The Forever Girl Read online

  “Time for food!” Caitlin declared with an overabundance of cheer that had Walker taking a second look at her. “Just give me a few minutes to set up,” she said.

  When Caitlin needed a minute, it was usually to give herself a time-out in order to avoid bloodshed. Walker headed over to where she was setting up a rather elaborate picnic. “What’s up?”

  Caitlin downed a glass of wine. “Nothing.”

  “You’re running around like a chicken without a head trying to please everyone, and you’re day drinking. So try again.”

  Even though she didn’t have anywhere near the same life experience he did, Caitlin had always treated him like she was the big sister. She was the warmest, sweetest person he’d ever met and had come into his life during a time when he hadn’t known much warmth or sweetness. He’d never felt anything but gratitude and a brotherly sense of protectiveness for her, and that shit went deep with him. Soul deep. She was his family for life, and he’d do anything for her.

  Same for Heather.

  He glanced at the third musketeer. Maze was a different story. Not that he wouldn’t throw himself in front of a train for her, because he would. But if she wanted his heart and soul . . . well, they weren’t available. She’d already had them.

  And destroyed them.

  “Done,” Caitlin said, gesturing to the spread. “Think it’s okay?”

  She’d thought of everything, including Dillon’s favorite beer, Heather’s favorite cookies, and a container of dry cereal in which Sammie was already up to her elbows. Pieces of the cereal were stuck to her cheeks and chin.

  “Delicious?” Walker asked the kid.

  She beamed at him and drooled. Heather laughed and kissed her baby’s face all over, much to Sammie’s utter delight. Caitlin tried to join in the fun and Sammie’s smile faded.

  “Honestly,” Caitlin said, and that made Sammie laugh.

  Maze and Jace were sitting on an old log sharing a sandwich, looking annoyingly cozy. Walker tried to find something in their body language to prove his gut theory that they weren’t sleeping together, but he got nothing. For the first time ever, his famed instincts failed him.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said to Walker, breaking his attention. “The stuff I packed for you is far more boring. Turkey on wheat with sprouts. But don’t worry, it’ll keep your body pure.”

  Maze choked on a bite. “Sorry,” she muttered, carefully not looking at him. Which was how he found his first genuine grin of the day. He sat with Sammie, and though she offered to share her cereal, he passed and ate his sandwich.

  A bit later, he saw Maze by herself sitting on the tire swing, staring out at the water.

  Because he couldn’t seem to help himself, he followed. When he was at her back, he took a hold of the swing and gave her a gentle nudge.

  “That all you got?” she asked, and threw her weight into it so she went higher.

  “You do know you don’t always have to go five hundred miles an hour, right?”

  She flashed him a look as she swung by him. “And right back at you.”

  Touché. “I saw that you won that bartending competition in San Francisco,” he said.

  She leaned back, her feet up to the sky as she pumped for more speed. “And you saw that where?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “After the five hundredth time that Facebook recommended we be friends, I decided to check it out and see what you were up to.”

  “You keeping tabs on me, Walk?”

  Actually, he’d kept track of all of them; it was a part of his obsessive need to keep safe the few people who had keys to his heart. Maze had been a challenge, since he’d had to do his protective thing from afar and quietly. Of all of them, not only wouldn’t she thank him for watching out for her, she’d be pissed off. And it bugged the hell out of him that she’d been content to have nothing to do with him at all, when he felt the opposite.

  She’d been broken when Michael died. Broken when he’d stupidly married her far before she’d been ready for any such thing. And broken three years ago when she’d walked away from all of them rather than face down her pride and admit she needed anyone. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve kept tabs on you.”

  She held his gaze for a long beat, shocking the hell out of him when she nodded and quietly said, “Thanks. And I’m not just a bartender.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’re still in night school for your bachelor’s degree. But even if you weren’t, if there’s anyone who can make being a bartender a hotshot career, it’s you. Because, Maze?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ve never been ‘just’ anything in your life.”

  She blinked, like she didn’t know what to do with the compliment. Which kind of broke his heart.

  “What do you want to do after you graduate?” he asked.

  “Run a bar and grill and keep bartending. I like it,” she said. “But I want to be the boss. I think I’ll like that even better.”

  He laughed and nodded.

  “I got that dream from you, you know,” she said softly. “You always wanted to run your own restaurant so you could feed all your people.”

  Funny how their dreams had aligned but not their lives. Heather and Sammie were sitting in the grass. Caitlin was feeding Dillon a bite of her sandwich. Roly and Poly were collapsed in front of their portable water bowl. Roly was asleep. Too tired to stand up, Poly lay there, chin resting on the lip of the water dish, lapping up water. Jace was sitting with them. No one was paying them any attention. “You and Jules doing okay?” he asked.

  Maze snorted, then jumped off the swing. “Yeah. We’re fine.” And with that, she headed off to the picnic table, perusing the assortment of desserts Caitlin had brought. Walker followed and grabbed an apple and a wedge of cheese. He began cutting them up.

  Diverted from the cookies, Maze paired a piece of apple with a slice of cheese. “I see what you’re doing, you know.” She bit into the snack. Chewed. Swallowed. “Trying to change me. Many have tried. None have succeeded.”

