I was lying to myself.
She's my wife. She and the kids are my family. I want her back. I want them all back so much that the wanting is like a feverish pain—a real, bone-deep, take-my-breath-away kind of pain.
My dad heaves a ten-ton sigh, his expression tight with worry and resignation. “How can I help?”
“I don’t know.” Putting my bottle in the cup holder, I run my hand down my face. “With Paige and me, there’s nothing. And you’re already helping a lot with the kids.”
“Well, what about you?”
“I’m okay.” I shrug, trying to reassure him.
“Even if that was true,” he says, falling back in his chair again, “which I sincerely fucking doubt, I'd like for you to be more than just okay.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I pick up my beer again. Staring pensively at the flames that are slowly shrinking to embers, I tighten my hold on Elliott. His warm little body is dead weight in my lap, and I can feel his inhalations and exhalations against my chest, can hear his shallow sleep-breathing.
Calling it the easiest route to bring him out here and let him fall asleep in my arms was another lie to myself. I need to hold him close just as much as he does. He was just a baby when Paige kicked me out, and he’s the one who’s been changing the most from day to day since.
When I talk to my girls, they tell me how they’ve been, what they’ve been doing, what they’re worried about, and what excites them. With Elliott, there’s just a void. Yeah, he knows who I am. He calls me Daddy. But does that even mean anything to him? He doesn’t remember me doing just about everything for him the first couple of weeks of his life, while Paige was recovering from his birth. Or how I was the one who carried and rocked him all night when he wasn’t feeling well after his four-month shots. To him, I might as well be a favorite uncle.
That’ll change as he grows, of course, but I’ll still be just an occasional presence in their lives when I want to and should be a constant.
Why would Paige think I’ll just roll over and allow her to take them away? My job demands a lot of my time and attention, true, and yeah, I haven’t always made my family the priority they should be, but I haven’t been absent that much. I’ve been there. I also carried a screaming and colicky Baby Freya for hours every night. I’ve been just as worried as Paige about Abi’s unexplained rashes. And I’m pretty sure I still have gray hairs from Elliott’s dramatic and frightening entrance into this world, what with the emergency C-section because the cord was wrapped around his neck.
I love these three tiny humans we made just as much as she does, god dammit.
How could anyone walk away from their kids?
And just like that, I know why this issue infuriates me so much.
And it hits me how to answer my dad’s question.
Looking at him again, I open my mouth to say it out loud, but the words get stuck in my throat, and I clamp my mouth back shut.
“What?” my old man says with a frown, because of course he noticed. Can’t slip anything past Mike McKinley.
“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. I shouldn’t ask this of him. It’s wrong—selfish, inconsiderate—and I’m pretty sure I’ve already exceeded my quota when it comes to stuff like that. I’ve always known my dad will do pretty much anything for me, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve taken advantage of it in the past.
In the not-even-distant past.
“Just spit it out,” he says in an exasperated tone. “Jesus.”
I blow out a heavy breath, indecision tugging me to and fro. He’s a grown-up. Maybe it’s time he learned how to say no? That’s a paper-thin, piss-poor excuse, I know, but I need this. And maybe he does, too.
So I draw in a deep breath, clenching the beer bottle hard while I screw up my courage. And then I let the words tumble out. “I want you to find Mom.”
My dad’s face grows pale and frozen, his whole body going so still he could pass for a corpse. For what feels like an eternity, he just sits there like that—mute, arrested, and unblinking—while my heart starts to beat painfully against my ribs.
Yeah, I’ve definitely gone too far this time, asked too much. This isn’t something he’ll do, not even for me.
“Logan…” His voice sounds so tired. As he squeezes his eyes shut, pinches the bridge of his nose, and slowly shakes his head, I’m pretty sure I’d sacrifice a limb—or maybe just a finger or a toe—for an Undo button.
Fuck, I’m an asshole sometimes.
“So—” His voice cracks, so he clears his throat and sighs. At his feet, his dog also heaves a big, snuffling sigh. “Say I find her. Then what?”
I’m searching for the right words. Forget it won’t work, because he won’t. I should just roll with it and be honest. “Then I’ll have a choice.”
I’ll get to decide if I want to see her. To ask her the questions that I’ve spent the past twenty-eight years obsessing, agonizing, and making myself miserable over. Because apparently no matter how many times I tell myself that she left and never, not once, cared enough to contact me—and so I shouldn’t even want anything to do with her—it hasn’t worked.
My dad is rubbing his hand over his mouth, staring down at the ground, looking deep in thought. Not happy thoughts. His wife abandoned him, most likely for another man and a new life, and he’s never tried to find out where she went. And now I’m asking him to change that.
He’s spent his entire adult life tracking people down. If anyone can find her, it’s him.
The silence between us lingers, heavy and dark. The flames pop and crackle in the fire ring, spitting sparks in the air, and I turn my head skyward to watch the stars that are so much more brilliant and plentiful out here than in the city. I always hoped I could get Paige to enjoy this as much as I do, but that turned out to be a lost cause.
I never felt like I loved her despite her hatred of nature, though. That’s not how you truly love someone, despite their faults. Because without them, they’d be a different person altogether.
