Like Never Before

by Melissa Tagg

  “I thought I saw someone out here.”

  The sound of a screen door tapping shut followed Case’s voice. His shadow poured over the porch steps.

  “Hey, Mr. Walker. Sorry to camp out on your steps.” She laced her fingers over her knees.

  “I seem to recall telling you to call me Case.” He lowered beside her. “Probably about three hundred times.”

  “Sorry.” It was something about the man. He gave off a regal vibe. Somehow commanding and mild all at once.

  “You apologize a lot, you know that?”

  “Sor—” She caught herself with her first grin since this morning. Since walking out on Eleanor.

  “So which of my kids are you waiting for? Few weeks ago I would’ve guessed Rae, but lately you and Logan are together more than you and Rae.”

  True. So true, in fact, she’d gotten used to seeing him on a daily basis. Maybe, probably, that’s why she’d come here, a mix of whim and desire. She’d never made a friend this quickly, not one who managed to draw out her secrets.

  Well, not all her secrets.

  “Waiting for Logan. Although he’ll laugh at me when he finds out why.”

  “Good.” Case drawled the word, the creases bracketing his smile deepening at her raised eyebrows. “He doesn’t laugh enough, my son. So you go ahead and say whatever you came to say and make him laugh.”

  And there was Logan’s car now, plodding around a curve, tires kicking up gravel and dust. “Even if it’s crazy?”

  “Especially if it’s crazy.” Case stood. “Besides, half the time crazy is just another word for bold. Or grand. Or adventurous. All of which I generally support.” He patted her shoulder as Logan’s car came to a stop underneath the basketball hoop in the driveway. “And Amelia?”

  She tipped her head.

  “Don’t forget to laugh yourself.”

  How was it possible, in one little sentence, one look, to feel as if Case Walker saw all the way inside her? It was as if he’d overheard her argument with Eleanor this morning or, even more, knew the floating fragments of her story she’d never allowed to bob to the surface.

  He waved at his son, then slipped inside the house.

  And Logan’s gaze connected with hers from behind his windshield.

  No wonder Logan was such a good listener, with a dad like Case. No wonder this was the place she’d ended up today, when the past she’d worked so hard to confine inside a vault blasted its way into her present.

  Logan walked toward her now, sleeves of his plaid shirt rolled to his elbows. He stopped in front of her. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” She rose, wedged her hands into her back pockets, felt the wind working tangles into her hair.

  “Where’s Charlie?”

  “How’s Eleanor?”

  Their questions collided as she took in the faint circles under his eyes. Had he had as restless a night as she had, folded onto the couch while El slept a floor above? “I’m just going to say it. You look as ragged as I feel.”

  “Yeah?” He rubbed one hand over his unshaven jaw.

  “Which makes why I’m here all the nuttier.”

  “I’m getting used to your brand of nutty, Amelia Bentley. What’s up?”

  “I found Marney Billingsley, Kendall’s old nurse.” She took a breath. “Want to go to South Dakota with me?”

  8

  I can’t believe we’re really doing this.”

  Stars glittered in clusters across the stretch of sky, like sequins on a satiny black dress. Shadowed fields reached to the north and south on either side of the highway, the lights of Logan’s Ford casting the only color out the front windshield. In the rearview mirror, the lights of Maple Valley paled with every mile.

  If the GPS on her phone was right, they’d reach the roadside lodge where Marney Billingsley apparently lived and worked by the time sunshine bathed the Black Hills.

  “We’re really doing it.” Logan sipped from the travel mug she’d handed him when he’d come to pick her up. Midnight. Not a minute late. Because that was Logan. “You know, this tea isn’t that bad.”

  “Told ya. Enough caffeine to keep you alert for a few hours. Not so much it’ll keep you from getting some shut-eye later when it’s my turn to drive.”

  “Speaking of which, Super Sleuth, you’re supposed to be trying to sleep now.”

  “Can’t. I’m too excited.” Did she sound like a five-year-old on the first day of school? Because she felt like one. The dancing thrill of chasing a story—literally—all the way across state lines rollicked through her.

