"You better not be late picking up my sister."
Drake grinned at the text message from his best friend as he walked out of the short-term lot toward the airport terminal. Late, of course.
"Got it under control," he typed as he entered the building.
"The plane landed three minutes ago," Ezra texted.
Drake was fully aware of the time. He might have a rep for being fashionably late, but he wasn’t going to let Ezra down.
"Yep," Drake replied. "You can quit stalking the airline app now. It doesn’t ease your guilty conscience anyway, does it?" He couldn’t resist the jab, even though he was more than a little familiar with Ezra’s lifelong protectiveness toward his younger sister, Mackenzie.
As Drake made his way toward the security cutoff, keeping an eye on the arriving passengers, his phone vibrated with a call. He laughed when he saw it was Ez.
“Kinda busy here,” Drake answered facetiously.
“Are you even to the airport yet?” his friend demanded from the other side of the globe.
“Relax. I’m in the terminal, watching for her. Her plane hasn’t unloaded yet.”
Ez released a breath over the line, as if finally relaxing. “Thanks for doing this. I’m sorry to drag you away from whatever you had going on.”
“You do know Mackenzie’s a grown woman who’s been on her own in LA for years?” Drake asked. He did the math in his head to figure she must be twenty-five now, four years younger than the two of them.
“She could handle it on her own, no question, but it’d be nice if she didn’t have to. And moving sucks no matter how old you are.”
“That it does, but tonight’ll be easy. It hardly counts as moving.”
From what Drake understood, Mackenzie’s move back to Nashville, where she’d grown up, was because of her job. She’d apparently sold her car, packed her bags, and had already signed a lease on an apartment here in town.
“Still, I appreciate it,” Ezra said, his tone going serious. “Big-brother fail on my part. And not the first one.”
Not surprising considering Ezra’s demanding career, the very type Drake had always managed to avoid.
“I’ve got you covered, bro. I’ll get her to her apartment, make sure it looks okay, see that she has what she needs. I’ll take care of her for you. You go back to doing your technology-whisperer thing.”
It really was no big deal, just a couple of hours of Drake’s time before he met friends at a bar later, and he’d do anything for his best friend. Ez had been there for him at some of the toughest times of his life.
“Gotta go,” Drake said as passengers started appearing. “They’re deplaning.”
They said goodbye as Drake scanned the people exiting the secured part of the airport.
Hoping he could recognize her, he shoved his phone into his pocket and spotted a head of tousled hair the right color a few steps behind the pack, pointed downward so he couldn’t see the face.
As they got closer, the group in front of her dispersed, allowing him to see that, yes, this was Mackenzie. He was fairly sure of it even with her head down, as she stuffed something in a bag on her shoulder and rolled a carry-on behind her, and then her step stuttered as the bag rolled into her ankle, and that sealed it.
Mackenzie had always been the clumsiest human he knew.
Drake stepped closer, waiting impatiently for her to look up. She was tall—she’d always been tall for a female and skinny—but the feminine curves on her were new to him. She wore jeans, a simple V-neck T-shirt, and a flannel shirt tied around her waist that highlighted the dip inward from her hips. With her face still averted, his gaze was drawn to her collarbone, partially revealed by the wide vee of her shirt, and something about it got his attention as a man instead of as her brother’s friend.
He shook himself out of that, and then finally she looked up.
It was as if someone zapped him with a Taser as a strange combination of familiarity and shock hit him. Familiarity because that smile and the spark in her eyes were his friend’s little sister through and through. Shock because…damn. Mackenzie Shaw had grown up spectacularly.
*****
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "I love a truly happy ending that leaves me smiling for days. This one is highly recommended!!!"
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "A complex story but a charming toe curling read that gave me all the feels"
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Worth putting on your keeper shelf!"