  “I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

  She choked on her apple and cheese, and he rubbed her back until she wheezed out an “I’m fine!”

  “That too.”

  She shook her head and took another bite. He waited her out, knowing that was the only way to get her to talk. Maze didn’t like silence and tended to fill it. And sure enough, she sighed and spoke. “You asked why I lost touch with Caitlin and Heather. I pulled back,” she admitted. “Caitlin thinks she did something wrong, but she didn’t. It was all me. I got locked into a cycle of guilt I couldn’t shake.”

  “Maze,” he said, aching for her. The fire that had taken out the Walshes’ house and killed their son had begun in the basement, where the older kids had been working on their plans to sneak out.

  Maze had been the ringleader on that particular adventure. Caitlin’s parents had never blamed her for the fire, or for Michael’s death, but she’d blamed herself. When the Walshes could no longer take on foster kids, Maze had felt abandoned. And honestly? Walker 100 percent got that, irrational as it was.

  “A few months after Vegas,” Maze said softly, “Caitlin threw herself a birthday party. I didn’t go. I blew her off, no warning.”

  “Because of me,” he said quietly, remembering. “Because you didn’t want to see me.”

  She lifted a shoulder in a possible admission to that. “I didn’t think about how it would affect her. It was selfish. But then, because I’m me, I made it even worse.”

  “How?”

  “Remember Caitlin’s surprise anniversary party for her parents that same year?”

  He nodded.

  “I was supposed to get them there. Caitlin asked me, said it was my only job.”

  “A pretty big job, seeing as you were estranged from them by that time,” Walker said.

  “It’s true that we hadn’t spoken much,” she said. “They’d been busy rebuilding their lives, and me . . . well, I still had some things to w
ork through. But Caitlin wanted me to do it, to make up with them. I agreed, even knowing deep down I’d only make things worse. But I picked them up . . .” She trailed off, eating the last pieces of apple and cheese.

  Walker cut up some more, giving her a minute.

  “We had a . . . disagreement in the car on the way to the party,” she finally said. “Because that’s what I do, right? Ruin things. Mayhem Maze . . . I wear the nickname well, as we all know.”

  He instantly felt sick that he’d ever let that nickname stick to her. “Maze—”

  “I was still so angry,” she said, “even though I had no right to be. They asked how I was doing. And I said . . .” She closed her eyes. “I said, ‘My real parents are the only ones allowed to inquire about my life.’ I said they’d given me up just like everyone else, so my life didn’t concern them.” She opened her eyes, and they were filled with regret and pain. “Even though of course I had no idea who my birth dad was and my mom hadn’t bothered with me in years.”

  “You were hurting—”

  “Right, and we know how much I like to share my pain.” She shook her head. “But they kept it classy. Shelly said she might not be my birth mom, but she’d brought me into her house and thought of me as a daughter. Still did.” Maze paused. “Which of course was one of the sweetest things I’d ever heard.”

  “What happened?” he asked quietly.

  “I behaved predictably. I said, ‘If you loved me so much, you’d have found a way to keep me.’” She shook her head. “I’ll never forget the look on Shelly’s face. I feel so badly about that and what came next.”

  “Which was?”

  “When I got out of the car, I saw your truck. Vegas had only been a few months before that. We hadn’t seen each other or talked, and it was like all my mistakes were in one place mocking me. So I compounded my errors and left. And then I guess they went inside, and when everyone yelled ‘Happy anniversary,’ Caitlin’s mom burst into tears. And not the happy ones.”

  Walker nodded. Caitlin had been furious with Maze.

  He hadn’t been, because unlike Caitlin, who’d looked at this from the other side, he understood how Maze had felt, though as usual, she’d let her emotions get the best of her. Back then, she hadn’t yet learned how to temper herself. But at some point, she’d clearly figured that out. She could now hide herself in plain sight.

  “A few years ago, I realized only I held the power to make myself miserable about the past,” she said, “but I also had the power to stop making myself miserable. So I reached out. They responded right away, and I tried to apologize but they wouldn’t let me. They were super kind and happy to hear from me, and I was my usual weird and awkward.”

  “Those are two of my favorite things about you.”

  She snorted and he smiled.

  “What did they say?”

  “They wanted to meet.”

  “And?”

  She closed her eyes. “And . . . I didn’t show.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was overwhelmed, afraid, nervous . . . hell, I don’t know, pick one.”

  “What were you nervous about?”

  She shrugged, but he knew. She’d been nervous that she’d be rejected. She hadn’t been able to trust them when they’d said it was all fine because it hadn’t been fine the last time they’d said that, when they’d had to move into the hotel without the fosters. They’d promised to come back for her, for all three of them, but that hadn’t happened. “I get it, Maze.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. “You do?”

  “Yeah. I do. And I wish you’d stop beating yourself up for things that weren’t just on you.”

  She took that in for a beat. “I guess I’ll be seeing them at some point this week,” she said uneasily.

  He looked into her eyes, saw the fear. The shame. “But this time you won’t be alone.”

  Their gazes held and he did his best to send encouraging vibes, but it wasn’t his strong suit.