“You’d be on your own,” he says finally.
“I know,” I don’t hesitate to reply, because I do. He doesn’t ever want to see her again—and I don’t blame him, I guess.
There’s another loaded pause, and then I turn my gaze to him again just as he nods and grimly says, “All right.”
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
And I am grateful.
But I don’t feel good about it. What’s done is done, though, right?
“I gotta take a piss,” my dad announces, pushing up out of his chair. “Go put that boy to bed already.”
As he walks off with Baldwin lumbering after him, I somehow manage to scoot and shuffle up from my own chair with Elliott still in my arms. Treading carefully, I carry him back to the tent, digging my phone out of my pocket and using it as a flashlight.
Seconds later, I’ve successfully placed his chubby little body on the air mattress in between his sleeping sisters. With the weak light from my phone screen illuminating their three snuggled-up shapes, I stand there transfixed by a sudden sense of emotional vertigo.
How did I end up here? There they are, my kids. Sometimes their existence seems almost surreal. Three small human beings with minds of their own and their own personalities, all of them looking a bit like me and a bit like her.
I tend to think of my life as Before Paige and After Paige, and I’ve assumed the After part started the day I first met her and she and Bethany Wang were gossiping about me in the break room.
But the more I consider it, the more obvious it is that the After didn’t begin until months later. The Christmas party on that over-the-top yacht? Maybe.
More likely, though, it was New Year’s Eve that ended the Before era of my life. If that night hadn’t happened, I would’ve decided Paige was serious about not wanting anything to do with me, and that would’ve been the end of it. I’d be somewhere else right now, with someone else, and these three small humans wouldn’t exist.
/>
And that is a hell of a sobering realization.
I’m not pleading guilty to Pop’s charge of bullying her right now, but I definitely did more or less bully her that night. Or at the very least, I manipulated her to get what I wanted.
Maybe that was an unfortunate start for us, an omen. Not that I regret it or think it was a mistake. But if I’m looking for a defining moment to illustrate how far I was willing to go to make her mine? That’d be it.
New Year’s Eve.
In the file room.
Chapter 8
Logan
Ten years ago
It’s almost eight p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and I’m finally leaving work. This despite still having prep left to do for the Huntley insurance fraud trial starting the day after tomorrow. I probably wouldn't even be leaving except my friend Nick threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t come to his party tonight.
As I turn off the lights on my way out of the office, I notice a glow beneath the door to the file room. With Hammer’s voice in my head, lecturing me about acting like a partner being the key to actually becoming one someday, I walk down the hallway, dismissing my urge to be lazy.
I open the file room door, step inside, and reach for the light switch—and stop dead in my tracks. A figure sits hunched over the industrial metal table in the middle of a mountain of storage boxes, with earbuds in that are connected to an iPod resting on top of a stack of papers.
Blonde hair in a pretty, sleek updo. Simple, classy white dress. Pale—no, creamy—skin that I can’t see nearly enough of.
It’s Paige.
Of course she’s still working. Even though it’s nearly eight p.m. On New Year’s Eve.
Unable to resist, I raise my voice and ask, “Taking this workaholic thing a little too far, aren’t you?”
Her head whips up, her pretty blue eyes going wide. Clearly she also thought she was the only person left tonight.
Pulling her earbuds out, she comments, “Says the guy who’s also here.”
Well, at least she’s talking to me. I haven’t been alone with her since the holiday party. After what went down that night and the way she’s been doing her damnedest to avoid eye contact since, that’s kind of unexpected. “Right,” I say, “but I’m actually leaving now and going out. Did you notice it’s New Year’s Eve?”
Her lips twist. “Yeah, unfortunately Shaun didn’t care when he told me he wanted me to find the Jacobson memo somewhere in all of this”—she gestures at the file boxes around her—“by tomorrow.”
“Because Shaun’s kind of a dick. I’ll tell him Hammer told you to go home.” I’m having visions of walking her to her car and maybe even convincing her to go out for a drink or something—knowing Nick would forgive me, considering his mantra of “hoes before bros.”
“That’s really generous of you, but no thank you,” she replies in a professional tone, though I’m pretty sure the flash in her eyes is annoyance.
All right, then. Needs must. Letting the door go so that it clicks shut behind me, I approach the table and drop my briefcase into a spare chair before shrugging out of my suit jacket.
“What are you doing?” Her pen hovering over the document in front of her, she frowns up at me.
“Helping you.” Hanging my jacket on the back of the chair, I pull out the one next to it and sit down across from her.
“I don’t need help.” Her eyes narrow into slits. Or at least they begin to, but then suddenly she’s blinking instead, her gaze flickering down my body. Just as quickly, she lowers her eyes back to the table.
Heat infuses my veins. Was she checking me out? She hasn’t actually seen me without a jacket before, has she? We’ve never been in any situation this casual. Still, I would’ve expected more self-control from her…or at least more subtlety.
Not that I mind.
“I know you don’t.” I have no problem playing knight in shining armor even as I’m unashamed to admit I’m staying more for my own sake than for hers.
She peers up at me. “Okay, let me rephrase: I don’t want help.”
