His jaw tightened. “I’m not from around here, Jenny.”
“Right. You’re a cowboy photographer with a medical degree.”
A waitress clattered two beers between them, striding away before the mugs stopped rattling. Logan curled a hand around a frosty glass and lifted it to his lips. When he finished taking a long drag on the lip, he placed the mug with great deliberation back on the table. He may as well have teleported a thousand miles from this intimate little table. Even she could tell she’d probed a sensitive subject.
But they’d committed to this odd sort of date, and that freed her from years of social etiquette that demanded she change the subject when a guest was uncomfortable. “What kind of doctor are you, exactly?”
“No kind of doctor at all.” His knuckles whitened around the mug. “I quit my job as an emergency physician six months ago and I have no intention of going back.”
Hmmm. “You quit?”
“Yup.”
“You needed a change of pace?”
“No.”
“Plan on going back to school for a new specialty?”
“No.”
“Give me something.” She took a sip of the tasteless but refreshingly ice-cold beer. “You wanted to knock the shine off the diamond, right? Then you can’t leave me burning with curiosity.”
A muscle in his cheek flexed. “I’m just done with the career.”
“Burnt out?”
He paused, and then nodded, and shut down so fast she practically heard the walls falling. She’d known assistant professors who’d crumbled under the demands of classes, lab work, and grant applications, who’d disappeared for months on leave to reconsider less stressful options. She herself thrived on the demands of her work, but she wasn’t ignorant of the toll it could take.
“I’ve got all the time in the world now,” Logan said. “So I’m couch-surfing across America.”
She tilted her head, contemplating. “That actually sounds appealing.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Maybe not couch-surfing,” she said, “but I envy the lack of a schedule, the ample time you have. Summers with my grandmother were freewheeling like that, days that unfurled without a single lesson or appointment or plan. And those were the happiest months of my life.”
“Is your grandmother the rich relative?”
Her stomach tightened. “Rich?”
“Come on, Red. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
She hated to admit that Logan pinned her good. “It’s the Saab, isn’t it? I have a weakness for foreign cars.”
“It’s not the car or jewelry.” His gaze dropped to the pearls at her throat. “It’s the boarding school and the Mozart you hum in the shower. You ooze class. It’s like a scent rising off your skin.”
“My parents are wealthy,” she said with a tilt of chin, “but I worked hard to get where I am.”
“I didn’t say otherwise.”
“Last time I looked, you couldn’t buy a Ph.D. Or an M.D.” Or love, for that matter. The only wealth that really counted.
“I’m making an effort to point out the gulf between us, Red.”
“So did you go hungry to bed as a child? Had no shoes for your feet?”
He swung his face away and scanned the crowd as the speakers hissed static between twanging country songs. “Not me or my eight siblings. There’s a lot of room on a cattle ranch.”
“Did you all sleep in one bed, head to foot?”
He raised the beer to his lips. “My wit and charm are working on you already, I see.”
“Working like magic.” She took another gulp of the tasteless beer. “So what did your parents do on this ranch?”
“He was a veterinarian.”
“So his son didn’t fall far from the tree, then.”
“I still had to work two jobs to help pay for medical school. Wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise.”
“I have no doubt.” She’d never had to worry about money for schooling, but her family had other ways of making sure she understood the value of a dollar.
“Working on a ranch put dirt under my fingernails,” he said, slugging down the last of his beer. “The kind that never comes out.”
He frowned into his mug, as if surprised to find it empty. Her gaze fell to his hands. They were nicked here and there, clean, strong, and work-hardened hands. All she could think about was how rough they’d feel running up her inner thigh.
His throat flexed. “I’m acting like an ass.”
“Isn’t that the point of this date?”
The honesty of her own words caught her by surprise. The truth was that she didn’t really want to argue with Logan, even if he always knocked her off-kilter. With a half a glass of beer in her, she was willing to admit she liked the challenge. She liked the attraction.
She liked him.
Just like that, he kicked back on the rear legs of his chair as if he couldn’t get far enough away from her. “You went to boarding school as a kid.”
Back to that, are we? “Yes, I did. When I was eight years old.”
And just like that, his chair legs rattled against the linoleum floor.
“I know.” She was used to that response. She didn’t know that was unusual until she went to medical school with scholarship students. “My parents are both surgeons at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Everyone we knew sent their kids to boarding school. It seemed the natural progression.”
“Did you have pigtails?”
Odd question. “Yeah, sometimes, I suppose.” Does he really want to know the ugly? “I had freckles and buck teeth, two.”
“And so, freckled and with your hair in ribbons, they sent you off to Switzerland when you were in second grade.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Zurich, actually.”
“Sounds lonely.”