  “I should’ve found a way to see them before now so it wouldn’t be so uncomfortable. I blame Past Maze. Past Maze is the worst.”

  “No, she isn’t, and neither is Present Maze.”

  She slid him a look. “Would you still say that if you knew that Present Maze’s plan is to avoid them until the last possible moment, adding stress and anxiety to every day that goes by? I mean, it is how I operate best.”

  “Maze. It really will be okay.”

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t have to face your past.”

  Ha. Little did she know.

  Caitlin called them over and tried to get everyone involved in some games. First up was Ultimate Frisbee. She put Maze, Heather, and Walker on one team, and Dillon, herself, and Jace on the other. Then she smiled at Sammie. “Would you like to be on my team?”

  Sammie shook her head.

  “You know,” Cat said, “one of these days I’m going to win you over. You don’t know this, but when I first met Maze, she tried to resist me too.”

  Maze smiled. “True story.”

  Walker smiled too. When he’d come into the house all those years ago, Maze had been doing her damnedest to ignore Caitlin. A few weeks later, Caitlin came home from dance camp with a black eye. She’d gotten into a fight with a boy who’d been picking on some girl, and after that Maze decided Caitlin was her person for life.

  “I won her over,” Caitlin said to Sammie, skipping the part where she’d had to club some boy in the face to do it. “Just like I’m going to do with you.”

  Sammie ran back to Heather.

  Caitlin sighed.

  The teams went off to separate sides of the beach to strategize, and Heather eyed Maze. “We’re going to play nice.”

  Maze studied her fingernails.

  “Maze,” Heather said.

  “I’m always nice. I’m a peach!”

  Walker laughed. Maze was super competitive, always had to win at any cost, and never played nice.

  Maze pointed at him to shut it.

  Heather looked at Walker. “She’s not going to play nice.”

  Walker shook his head. “Nope.”

  Maze threw up her hands. “The point of a game is to win. What does that have to do with being nice?”

  Heather shook her head. “We should let Caitlin win. She’s so stressed.”

  “Letting her win isn’t going to help,” Maze said.

  “Then what will?”

  Maze scrunched her lips together like she was trying to bite back an answer not suitable for public consumption.

  Again, Heather looked at Walker. “I’m counting on you to play fair because I’ve never known you to not be fair.”

  Maze rolled her eyes. “Don’t let that pretty face fool you, he’s no Boy Scout.”

  This was true. He was no Boy Scout.

  Caitlin blew her whistle—yes, she’d brought a whistle—and the game started. Maze sent the Frisbee flying in a beautiful, perfect arc . . . and beaned Dillon right in the face. As far as throws went, it was pretty impressive. So was the blood spurt that came from Dillon’s nose. But the most impressive thing of all was the sheer high pitch of the guy’s scream.

  When everyone stood still in shock, Walker jogged over to take a look. “Probably not broken,” he said, and while Caitlin doctored Dillon up from her first-aid kit, everyone else moved back to the food, looking for dessert.

  Except Maze. She remained at Walker’s side while he looked over Dillon’s nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly to Dillon, eyes filled with genuine remorse as she apologized.

  And here Walker had thought her in her wet tank top was the hottest thing he’d ever seen, but Maze accessing her emotions and acting on them definitely moved to first place.

  Dillon waved her off. “We’re even,” he said, sounding very nasal. “You saved Poly.”

  Maze nodded and, with an unreadable look at Walker, walked off. She went straight for the cookies.

  “What?” she
asked defensively when he caught her double-fisting a pair of snickerdoodles.

  “Those things’ll kill ya.”

  She shrugged, like she wasn’t sure she had a long life span coming anyway. “At least I’ll go happy.”

  “Will you?”

  Her eyes landed on his. “I’ll have you know I’m very happy.”

  “With John.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, and narrowed her eyes at him. “You damn well know his name, you’ve got the memory of an elephant.”

  Something he wouldn’t mind not having when it came to her, because remembering every detail was painful. “The opposite of you, apparently,” he said lightly.

  She scowled and went back to ignoring him.

  Once Dillon stopped bleeding, the groom-to-be claimed fun lake time over, and they all began the walk back. They were spread out on the trail, Dillon and Caitlin in the lead. Dillon had the backpack this time and Caitlin had Roly and Poly on their fancy leashes. She was telling a story that was making Dillon laugh and restoring his good humor.

  He really did appear to love her, Walker had to admit, at least in his own way. And who the hell was he to judge anyway, when he couldn’t seem to manage the sort of intimacy that a relationship like that required.

  Footsteps came up behind him, and he knew who it was without looking because his blood pressure rose. “Nice shot back there, Tex.”

  Maze blew out a breath. End of conversation, he thought. But then she slowed down so they were side by side. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said.

  “Your life motto.”

  She gave him a shoulder nudge that was really more like a shove as she passed him, which suited him just fine because . . . short shorts.

  “Are you staring at my ass?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She tripped over her own feet.

  Heather came along and grinned at them, looking far more carefree than she had when she’d arrived yesterday. The reason for that was apparent. Jace had Sammie on his back, piggyback style.