‘Time to go home, champ?’ Logan asked, as Jamie wrapped his arms around his leg and nodded.
‘Do you want me to take the bags so that you can carry him?’
Another touching gesture that Sophia would never have made. Not that she’d have even stooped to come to somewhere like this in the first place. Not even for Jamie.
Not unless some VIPs were attending and it was an opportunity for her to network. Or, in simpler terms, social climb.
‘Thanks, but they’re pretty heavy,’ he declined, dragging himself back to the present. ‘But if you can lift him onto my shoulders I can carry him too.’
‘Yay! Shoulder ride.’ Jamie applauded, but for the first time all night it was slightly muted, his tiredness showing through.
Logan bent his knees and dipped his head as Kat lifted Jamie up.
‘I guess that’s me, then.’ She smiled as he stood up again with his son. ‘I’d better be heading home.’
And Logan realised he didn’t want her to go. He wondered if it was just his imagination—or wishful thinking—that her smile looked slightly fixed.
He scanned his brain for something, anything, to say, but it came up with nothing. Probably for the best. There were a million reasons why her coming back to his apartment was a bad idea. Not least to avoid a repeat of what had happened last time she’d been.
‘Okay, well, thanks for joining us tonight.’ The words felt thick in his mouth.
‘I had fun.’
Another over-bright smile that Logan abruptly decided he hated on sight. His mind whirred for excuses even as he pretended it didn’t.
‘Didn’t you say you lived close to me?’
She blinked, then looked sheepish.
‘Yeah. I do. I pretty much walk past your door to get to my apartment.’
There was no reason whatsoever for him to feel quite so elated.
‘Come to mine. I’ll get Jamie down for the night and we’ll call a cab for you.’
She hesitated, and he knew he had her. Victory coursed through him, though he couldn’t have said why.
And he ignored the voice that said he just didn’t want to admit it.
* * *
‘The place looks like amazing,’ she marvelled, as Logan handed her the key to open the front door and he carried a sleeping Jamie inside.
He’d fallen asleep mid-shoulder ride and Logan had been forced to give Kat a couple of the bags after all so that he could carry his son in his arms.
‘It’s like a grotto,’ she continued, stepping a little further inside.
‘Yeah, I know, I might have gone a little overboard, but in a way it’s our first real Christmas together. I was always travelling such a lot.’
‘As a bodyguard?’ she asked wryly.
‘Fine, as a bodyguard, yes.’
‘For who?’
‘You know I can’t divulge that,’ he replied. ‘Feel free to head to the lounge. Or grab some wine from the kitchen. I’m just going to put this little man to bed.’
‘Okay.’ She kept her back firmly to Logan as she headed through to his lounge.
It felt as though she was walking on the softest, fluffiest clouds. He might not have confirmed who his VIP was, but he’d admitted that he’d been working as a bodyguard, which was more than he’d told anyone all day. And she knew that because she’d heard them.
She tried to caution herself that it probably meant nothing. But it didn’t work. She felt special. Trusted by Logan Connors. It was an inexplicably heady sensation.
Wandering through to the kitchen, she stopped and surveyed the scene. A half-mutilated gingerbread man lay next to a knife on a kid’s plate. Like a culinary crime scene. A pile of washed baking equipment sat, clean and dry, on a draining tray.
‘That’s one exceptionally tired little boy,’ Logan announced, stepping into the kitchen through the far door and making Kat jump. ‘Ah. I meant to clear up that horror story before I went out but everything was such a rush, and, well, time got away from me.’
‘No need to explain, I understand,’ she assured him, before realising that she’d almost begun talking about Carrie. Again. ‘And it isn’t too bad. It’s just that poor gingerbread blob. What happened?’
‘No idea.’ Logan grinned. ‘I’ve never baked in my life. I now realise it’s an essential skill that I need to know.’
‘Well, at least learn how to make gingerbread men look like they aren’t gingerbread cacti.’
‘Their undefined forms are the least of their problems. You didn’t have to taste one.’ He hung his head in feigned shame. ‘Jamie was wholly unimpressed.’
‘At least you tried.’
‘It was for the hospital baking competition. He really wanted us to enter.’
‘Is there a booby prize?’ she deadpanned.
‘Funny.’ His lips twitched, and she had to fight to urge to step over to taste them again.
Just like the other night.
Taking a bottle of the festive drink she’d dared him into buying, Logan collected two glasses and led the way back through to the living room, leaving her to follow.
‘I could probably give you a few pointers,’ she announced, out of the blue.
‘Sorry?’
She lifted her shoulders.
‘For your baking.’
‘You bake gingerbread men?’
‘Gingerbread folk, cookies, fairy cakes, you name it. I also make a mean frosting.’ She laughed.
‘For Carrie?’
And, for a moment, Kat could only stare at him. She felt physically winded. Then, just as quickly, she slipped her mask back into place and made herself answer.
‘I was a foster mom.’
‘You were?’
‘Before I moved to Seattle,’ she confirmed. ‘I fostered quite a few kids.’