  And she was still in shock that Logan had agreed to come.

  They’d stood on Case Walker’s porch, a breeze brushing dust and a few of last fall’s leftover leaves across the steps. The swing in the corner had tapped against the side of the house while she’d explained how she’d spent the afternoon using the Internet to track down Kendall Wilkins’s old nurse. Found her in South Dakota.

  “I tried calling the lodge’s number, but I keep getting voicemail. I sent an email. But I just . . . don’t want to wait.”

  Because she needed this.

  She couldn’t deal with Eleanor. Didn’t know how things would turn out with the paper. Felt a pit in her stomach at the thought of her meeting at the bank next week.

  But this one thing—this story and its latest lead—was a clear bull’s-eye amid a blur of moving targets.

  Logan had thought about her request for seconds that stretched and rolled like the afternoon’s pallid clouds. And then, a simple nod and two words. “I’m in.”

  They’d decided to drive through the night. Had agreed to go home and take naps, with the goal of hitting the Black Hills by morning.

  “Then we can Woodward and Bernstein it up for a few hours and head home by afternoon.” Exhilaration had trailed into Logan’s voice, steady and building, until she was convinced he needed this impulsive road trip as much as she did.

  She glanced at him now. For once, no sign of a tie or suit jacket. Only a dark-colored Henley and worn jeans. Instead of his usual tempered hair, it looked like he hadn’t bothered with it after his nap. Still with the unshaven cheeks and jaw.

  And glasses in place of his usual contacts.

  He wasn’t a bad-looking man any day, but tonight . . . well, he looked good, that’s all. If good meant a hundred kinds of attractive. The glasses only added to the appeal.

  An instant fog of warmth enveloped her, and she unzipped her hoodie, struggled to pull her arms free.

  Logan set his travel mug in the cup holder, then leaned over to help her out of the hoodie. “Too hot?” He knocked the heat down a notch.

  The faint scent of his cologne lingered even when he straightened. Something spicy, masculine. Enticing.

  “You okay, Amelia? You’ve got a funny look on your face.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What’d your sister say about our road trip?”

  The silhouette of a line of silos rose on one side the road. “Didn’t get a chance to talk to her.”

  Because when she’d finally returned to the house, Eleanor hadn’t been anywhere around. Her car, her suitcase, gone. Only the echoes of their argument loafing in the empty space.

  Hurled words had accomplished nothing other than to dredge even deeper the cavern that’d separated them all these years.

  “I left a note for her.” She’d stuck it behind an I <3 Iowa magnet on the fridge, certain Eleanor would never see it. She’d probably already left for Des Moines. “How about your dad?

  “He said something about you taking his definition of crazy to heart.”

  She grinned at that. What was it he’d said? “Half the time, crazy is just another word for bold. Or grand. Or adventurous.”

  “And your in-laws have Charlie for the weekend?”

  Impossible to miss his frown, fleeting as it was. And the apprehension in his single-word answer. “Yes.”

  She shifted underneath the hold of her seatbelt, pulled her feet up to
the edge of her seat, knees nearly knocking against her chin. “She’s adorable, by the way.”

  “She’s the best thing in my life.”

  His eyes were on the road when he spoke, but clearly his mind was elsewhere. Back in Maple Valley with little Charlie, or even farther in the rearview mirror of his life? Back to when his wife would’ve been the one seated next to him?

  “Logan?”

  One hand slid down the steering wheel. “Yeah?”

  “What was she like? Emma.”

  His quiet pause dawdled so long, only the puff of the heater filling the silence, she thought maybe he wasn’t going to answer. But then he nudged his glasses up and spoke. “She was incredible. Beautiful. So ridiculously talented. And intelligent. She actually turned down Yale. They offered her a free ride, and she said no.”

  “What made her do that?”

  One hand slipped lower on the wheel. “Me. I didn’t ask her to, told her we could long-distance it. But she insisted. Not sure her parents have ever forgiven me for that, really.”

  “She must’ve loved you.”

  “Guess so.”

  Amelia knew the pull of first love, remembered the lengths a heart could go to just to hold on to it. She’d given up a scholarship, hadn’t she? Would’ve followed Jeremy anywhere. And did until he’d decided love and loyalty weren’t enough.