“Or you do…just not from me?”
Arching her brows, she doesn’t argue. Shrugging off the insult with a smirk, I grab the file box closest to me on the table, sliding it closer. “What are you looking for and how far have you gotten?”
Her internal struggle is visible on her face—and so is the moment she decides it’s not worth arguing about. “An internal memo from Ron Jacobson to his CFO, Andrea Harris, outlining their strategy for firing hourly employees that complain about being forced to work off the clock. Sanford and Lopez says it doesn’t exist. We think it does, and they’ve buried it somewhere in here.” She gestures at the file boxes.
“It’s a file dump from Sanford and Lopez?” I pause with my hand on the box lid, raising my eyebrows at her.
“Mhmm.” She bends her neck and starts flipping through papers again.
And I’m having qualms. I know a thing or two that she probably doesn't about file dumps from Sanford and Lopez—one of the city’s biggest firms and serious rivals of Stevens and Hammerness. If I tell her, though, that’d be the end of this. She’ll pack up and go home.
Can’t have that, can we?
So I start sifting through the documents just like she is, doing my best to focus on the task and not thinking about how my leg would brush up against hers if I shifted it a few inches the right. Trying not to think about lying on that bed with her at the Christmas party and about how soft and silken her skin felt to the touch—and how much I’ve fantasized since about taking it further.
Wishing I had at the very least kissed her.
I can’t help throwing her surreptitious looks, though, allowing myself the luxury of letting them linger on her face, which is set in concentration. As I watch that firm and delicate jawline of hers, the slightly pouty lips with a hint of muted red lipstick, it hits me again—the same sensation that washed over me the first time I saw her.
It’s like the ground shifting below me, pushing and pulling and knocking me off-balance while a whispering voice reverberates through my body, chanting: want, want, want.
She’s like a skittish cat, cautious and distrustful. Having her will be a serious tightrope walk of pushing hard enough—but not too hard.
So I can’t really regret not kissing her on the yacht. It was too soon.
Tonight, though. Tonight feels like better timing.
When I’m halfway through the first box and realizing we’ll be here for a while, I ask, “Have you had dinner?”
She lifts her gaze to me, squinting. “What?”
“I’m gonna order some food.” While I pluck my Blackberry out of my pocket, her nose crinkles, and then she returns her attention to the work.
My God, she has the ice queen act down to a science, doesn’t she? I can’t fucking wait to crack through that facade. It’s a burning itch, a painful yearning—and kind of bewildering. When have I ever had to work this hard just to get a woman to give me the time of day? Never, that’s when.
Paige Waters is a goddamn challenge.
Smiling to myself, I find the number for one of the half-dozen restaurants that are my go-tos for late work evenings, a Thai food place that I’m hoping isn’t closed for the holiday. Thankfully they answer on the third ring, and I order some of the most popular dishes on their menu, which I have memorized by now.
When I disconnect and set the phone down, I settle back into reviewing files. About forty-five minutes passes in the heavy quiet before the delivery guy calls, and I leave to go to the front desk and buzz him up. A minute later, he steps off the elevator, I pay him, and after returning his “Happy New Year,” I head back to the file room.
She glances up for only a second as I enter, and she ignores me as I push aside the documents to make room for the Styrofoam containers, which I make sure to open wide, letting the savory aromas escape. Only when I reach across and slap down a wrapped set of utensils and napkin does she finally look up, a
ppearing torn as she takes in the sight of the food.
“Eat,” I command, plucking bottles of water out of the plastic bag, placing one in front of her.
Obviously reluctant, she still unpacks her utensils and grabs a container, and I bend my neck to hide my smile. It’s a small victory, but hopefully the first of many.
“So where would you be if you weren’t here?” I ask in between bites of curry and rice. “On a boring date with a guy who has lots of depth and self-doubt?”
She stops chewing to glare at me. “I’m pretty sure I already apologized for that.”
I let out a snort. “And I’m pretty sure you only did because you got caught. You don’t think you were wrong.”
“You haven’t exactly given me any evidence to the contrary.” Popping a piece of glistening chicken into her mouth, she eyes me with brows raised in challenge.
Well, when would I have had the chance? Sheesh.
I hadn’t intended to bring up her infuriating conversation with Wang, because I thought I’d decided to let it go by now. Yeah, after I asked her out that day—which at the time felt like the only appropriate response to her bullshit, and of course I knew she’d turn me down—I spent a couple of months getting irritated whenever I caught sight of her anywhere in the office.
Then followed a period where I contemplated pursuing her and using the full force of my charm, wit, and uh, other skills, to make her realize how badly she’d misjudged me. Which would be fun while it lasted, and then I’d move on.
That was a satisfying fantasy for a while, until it dawned on me that would pretty much just prove her right about my philandering ways.
After that, I tried to convince myself I didn’t give a crap what she thought of me, anyway. I put so much earnest effort into it that by the time the Christmas party rolled around, I was sure of success. I didn’t care about Paige Waters. Nope. True, I still lusted after her on an almost daily basis, but so the hell what? I could easily find other women to distract me.
Mend (Waters Book 2) Page 10