‘Did something happen?’
‘No, I just...changed.’
He eyed her intently and she tried not to squirm. Could he tell she was lying? He wasn’t stupid. He would know that whatever had happened, it had to be significant. She’d not only moved across the country, she’d also given up a lifestyle she’d loved.
And then Logan surprised her with his soft tone.
‘No wonder Jamie took to you so easily. You clearly find it easy and natural to relate to him, knowing just what to say to sweep away his...potential issues.’
‘You’re worried about abandonment,’ she realised. ‘You think that his mother’s...lack of presence will leave Jamie feeling he was somehow at fault? Not good enough?’
She knew she’d hit the proverbial nail on the head by his taut features and locked jaw. But to his credit he dipped his head once in acknowledgement.
‘So she is still alive. She just isn’t in your lives any more?’
The silence stretched between them for an eternity, before Logan finally spoke. Biting out each word.
‘She left when Jamie was sixteen months old. But do you want to know the worst of it? I sometimes feel it would be better if Sophia had died. At least that way I could lie to Jamie and tell him that she’d loved him very much, and she would never have left him if she’d had a choice. But then I feel guilty...’
He tailed off but she knew what he’d been saying and her chest constricted.
‘You wish you could spare your son the pain and the what ifs. That’s understandable.’
It was a dilemma all too easily understood. But another question clamoured for her attention, demanding to be answered. She would just have to be subtle about asking it.
‘But what about you? Would that have been easier for you, too?’
Logan eyed her shrewdly.
‘You’re asking if I miss her? If I still love her?’
So much for subtlety.
‘No. I don’t still love my ex-wife,’
he stated simply, and it was ridiculous how much her heart soared. ‘In truth, I’m not sure that I ever really did. I think I loved the idea of her, but never really her.’
‘Oh.’ Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.
Logan shrugged, as though it wasn’t that big a deal that he was talking to her, opening up to her, but she knew that it was. She could tell.
‘I’d just left the army, not entirely by choice. I was angry, and lost, and in a bit of a grim place. I met Sophia and at first I fell for her bright, vivacious charms. Her partying lifestyle was so far removed from the world I’d inhabited that I could pretend to be someone else entirely.’
She wasn’t sure it sounded like a solution. More like trying to cover an amputation with a sticky plaster. She’d met enough former soldiers in her nursing career to know that the army had often been their lives. When they’d lost it, they’d lost their identities. And a few superficial parties weren’t going to solve that.
Not that she felt she was in any position to voice that to Logan. But then it didn’t matter, because he was continuing by himself.
‘It took me twelve months to realise that I didn’t like the person I was pretending to be. And that Sophia was avaricious, egotistical and self-centred. She used people until she’d exhausted what they could do for her, and then she cast them aside.’
‘She married you because you were a bodyguard?’ Kat guessed.
He pulled a wry face, his gorgeous eyes colouring to a hue she hadn’t seen in them before.
‘She thought it meant a glamourous lifestyle and access to lots of highly connected people. As soon as she realised my—our—life wasn’t going to be like that, she left to move on to the next guy who could give her what she wanted.’
‘But not before she’d had Jamie?’
‘I’ll never regret him,’ Logan said fiercely. ‘He’s the best thing in my life. He makes everything worth it. But the truth is that I’d told Sophia that I wasn’t ready for marriage or a family. She told me she was on the Pill, and then eight months after we started dating she got pregnant.’
Shock wound its way through Kat. Though she didn’t know why, she’d seen it enough on the wards.
‘She knew you would marry her.’
He pulled a grim face.
‘Yeah. We lived on a small island. Everyone knew everyone else, and scandalous news travelled fast. She knew I’d do the right thing.’
‘It must have hurt, though.’ Kat frowned. ‘When she left.’
‘Not for a moment. If anything, the only thing I felt was relief for myself.’
‘You don’t sound too sure.’
He paused, and something she couldn’t identify swirled around them.
‘You think I’m bitter.’ He offered a twisted smile. ‘I’m not. I didn’t love her. For pretty much two of our almost three years together, I didn’t even like her, so I don’t entirely blame her for walking out on me. But I can never understand, never forgive, how she could walk out on our son.’
Kat shook her head.
‘No, I don’t think you’re bitter. I just think you’re more like me that I realised.’
‘Indeed?’ his brow drew tight.
But she didn’t want to explain herself. Not yet. But maybe someday soon. So she did the only other she could think of. She put down her drink, dropped to her knees on the rug between them and looked him straight in the eye.
‘Are we done talking?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE QUESTION RUSHED at him, then pooled low and heavy in his sex.
The friction had been arcing between them all night, he’d lost count of the number of times he’d almost gone to her.
The last thing he had remotely expected had been that Kat Steel would take the lead. He found he rather liked it.
Perhaps too much.
‘Be very careful, Kat,’ he muttered.
‘Or...?’ she prompted gently.
‘Or you may find that agreement we made to keep things platonic goes up in flames,’ he growled.
She eyed him for a moment longer then simply shrugged her shoulders at him.