  When she hadn’t been able to give him what he wanted, he’d lost patience.

  And she lost him.

  “Thing about Emma was, she was with me . . . in everything. Even when she wasn’t so sure—when I reconnected with Theo and he talked me into moving out to California to work on a campaign—she had this sort of ‘take one for the team’ mindset and jumped in. And then later . . .” Distance crawled into his expression. “I remember holding Charlie for the first time, looking at this little bundle in my arms and thinking, ‘What have I gotten into?’ A second later, I look up, and Emma’s watching me, and she says, ‘You’re going to rock this fatherhood thing.’ And instantly what felt for a second like the scariest moment of my life became the happiest. She grounded me.”

  Amelia couldn’t look away from Logan as he spoke. She saw the tick in his jaw. The glaze in his eyes he tried to blink away. Felt her heart twist and her own emotions well.

  And for moments that spread in a hushed stillness, he wasn’t Logan Walker the award-winning writer she’d idolized or the owner who might sell the paper out from under her or even the newfound friend caught in her web of story-hunting.

  He was just a man who’d lost something precious.

  And who was doing everything he could to hang on to what he had left.

  Understanding unfolded inside her, leaving her strangely breathless.

  And she couldn’t help it. She leaned over the console separating their seats, laid her hand on his arm. The curve of his muscle ticked at her touch.

  He looked over, moisture gone from his eyes but something heart-tugging still resting there. “I . . . I hate the thought of you going through that.”

  He’d said something similar to her last night, hadn’t he? Was that really just last night? When she’d told him about the divorce?

  Logan opened his mouth, closed it. Looked from her hand back to the road.

  Had she said too much? Steered the conversation places he hadn’t wanted to go?

  She let her hand drop.

  But before she could fully lean back to her own side of the car, he let go of the wheel with his right hand and reached down to grasp hers. He squeezed and then released it, words he didn’t need to say captured in the gesture.

  “You should get some sleep, Bentley. It’s going to be your turn to drive in a few hours.”

  The heater’s rasp and something new, a bond so real she could almost hear its whisper, curled in the space between them. Her lungs tightened.

  “Here.” Logan shrugged out of his vest and held it out to her. “You can use it as a pillow.”

  She bunched his vest into a ball and leaned it against the window. It smelled like Logan, the scent encasing her as she laid her head against it. She closed her eyes, heard a rustle of movement, and felt Logan lifting her hoodie over her, spreading it over her shoulders like a blanket.

  “Sweet dreams, Hildy.”

  Sleep held tight as sunlight tried its best to lull Logan into consciousness—sunlight and someone tugging on his arm, pulling him from a dream in which he and Charlie were back in LA, sitting at the breakfast bar inside his apartment.

  Only it hadn’t been Emma flipping pancakes over the stove.

  “Logan, wake up.”

  He opened his eyes one at a time, the flood of morning light as jarring as the memory of the face in his dream. Hazel eyes, freckles . . .

  “Hey, sleepyhead, you’re finally awake.” Too much perk lilted in Amelia’s voice.

  “Barely.” He croaked the word, uncoiling from his position in the passenger’s seat. Muscles groaned at the movement as his brain pilfered through scraps of recollection to piece together the past twenty-four hours.

  That meeting. Jenessa. A few hours at Rick and Helen’s house with Charlie before reluctantly agreeing to let them keep her until Monday morning.

  And then he and Amelia taking off at midnight, sights set on the Black Hills of South Dakota and a story he still wasn’t convinced was a story.

  What had he been thinking? What if Charlie got tired of being at her grandparents’? What if this trip was one more notch against him in Rick and Helen’s view?

  And why weren’t they moving now?

  “I almost woke you up three hours ago to see the sunrise,” Amelia said now. “It was like a watercolor painting, all these pastel smudges, and I kept thinking I should wake you up to see it, but you needed your sleep, and then I started wishing we had time to stop by Mount Rushmore because I’ve never been . . .” She stopped. “I’m talking too much. Jeremy used to hate it when I talked too much in the morning. He said—”

  She cut off so swiftly it was enough to shatter the last of Logan’s fatigue. He straightened in his seat, the vest they’d both used as a pillow dropping to his lap. “He said . . . ?”

