by Lori Ryan
The sound that came out of Logan’s mouth when he looked at his lunch was half groan and half indefinable gurgle of wordless appreciation.
Hell, this woman could somehow read what he wanted all the time. That fact would have unsettled him more if the smell of a combo plate of enchiladas, chimichangas, and rice and beans smothered in rich sauces and guacamole, hadn’t distracted him.
Logan continued to moan as he scooped oversized bites of the steaming food in his mouth, but stopped to glare at Sam when he heard her laughing at him.
“Sorry.” She raised her hands in front of her as if in apology but the impish grin on her face said she was anything but sorry.
“I like food. What can I say?”
Sam nodded and bent her head over her own food, eating with almost as much enthusiasm as Logan, but when Logan burst out with, “Jessica Rabbit!,” her head popped up in surprise.
“Excuse me?” Sam blinked at him.
“Jessica Rabbit. I’ve been trying to figure out who you remind me of all this time and it just hit me. It’s Jessica Rabbit. I mean, your hair is black not red, but other than that—” He broke off as if he was making all kinds of sense and she should be able to understand what he was saying.
Apparently, she didn’t.
“Don’t you know who Jessica Rabbit is?”
Sam only nodded at him.
He shrugged. “Well, you look like her.”
“No. I don’t. She’s all … all … gorgeous and hot and … all … all …”
Logan’s grin was irrepressible. “She’s tall and voluptuous and sexy as hell. Exactly like you.”
He went back to eating, but he could feel Sam’s gaze on him so he raised his gaze to hers again. “What?”
He could see the gears in that gorgeous brain of hers cranking a mile a minute as though she were calculating something and not coming up with the right answer. “It’s a compliment, Sam. Nod your head. Smile. Say thank you and move on.”
“Oh. O-okay,” she said and went back to her food, but the pinched brows stayed as she continued to fuss at the problem in her head.
Logan laughed but went back to eating. He had a feeling Sam would need to puzzle over things for a while on her own. No one else would be able to convince her of her beauty. She’d likely go home and somehow reduce the issue to numbers and equations and look for proof. And, damn how he wanted to be the one to give her that proof.
There was a time when Logan would have looked at a woman like Samantha and known right off the bat he shouldn’t be with her. It was the old problem of Sam being a woman made for marriage, and long-term love. Commitment.
She didn’t have the personality for one-night stands or short-term romance. Logan’s life hadn’t matched her needs until now. When he’d been in the Teams, his life had been a revolving door of deployments and training, with no room for a relationship in between. Sure, some of the guys had married, some even making it last for a while.
But Logan just never got how you could walk away from a woman you loved and stick yourself in the middle of the hellholes they went into and not lose your mind with worry. Or be distracted as all hell wondering how she was, if she was holding up all right or worried to pieces for his safety. He’d watched too many men tell one of their buddies to give a final message to a woman back home. He didn’t want to be that man.
Now that he was home for good, that was no longer an issue. In fact, Logan had begun to crave a longer-term connection with someone, the sharing of a life. The only problem was, he was enough of a man to know this wasn’t the time for that. He wasn’t whole enough right now and he honestly couldn’t say when he would be whole again. He didn’t feel like he could start something with Sam until he had found a way to beat this demon that seemed to be chasing him. If he could only fix what was broken in him, then maybe, just maybe, he’d be man enough for her.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, slowing down on his food now that he’d satiated the worst of his hunger. “I’m on level seventeen. I hope you’re adding new levels soon.”
Sam looked up, surprise in her eyes again.
He grinned. “Tangled Legacy.”
“You play?” She asked and he was surprised to see her blush. Why would she be shy about her game? It shouldn’t be a surprise he played. Hell, half the world played her game.
“Of course. I love the way your mind works. It’s like I can see the way you’ve woven the different pieces of the puzzle together in the world. But usually only after the fact.”
She licked her lips and the movement distracted him, but he still heard her words.
“I’ve got two more levels ready to go out with the next update.”
He watched her mouth, wanting to lean in and capture it. She was so damned sexy.
Instead, he nodded at her words and focused back on his food.
An alert chimed on his computer and Logan glanced to the screen. A message from a friend in Colorado popped up.
“Sorry, Sam. I just have to reply to this real fast,” Logan said as he turned his attention to the screen.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, but Logan shook his head.
“Nah, just have to get him some info real fast. It’ll only take a minute.”
“’Kay,” she said.
Logan typed the name and contact information for another one of his buddies into the message screen. He hit send before turning back to Sam. “Sorry. Just connecting a couple of people together about a job.”
Sam raised her eyebrows in question and Logan continued. “I have a buddy who got released from a rehab center about a month ago. He’s having trouble finding work and he’s got a young kid and a wife to support. It’s not looking good where they are, so I told him I’d hook him up with another friend in Colorado who might be able to find him work out there.”
“They’re former SEALs, too?” Sam asked, packing up the remnants of her lunch and tossing used napkins into the bag the food had come in.