Her throat pulled. Boarding school had been terrifying, until she’d finally learned enough French to made friends with the other girls. She knew no other kind of life, until she started spending summers with her grandmother.
“When I was eight,” Logan said, “I was riding horses, sweeping out stalls. I helped my father with birthing the foals. And every night, without fail, our family of ten ate dinner together.”
“Holy Norman Rockwell.” She spoke it like a joke, but it opened up a new hollow inside her. “We grew up very differently.”
“Worlds apart.”
“Couldn’t be farther.”
“Absolutely.”
The point was agreed upon. So why were they laboring to make it? Ignoring, in the process, that they were both of a scientific bent, had fought through graduate school, and weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
A tray clattered on the table between them. The steam of the hot pizza filled the space.
“One pizza, everything on it,” the waitress said, tearing off the check. “I’ll get you more beer.”
Jen barely heard the woman, feeling as hot as the confection of melted cheese sizzling between them.
“It’s too hot to eat,” Logan said.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “We should let it cool.”
He pinned her with that clear, green gaze. “That’s one thing, Jenny Vance, that we can agree on.”
***
A soft, cool rain greeted them when they left the movie theater later that evening. Logan welcomed the chill. After sitting in a dark room with Jenny’s smooth thighs constantly in his visual field, he needed an icy shower.
“We’d better get to the truck,” he said gruffly, shrugging his jacket over his shoulders, “it’s going to pour.”
The air in the car was heavy and humid, and the insides of the windows sweated with moisture. He turned the key and revved up the motor, trying to ignore the subtle scent of strawberries as Jenny settled in beside him.
“So,” he said, “how did you like the movie?”
“Fabulous.”
He didn’t believe that for a minute. “Got a favorite car crash?�
��
“I wasn’t keeping count.”
“But you were counting the bodies, yes?”
“Nope.”
“Admit it, Jenny.” He turned out onto the highway and headed down the road just as the patter of the rain intensified on the windshield. “That movie sucked.”
“You want me to lie?”
“There was more testosterone in it than in a whole class of eighth-grade boys.”
“What’s wrong with testosterone? You’re a man, you’re full of it.”
He grunted, for, medically, she was right. Long-term abstinence had a way of building up a cache.
Can’t think of that.
“I like brainless thrillers.” She leaned back on the chair, the dashboard lights liming her face. “It’s one of the few pleasures my ex introduced me to.”
Ex.
“It’s therapeutic to stop thinking for a while,” she added, “and just be distracted by explosions.”
“You don’t do that often.”
“Do what? Go to the movies?”
“Stop thinking.”
He regretted the words instantly, because it destroyed any therapeutic benefit and set her shifting in her seat. Ahead of them loomed the possibility of a good night kiss. His reptilian brain wanted her to stopped thinking altogether—but his cerebral cortex knew she deserved better.
“Who was the bastard, anyway,” he said. “This ex who only pleased you when he took you to a movie?”
She startled him by laughing. “That’s a more perfect description than you’ll ever know.”
He didn’t know where to start with that.
“I tried very hard to make him happy. I was faithful, enjoyed his company, greeted him at the door every day when he came home—”
“Did he want a girlfriend or a cocker spaniel?”
“He wanted something more, that’s for sure.” She turned her face toward the passenger side window. “Something I wasn’t capable of giving.”
“He sounds like a jerk.”
She shrugged. “Jerks may be my type.”
“No.” He glanced at her, saw the back of her head and a blur of a reflection in the passenger side window glass. “If you had to work that hard, he wasn’t the right guy. End of story.”
“And you know this from long and varied experience?”
He knew better than to answer that. He’d had a few relationships that had gone deep enough to leave an imprint. He always accepted that they had ended because of distance, the pull of demanding careers, and ill-timing, but, really, it was something deeper. Love had come to his married siblings the same way each time. They’d return home from school or work or a party all bothered and lit up. Talking about ‘this girl’ or ‘that guy’. Months, or occasionally weeks later, they’d be engaged. That’s how it was supposed to happen. Now, sitting here next to Jenny, rocked by the rumbling of the truck, the only light in the cab a reflection of the reach of his headlights, he couldn’t find any reason not to confess his truth.
“I’ve seen three of my siblings married, and it’s always been swift and sure.” He flicked on the wipers as the rain intensified. “Just proves that your ex wasn’t the right man.”
Oh, you’ll know the one for you, his two married brothers had said to him, you’ll know the minute she walks into your life.
“Logan,” she teased. “You’re a romantic.”
He flexed his hands over the steering wheel and fixed his gaze on the white line in the middle of the road, remembering not for the first time the image of Jenny walking out of that shower on the day he met her. The rain splashed against the windshield, the wipers squeaked it away. The motor rumbled under his foot. And for a moment life contracted upon him, reduced in all its dense complexity to the simple space within this cab. To the living, breathing redhead sitting beside him, and to the surprising insight of her scientific mind.
