shift. “Why are you here, Hunter?”
“To drop off a yap dog for my niece, a nice little payback for Brody not telling me about you sooner.” The coffee table groaned under Hunter’s weight as he sat. “And because we need to talk.”
“You had your chance the other week in Brody’s office,” she said.
“Brody told you that was me?” He had the nerve to sound irritated.
“No, I recognized your cologne.” She didn’t know if he was impressed or just choosing to remain silent, so she said, “It must have taken a lot to get Brody to go against his promise and set up that meeting. Yet you didn’t say a word.” Not a single one. “Why?”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
It was strange how a simple statement had the power to cut so deep it actually ached to smile. But Mackenzie forced a grin, big and bold, because it would hurt less than his pity.
Since leaving rehab, Mackenzie had experienced her share of awkward conversations and even more awkward silences when running into people from her past. It was as if her disability had become her new identity, erasing the woman behind the illness, making her somehow a stranger to them.
What really got to her, though, were the people who would pretend nothing had changed. That this was just another bump in the road for her to overcome. As if all she needed to do was fight harder, really commit herself, and everything would go back to normal.
What people didn’t understand was Mackenzie’s life was normal. It was just a different kind of comfort and balance she sought. She was proud of the leaps she’d made in getting there.
Her doctors praised her for how fast she’d progressed, how she’d embraced her rehabilitation. The only thing she had yet to master was reentry. How to make her new normal work with everyone else’s normal. So when those awkward moments happened, they wouldn’t be so isolating—or devastating.
“Don’t worry.” She grabbed the harness and stood, Muttley steadily at her side. “I get that a lot.”
“I wasn’t talking about your sight,” Hunter said, coming to stand in front of her. “I was talking about you, your music, everything else I’ve missed out on. You disappeared on me. I had no idea what happened.”
His anguish was raw and real and made Mackenzie’s stomach cave in on itself—and her feet shift to find a clear path.
“What was I supposed to do? Walk into your dressing room, a few minutes before you were supposed to walk down the aisle, and tell you I was going blind?” She took a step to the right and bumped into something large with rounded corners. “That all of the plans we had for touring and the band were over for me?”
“If that’s what it took, then yeah.”
She moved forward and felt the space tighten. Her emotions were out of control, so disorienting she couldn’t remember the exact layout of the room. And she couldn’t slow down enough to let Muttley do his job.
“It was your wedding. You had a honeymoon to go on and a tour starting right after. I didn’t want to hold you back.” Didn’t want him to witness her independence wilting away. “I knew I could handle it on my own.”
“This isn’t about what you can or can’t handle,” he said, his voice right behind her. No matter how many steps she moved, he was right there.
A total Hunter move. Get close, get personal, then get sweet-talking.
Problem was, it had been a long while since someone had sweet-talked Mackenzie, a language in which Hunter was fluent. Although his tone was far from sweet. In fact, he sounded angry—an emotion she’d never felt from him before with regard to her.
“This is about our friendship. About you deciding how much I was allowed to care for you. Jesus, you were a no-show at my wedding, then disappeared without a word.” No, not anger . . . fury.
“Big Daddy knew where I was,” she said.
“And he was guilted into silence, I bet. Jesus, all I knew was that you’d quit the band and were going in a different direction. He never said much more, leaving me to replay the last six months before the wedding, what I could have said, what I could have done so wrong that you’d cut me out of your life.”
A wave of guilt washed over her, moving around her stomach before settling like hot lead in her chest. She knew better than anyone how crushing the weight of uncertainty could be, how tiring it was to obsess over where things had gone wrong. Figure out exactly where she came up lacking.
Her mother’s death had paralyzed her, but it was the all-encompassing guilt that had finally pulled her under.
“I was trying to do the right thing. My life was going to change, but that didn’t mean yours had to,” she said, finally letting Muttley lead her through the maze of furniture. “I knew if I told you about my disease, you’d want to help, postpone the tour to take care of me. But you deserved to enjoy your success, live a happy life with Hadley.”
“You were a part of that happy life. And what went down between us had nothing to do with the band or Hadley.” Suddenly he was directly in front of her, blocking her path, and it felt as if the walls were closing in. And that distress, the one she’d felt the first time she’d awoken to find everything had faded into the shadows, came rushing back.
Sometimes, being blind was similar to being bound: no matter how hard she fought, she’d never break free. Some days it was a lonely existence, and other days the darkness went far deeper than missing the spectrum of colors that made life warm.
“It had to do with you not trusting me,” he said.
“It had to do with trusting myself,” she clarified. “All I wanted was for you to be happy, but the engagement flew by, and working with you became harder and harder. I knew I would eventually lose my sight, next would come my home, and then my freedom.” She pushed through the emotion. “I couldn’t survive standing by and watching the last thing I loved slip away.”
Hunter stopped breathing. She felt it. Felt the energy thicken and the reality of what she’d admitted push down on the both of them.
She couldn’t see his face, didn’t know what expression he was wearing, but knew she’d dropped a bomb so destructive it had splintered Hunter’s foundation. Shredded the conversation until all that remained was her admission of love.
Mackenzie didn’t know what was worse: unrequited love or her being so far under his radar that her admission came as a shock.
“You should have told me.” His voice was so low she had a hard time picking up on the cues she needed to decipher his expression.
“Would it have made a difference?” A question she’d carried with her every day. A question that had expanded since news of the divorce hit, until sometimes it was all she could think about.
“Honestly, I don’t know, but we would have worked it out. We’ve always worked it out. It’s what made us such a strong team. Or at least I thought it had, but I must have been missing something if you thought your only option was to run.”
“What other options would there be?” she whispered. “Sit on the porch and wait. For the band to leave on tour, for you to start living your new life, for everything and everyone I knew to keep moving in the same direction while I walked up and down those front steps of my house over and over until my doctors thought I could handle stepping onto the sidewalk?”
“Mackenzie,” he said quietly.
“Y’all were in a different hotel room every night, while I was trying to memorize how many steps it was to the bathroom. How many tiles back my toothbrush sat on the counter.”
Embarrassed by her admission and afraid she was about to cry, Mackenzie turned around to leave—and almost walked straight into a wall.
Muttley tugged her back before she could make contact, but she felt the cold air through the plaster close enough to know it was a near miss.
Humiliation warmed her face and stung her eyes. It had been almost a year since she’d walked into something, so why had her last four senses chosen now to abandon her? All she wanted to do was disappear into the darkness until the world didn’t feel so big and ever-changing.
“Can we do this another time?” Her voice was hoarse.
Hunter came up behind her, his body heat seeping through her skin and his voice a soft husk. “We’ve been so busy moving forward we’ve lost too much time, Trouble,” he whispered, her nickname falling from his lips as if nothing had changed, his hands resting on her hips as if they belonged there.
Slowly, God, so slowly, he turned her around and right into those big strong arms of his, then wrapped her up in a hug that was as gentle as it was devastating. Desire, and something much more vulnerable, rushed through her and settled in parts she’d thought long forgotten. But he didn’t stop there.
Oh no, Hunter pulled her even closer, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and whispered, “And I don’t plan to stand by and lose more.”