  “Never mind. How’d you sleep?”

  Surprisingly well. There’d been something about last night—moonlit fields and the low drone of talk radio, Amelia’s soft breathing. He’d agreed to wake her at four-thirty but had instead waited until almost a quarter past five. She’d looked so comfortable, face mashed into his vest and legs curled up to her chin. He’d hated rousing her.

  When he’d finally taken his turn in the passenger’s seat, he’d expected to have trouble falling asleep. But the warmth from the heater, the rhythm of wheels on pavement, the lingering scent of vanilla on his vest . . .

  He’d drifted off in no time.

  “Why are we stopped?” He looked out the window, car pulled onto the shoulder, an orange sun brushing tawny strokes over black fields. And in the distance, shadowed ridges—the Black Hills. They were close.

  “Well, that’s why I woke you.” Chagrin stilted her words. “We’re out of gas. We passed a station a while ago, but I thought stopping would wake you up, and we seemed so close, I thought we could make it.”

  “You’re kidding.” He leaned over, elbows propped on his knees, fingers rubbing his forehead.

  “I never kid when stranded in a different state with a man in the car who may or may not handle this kind of situation well. I know your writing style, Walker, but not your emergency-situation style. Not that this is much of an emergency. My GPS says we’re less than a mile from the turnoff for the Glorietta. That’s the name of the lodge.”

  He lifted his head. “You really do talk a lot in the morning.” More amused observance than accusation, but what he wouldn’t give for a mug of Dad’s swampy coffee right now. Most the time he had to add water to get it down, but today he’d have gulped it as is just to keep up with Amelia. “You said we’re only a mile away?”

  “Right, so . . . we walk?”


  He nodded.

  They got out of the car, the morning breeze brushing cool air over Logan’s cheeks. He pulled on his puff vest, zipped it up, and burrowed his chin inside. He looked across the car’s hood at Amelia. “Where’s your coat?”

  “Didn’t bring one. It was so warm in Iowa yesterday.”

  South Dakota wasn’t exactly a frozen tundra at the moment, but she needed more than that flimsy hoodie. “Pop the trunk. I’ve probably got something in there you can wear.”

  He rounded the car and found a fleece jacket as she came up beside him. “Here you go. You’ll drown in it, but it’ll keep you warm.” He helped her into it, reached for the zipper, and pulled it up to her chin before realizing what he was doing. “Sorry. Habit. Charlie.”

  Except standing this close to her, the wind blowing her hair in his face, well, those weren’t exactly paternal feelings pooling inside him. He stepped back, but she only stared, a hint of a grin tugging at her lips.

  “What?”

  “Just thinking about what a good Boy Scout you must’ve been. Look at this trunk. Emergency kit. Blanket. Jug of water. Tool box. Extra jacket.” The sleeves of his jacket flopped over her wrists as she spoke. “It’s like whoever came up with the ‘Be Prepared’ motto was picturing you.”

  “I can’t tell whether you’re mocking or complimenting me.”

  “Good. I like retaining a hint of mystery about me.”

  “That’s very Lauren Bacall of you.”

  “Now that is a compliment.”

  He closed the trunk. “But don’t think for a second I need you teaching me to whistle.”

  Her nose wrinkled at the comment, and he could almost see the cogs in her brain turning. “Reference?”

  “You’ll figure it out. But I’ll give you a clue: Humphrey Bogart was in it, too.” He pulled the keys from her hand, locked the door, and started walking.

  She hurried to catch up. “That’s not a clue. They were in, like, twenty movies together.”

  “They were in three movies together.”

  “Showoff.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes, accompanied by only the sound of their shoes on gravel and the swish of grass. In the distance, a bird’s caa pealed through the air. If they had to finish the trek to their destination by foot, this wasn’t such a bad day to do it. Cold, maybe, but the fresh air filled Logan’s lungs with something fresh and energizing.