“One guy is. The other is Army. I served with him in Afghanistan for a while. They sometimes pair a SEAL to an Army unit during deployments. We worked together for a few months.”
Logan shifted in his seat, not sure he wanted to tell her about any of this, but she had this way of simply looking at him and waiting with her face open and genuinely interested.
It made him want to talk to her. Damned woman could have been an interrogator in another life. That, or a shrink. She had mad skills. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just her effect on him. He seemed somehow undone by her.
“Some of the guys I know are coming home to some pretty screwed up situations. They can’t get work, their kids either don’t know them at all or they don’t want to listen to them anymore because they’ve been gone so long. Their spouses have been holding things together here for so long, they’re just excited to have their partner back, but for the guys coming home, it’s not easy to slip back into things. They can’t really just step back into what their wives need them to be. Add in the stress of not being able to make a living and things get sideways pretty fast.”
“So, you’re networking for them, helping them find work?”
“Where I can.”
“How many people have you tried to help this way?”
“A few,” he said.
More like twenty, but she didn’t need to know that. He’d discovered he could match people up around the country. If one person couldn’t help, that person got in touch with someone who could, and so on, and so on.
So far, things had worked out pretty well for many of the guys. “I’m really lucky to have this job from Jack. A lot of guys coming back aren’t finding work, anywhere. And, I don’t even have a family to feed. They do.”
Sam was quiet for a bit and Logan became lost in his own world, thinking about the guys who were struggling with coming home and the guys who hadn’t made it back.
“Oh, I get it,” Sam said quietly. Logan’s eyes flew to hers but he looked away just as quick
ly.
She knew. Somehow, she knew.
“You’re feeling guilty because you have this job, aren’t you?” Her words were soft, but she wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
Logan didn’t answer. What the hell could he say? Besides, the woman seemed to know everything whether he voiced it or not, so he didn’t see why he needed to participate.
“You earned it, you know,” she said. “It’s not just because you’re friends with Jack’s brother-in-law. Jack might be a softie nowadays, but he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to. And, he would never make a decision for Sutton Capital that isn’t the right decision. He’s not going to give you a job like this out of sympathy or loyalty to Zach or anything. Maybe a mailroom job, but not this job, Logan. You’re here because you’re the right man for the job.”
Logan didn’t say anything. Just because he had the credentials didn’t mean it was right that he had this job. Why him? There were no answers down that road, no matter how many times he traveled it. Only questions and a whole bunch of shit.
Shit that messes with your head. He’d spent plenty of time on the why me? bullshit when he’d come home alongside coffins draped in flags. Alongside men with injuries far more life-altering than his own. When he’d come home.
Diya Molov smiled as she looked at the image on the screen, but the smile was one of sad memories, not joy. She wiped at an errant tear under one eye and forced herself to look past her own feelings.
She was happy for her ex-fiancé, despite the fact there was a new woman on his arm in the photo. It wasn’t his fault their world had been torn apart, any more than it was hers. When her family died, something inside her had died with them. In that moment, her life had been irreparably altered, and there was no going back. She’d had to abandon all she’d known, all she’d loved. To give all of it up in search of justice.
None of this had been fair to either of them, but she wanted his happiness, above all else. She wanted at least one of them to be able to continue to live happily.
Well, that wasn’t true. She wanted to avenge her family’s deaths above all else. Then she’d be satisfied to die along with them. To slip from this world to whatever it was that waited on the other side. On to join her family. Her beautiful baby brothers and their smiling faces. Her mother and father.
Her hand went to the locket on her neck, where she carried pictures of her brothers’ smiling faces. Little cherubs.
They had been ten and twelve when her father’s enemies murdered them, but in her mind’s eye they would always be chubby cheeked and pudgy legged children, running toward her for sticky kisses. Throwing dirty arms around her after a day playing in the yard at their family home.
Hearing a noise outside the room, she clicked the window closed on her laptop and turned to face the door. Yoshi entered quietly, as he always did. He wasn’t a leader, but he was a damned good soldier.
She understood why her father had kept him so close all these years. Aside from the family connection, that is. Yoshi Bogolomov was her cousin, son of her father’s long deceased brother, but he was also loyal and true. He would have gladly died alongside her father had his delay getting to the house the night of the attack not been unavoidable. And now he served alongside her as she sought vengeance.
He came with her from Russia to New York City, after they buried her family. New York was where they had begun to collect the information they would need to complete their task. It was where they were calling in markers her father held, to seek the justice denied to her family.
“Yoshi,” she said quietly. “You have news?”
He came and knelt before her, pulling papers from his back pocket. “I’ve located the two who are no longer overseas. Stone is one of them. He was injured and is living in Connecticut now.”
Diya tilted her head to the other chair in the room as she took the photos from his hands. She glanced at the images of one man before dropping them on her desk in exchange for the pictures of Logan Stone.
The one in charge of the ambush against her family. Rage washed over her as she saw the life he lived. The photos showed him entering a large office building, enjoying a life that shouldn’t be his. A life he didn’t deserve.