‘Maybe I rather like the idea of setting fire to something for once.’
If he’d expected her to have second thoughts, he would clearly need to think again. And now he was restless, edgy. He’d wanted her since that first moment he’d seen her, and just now he’d ended up telling her a raft of private details he had never told anyone else before. Ever.
Maybe Kat was right. The time for talking was over.
Unable to hold himself back any longer, Logan sank onto the rug in front of her, moved his mouth over hers and finally, finally kissed her for the second time.
Thoroughly and completely, the way he had in every fantasy he’d had about her since he’d met her that first day in the hospital.
The way he’d been telling himself all night he didn’t want to.
* * *
Kat didn’t stop him. She didn’t want to even try to. He claimed her again and again as her hands inched their way up solid biceps, greed and hunger pumping through her.
He tasted of cinnamon, with that kick of the festive wine they’d been sharing, and the memory of their afternoon together only made her feel that much closer to him. Then he slid his hand to into her hair and angled her head until he was kissing her deeper. More carnally, if that were possible.
She couldn’t breathe. She was sure she’d stopped. And yet she could feel the slow, heavy thumping of her heart against her ribcage. Like the timpani drums she’d heard earlier, playing that medley of Christmas carols.
She had never felt so untethered and adrift. But she simply couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted was Logan. Right here, right now. He was so very strong, was it any wonder that she trembled so deliciously from head to foot at the feel of his sublimely chiselled body covering hers?
He made her feel wanton, needy, and she couldn’t get enough of him. She pressed herself closer, shamelessly rubbing herself against him, and the rough growl he made shook right through her.
Pure lust shimmered between them. It danced. It teased. She lost herself in it, letting her palms graze over his arms, then his shoulders, indulging herself and revelling in the pure physical strength of the man.
Kat hardly noticed when he slid his own hands down her body, hooking then under the hem of her jumper and pulling it up. But when he broke the kiss long enough to tug it over her head in a slick movement, she heard a low sound of protest that was so needy it couldn’t possibly be her.
And then he was back, fusing his mouth to hers, and pouring so much into that kiss that she felt as though she might spill over from the sheer, dizzying thrill of it. He moved his hands to cup her backside and shifted them both in one efficient move that had him sitting on the couch and her sitting astride him.
She gasped and then, unable to help herself, she rocked herself into him. Her softness against his unequivocal hardness. And heat. So much heat. Her heart clattered louder at the dark flare in his eyes. So black it was almost feral.
Reaching down, she pulled her T-shirt up over her head and dropped it to the floor. Then she did the same for him.
Her insides lurched.
The man really was Comic Book God. Or, at least, the latter part. He had abs that even the fictional heroes would have coveted. Almost reverently, she reached out and traced every perfectly hewn contour. It should be illegal for any man to look so mouthwateringly irresistible.
And then, as if compelled by some unheard voice, she dipped her head and pressed her lips to the muscles instead. As if they were there purely for her pleasure. Her body was on fire. Her breasts felt heavy, her nipples too tight, and between her legs she felt molten.
Backwards and forwards, Kat explored. Right up until he lifted his hand and traced a soft line down the centr
e of her spine, and she lifted her head in question.
‘I think,’ he drawled, the thickness in his voice moving through her like slick oil, ‘it may be my turn.’
Before she could answer, he dipped his head to her breast and drew one of the hard peaks into his mouth—lacy bra included—and she couldn’t tell whether it was the frustrating barrier of the material or the graze of the lace against her already sensitive skin that sent her wild.
‘More,’ she muttered, arching her back—the action making her press down on him all the more urgently, that hard ridge of sheer masculinity flexing where she ached for him the most.
And then his hand was grazing her belly, sneaking lower and lower until he was toying with the waistband of her trousers and she thought she might go up in flames from the liquid heat that pooled between her legs.
The sound of the zip being tugged down, slowly, deliberately. And Kat thought she’d never heard it sound quite so deliciously rude before. But then the back of his hand was sliding over the front of her briefs and she stopped thinking anything at all.
There was nothing but the feel of one large hand cupping her backside, and the other hooking under the material to graze over her and then cup her, wet and hot, in the palm of his hand.
She feared she might break, humiliatingly, apart from just that single action.
Then his fingers began to move, tracing her, learning her, making her grow slicker and heavier with every stroke. But still making her wait. Torturing her with the tantalising promise of exquisite pleasure, which he kept Just. Out. Of. Reach.
‘Logan...’
Kat bit her lower lip, helpless to keep the desperate longing from her voice.
‘Tell me,’ he commanded hoarsely, as if it was taking just as much for him to resist.
‘You already know...’ She tried to drop her forehead to rest on his shoulder but he wouldn’t let her.
He shifted back until he could see her, until they were gazing at each other, and then finally—finally—he slid his fingers inside her, driving her to dizzier heights. And she, to what should have been her shame, simply threw her head back and rode his hand as long and as far as he wanted to take her.
The Bodyguard's Christmas Proposal Page 8