"Yep." Not exactly chatty, bud . He'd better improve on the monosyllabic responses or he'd be right back where he'd started—and that was a situation he wanted to avoid at all costs. "I lived in numerous small villages on the veldt of south and eastAfricauntil I was eleven."
"The veldt ofAfrica," she repeated dreamily. "It sounds like something out of a Karen Blixen novel. That must have been so fascinating. And your parents! Your sister mentioned they were doctors whose specialty was working with the natives. I know she's terribly proud of them. You must have been, too."
"Proud? Yeah, I suppose so." Mostly, though, an unsatisfied yearning was the feeling that came to mind when he thought of his parents. Their grand passion for each other and for their work hadn't left much over for anyone else, and the benign neglect that had been his childhood had taught him early on that you couldn't rely on others for your emotional well-being. But if he'd often felt left out, even forgotten, at least he'd had the freedom of the veldt. Running with the nomadic Maasia tribesmen in the high open grasslands had given him his first taste for adventure and gone a long way toward alleviating his loneliness.
Then, that too, had been denied him shortly after Glynnis was born, when his mother and father, who'd claimed to love them so much, had shipped him and his infant sister back to the states. "Glynnis never actually had the opportunity to know our parents," he heard himself admit. "I might have romanticized them a bit for her benefit."
"How so?"
He had to hand it to her; she was all big-eyed curiosity. Yet even the cynical suspicion that she couldn't possibly be that interested didn't prevent him from responding to all that intense attention being focused on him. "They were rabid about the plight of the natives, which made them excellent doctors. But they weren't exactly the most attentive mom and dad in the world. They packed us off to our grandparents in Philadelphia when Glynnie was less than six months old, and they only ever bothered to come see her a handful of times after that. Yet I could hardly tell her that other people obviously mattered more to them than she did, could I? They were the only parents she had." He shrugged to make clear his supreme indifference. "So I emphasized the great demands put on them by their humanitarian deeds." He shot her a quick sideways glance, then turned his attention back on the road. "For Glynnis's sake I always hoped the situation would someday change, but as you already know, a fever swept through the village where they worked when Glynnis was eight, and it killed them both."
"Yes, I'm sorry."
He shrugged again. "Given the conditions they routinely worked in, it was bound to happen."
But Lily watched a flash of pain come and go across his face, and her stomach performed a funny little somersault. Okay, so maybe he's not the demon spawn I pegged him to be . Observing his profile from beneath her lashes, she deduced that his hopes for a change in his parents' situation probably hadn't been merely for Glynnis's sake. And Lily had to wonder: Where the heck had he come into the equation? He'd talked about other people mattering more to his parents than his sis-ter, but what about him? He'd lived with them for eleven years before Glynnis was even born—what had happened during that decade that their only son seemed not to expect any attention for himself? For the first time since clapping eyes on him in hisLaguna Beachkitchen, she found herself regarding him not as a gorgeous hunk or an insulting Neanderthal, but as an intriguing puzzle she'd very much like to figure out.
Before she could decide what it would take to do so, however, Zach surprised her by saying, "What about you? Are your parents still around?"
"Oh, yeah." She laughed. "Very much so." For a second she considered not saying anything else to see if he was interested enough to ask for details, but decided against it. If he hadn't said a word for almost two hundred miles, what were the chances of him suddenly demanding all the details of her life? Clearly he'd be perfectly happy to travel in silence for the rest of the day.
She couldn't claim the same; the last couple of hours had nearly driven her up the wall. "My folks sound the polar opposite of yours, at least as far as education goes. They had to get married when they were both seventeen, so they barely made it through high school."
He didn't take his eyes off the road. "Was that because of you?" he asked, "or do you have an older sibling somewhere who forced that marriage?"
"No, that would be me. Conceived, I've been told, in the backseat of a '62 Buick at the Sunset Drive-in Theater in a little one-horse town in Idaho I'm sure you've never heard of."
"So which parent did you end up with?" He deigned to take his eyes off the road long enough to slide a fast glance over her. "I'm guessing your mother."
She looked at him in surprise. "I lived with both of them."
"They're still married? Isn't that against every statistic for couples that wed so young?"
"Yeah, well, the statisticians never met my folks. Until I took over their finances, they might not have had two nickels to rub together, but one thing they always have had is true love." She caught Zach's eye roll. "I'm not saying they didn't occasionally indulge in a scream-the-house-down fight. But there was never any doubt that their marriage was solid."
This time when he took his eyes off the road, it was to give her a look she couldn't even begin to decipher. "So you had yourself a white-picket-fence upbringing?"
Lily couldn't help it—she threw back her head and laughed herself silly. "I'm sorry," she said in the face of his irritation once she'd collected herself. "I'm not laughing at you. It's just—a white-picket-fence upbringing is about the farthest thing from the truth. My folks led a restless lifestyle. We moved a lot. Usually once, often twice, and sometimes even three times a year. I dreamed of a house with a white picket fence." She made a wry face. "I never actually got to live in one."
"Huh." He fell silent, his eyes narrowing in concentration as he swung around a semi. More and more traffic began to clog the interstate the closer they got to Salem, and Zach seemed focused not only on getting through it, but making good time as well.
Lily found herself shooting him frequent glances, wondering what he was thinking beyond the fact that Oregon's fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit clearly didn't sit well with him. They stopped occasionally for her to use the restroom, or to grab something to eat, but Zach's growing impatience was all but palpable. Surprisingly, rather than annoying her, his restlessness made Lily long to reach across the console and give him a little there-there pat on the knee. She managed to engage him in a couple more brief exchanges, but it was like trying to detangle hair from a fine chain necklace at the back of one's neck, difficult and painstaking.
He pulled into the first gas station he saw after they'd crossed the Oregon border into Washington later in the day. "Here." He shoved a handful of bills into Lily's hand. "Go get us something to eat. I'm gonna fill up the tank now that we're finally in a state where you can pump your own."
She felt a smile crook her lips as she went into the minimart. Zach had taken Oregon's law that prohibited the pumping of one's own gas as a personal affront. No doubt the service station attendants weren't fast enough to suit his exacting standards.
Picking over the store's selection for something that wasn't loaded with preservatives, she experienced a sudden surge of homesickness for a real kitchen. She was tired of fast food and minimart fare. She'd give a bundle to be able to whip up something with ingredients she knew to be fresh. A pragmatic woman at heart, though, she did the best she could with the limited resources at hand.
She was headed back to the car with a small bag of provisions when a dark-haired young man suddenly materialized at her side.