The injustice of it steeled her resolve. One simply cannot erase an entire family from the face of the earth and expect to move on. But, Stone hadn’t erased them all. He’d left her alive and that would be his mistake. He underestimated her. And she would take advantage of that fact and make him pay.
“Should I make arrangements?” Yoshi pulled her out of her head and back to the present with his question. She knew what he was asking. Did she want him to arrange for their deaths?
She didn’t. Not like that. It would be too easy to rely on the connections her father had built over the years. To call on the favors owed her father and his empire, and have the man and all who were there with him that night killed efficiently and without fanfare.
“No. Each of these men must pay a much higher price than the simple cost of their lives. They need to suffer as we have suffered, Yoshi. To have it all taken from them. Everything they love. All they value. They need to see it all destroyed. Then, and only then, will they die.”
Yoshi nodded as Diya looked back at the images in her hand. “We start with Stone. He is responsible. He led them and it is he who must pay first. Find out everything. Where his family is. Who his loved ones are. If he has a dog, find out. I want to take it all from him.”
She glanced down at the photos again and turned one toward Yoshi. In it, Stone and a woman stood together by the same building Stone entered in the previous picture. “Who is she?”
“I’m not sure yet. Could be someone he works with, but they’ve been seen coming and going from the building together a number of times.”
Diya murmured, and then handed the photos to Yoshi. “Find out if she’s more to him. If so, she’ll be taken away.”
Yoshi nodded and left the room, slipping out as quietly as he’d come, and leaving Diya alone to remember all she’d lost. All Stone stole from her.
Chapter 4
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?” Zach Harris asked as he sat on the couch next to Logan in Jack’s living room.
The others were on the opposite side of the large room, half of them sitting or standing near the couches by the fireplace. The others spilled over into the kitchen where Jack’s housekeeper was holding court while she and her boyfriend, Roark, cooked.
Sam had told Logan that Roark wooed Mrs. Poole for years before she gave in and started dating him recently. The man doted on her, following her every command in the kitchen with a smile that had love-sick-puppy written all over it.
Logan turned and grinned at Zach, the man who’d been his best friend growing up. He knew if anyone understood the odd feeling he had, surrounded by friends on a Saturday afternoon, it was Zach.
And surreal was right. Unreal. So far away from where he’d spent the last twelve years of his life. Zach had served overseas a long time ago. A much shorter stint than Logan’s, but he understood. He knew what it was like to try to come home. To try to be normal again.
As he watched the others across the room, part of him envied their ability to make a home, a family. To bring children into this world. As much as a piece of him craved just that, he had to wonder if it was right to bring children into this world. A world that had shown him unspeakable cruelty.
He envied them their innocence in that. The blind ability to see only what they knew, here in front of them. Then his eyes turned to Chad, who held his young daughter above him. He tossed her up in the air, bringing squeals forth with each toss. Chad had seen what Logan had. He knew the evil the world bred, and he’d chosen to have a child.
“Something like that,” he said in answer to Zach. Surreal was right.
“You hanging in there?” Zach asked.
Logan grunted a response. It was as close as the two of them would get to talking about their feelings.
�
�How’s Sutton? You like it there?”
“Sure,” Logan said, raising the beer in his hand to his lips. He’d been nursing the same one for an hour now. If he knew nothing else, he’d instinctively known, if he let himself seek the numbness a bottle could bring him, he wouldn’t come back up. He’d been careful not to allow himself that solace.
“What’s not to like? It’s a great company. Good people.” Logan nodded to the group across the room, trying not to note that Sam’s eyes had crossed to him more than a few times.
Everyone else seemed to be content to let him stay on the far side of things. He knew her head was probably trying to calculate some precise measurement of time before intervening, balancing all the factors to know when to step in and try to lure him into the group.
He had a feeling she’d been studying even more about trauma, since she seemed pretty damned sure he needed help. Not that he could argue with her. He didn’t question that he had post-traumatic stress injury. He just didn’t know what the hell to do with that information.
“They are,” Zach said, and Logan thought he was about to say more, but the screech from a baby monitor on a nearby table interrupted him.
Logan’s body stilled, tense as he shifted into autopilot. His mind instantly processed the noise, eyes checking his surroundings before his brain gave the all clear. But not fast enough, or subtly enough.
Logan willed his breathing back to normal, but his heart rate was another story. His body just didn’t seem willing to come back down from fight-or-flight mode nowadays. And the toll was starting to wear on him.
Zach had seen that.
His friend’s voice was quiet as he spoke, talking more into the glass he raised to his lips than to Logan.
“You still seeing someone? Getting some help with being back?”
Logan’s lips thinned as he shook his head once. “Not since the hospital.”
Both men kept their eyes on the group across the room as Jack reentered, holding little Maddie, fresh from her nap. The way she scowled at everyone and reached for her mom was almost comical. Apparently, she wasn’t one for company first thing after her nap.