“I know one thing,” he said. “You should never let any man make you feel less brilliant and desirable as you are, Jenny Vance.”
The car revved as he pressed down on the accelerator. He wasn’t ready for this now. He’d spent the evening light-headed, his loins engorged, erotic visions roiling through his mind. But his life was in chaos, the timing was all wrong. He had nothing to offer.
Nothing at all.
CHAPTER SIX
As soon as Logan took the key out of the ignition, Jenny tumbled out of the Ford. She couldn’t take another minute so close to that brooding hulk of a man. He exuded sexuality in waves so powerful he seemed to suck every atom of air between them. She needed to breathe deep and clear her head of too many imaginings.
She stepped out of the jeep. Rain pounded her head and shoulders, soaking her in an instant. Hunching over, she scrambled around the truck and headed blindly for the deck.
“Here.”
He loomed out of the darkness and thrust his jacket over her head. She clutched it against the roar of the rain and tried to ignore the fragrant warmth emanating from the brushed cotton inside. She followed him up the stairs. He snatched the key out of the stone turtle tucked under potted geraniums and fumbled with the lock as thunder rumbled in the distance. He thrust the door open and they both burst inside.
Jenny slipped his coat off her head and flicked on the light switch. She glanced up at the recessed lights in the ceiling as nothing happened.
She flicked it again.
“Power’s out,” he said, his deep voice rumbling. “There are candles in the drawer by the fridge. Stay here.”
He moved into the darkness. She pulled off one of her sandals, smearing her fingers with grit and mud. She toed off the other sandal and pushed them both to the side of the mat. She heard him yank open draws, then fumble amid the clank of silverware and wooden spoons. Finally, she heard the strike of a match. A golden glow flared in the kitchen.
She minced across the cold floor and thrust the faucet onto rub her hands free of grit. By the flickering light, she watched him set an array of candle nubs on the counter, and then light them, one by one.
She jerked the faucet off and dried her hands on a dish towel. “Do the lights go out often around here?”
“Every time there’s a storm. It’s an old transformer. John’s been bugging the utility company for months.”
“No flashlights?”
“No batteries.” He lit the candle closest to her and blew out the match. A curl of blue smoke rose between them. “Candles are more romantic anyway.”
He raised his lashes and looked right at her within the golden glow of light. The silence of the room was broken only by the patter of the rain outside, the flare of another match, the hiss of a drop of water falling from Logan’s hair into the hot wax. She could see his eyes—those fierce green eyes. The rest of him was an outline of a shadow against the gloom. Standing here with her skirt pasted to her legs, her knit tank clinging to her breasts, she felt as naked as the day he’d seen her damp from the shower.
If there were a way to tap into the electricity zapping between them, there’d be no use for a new transformer in these woods. Why weren’t the lights buzzing on? The coffeemaker burbling? The old electric mixer sparking up and whirring?
He murmured, “You’re thinking too much, Red.”
Thinking? She could hardly string two thoughts together, her heart was pounding so hard.
“I can hear your mind working.” His voice was husky, his face close enough to feel his breath. “Tell me when you figure it out.”
“Figure out…what?”
A muscle in his cheek flexed. “What you really want.”
She knew what she wanted. As clear as the flash of lightning in the room. She couldn’t seem to find her tongue right now, to make it work, to speak the ideas spinning in her mind, but every time a sentence surged to her throat, her better sense pulled it back. Excitement kept knocking up against resistance, and terror tempered her enthusiasm, but she knew what lay at the bottom of it all, knew it in every cell of her body. Her tongue tingle
d to lick off the rain beading on his throat. Her fingers ached to comb through the dampness of his hair.
“I know what I want,” Logan said, taking a dangerous step closer.
“Say it,” she said, her teeth chattering, and not from any cold, “a girl needs to hear it said.”
“I want you, Jenny.”
His words spiraled through her, making her inner muscles squeeze with promise.
His voice dropped. “You need more details?”
“Y-yes.”
“All right then.” He curled a hand around her waist and slipped the other into the wet tangle of her hair. “I want you naked on that bed in the room where I first saw you. I want to lick every drop of rain off your body.” He lowered his mouth to her ear. “I want to hear you scream my name when you come.”
She gripped the counter’s edge. “That won’t knock the shine of the diamond, Logan.”
“We’ve both been pretending there nothing between us.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
Her throat closed up. She knew this was going to happen, she’d known it in her bones. The desire rising in her felt volcanic. She’d spill over any minute now. She hadn’t felt this lit up by a man’s touch since those summer nights as a teenager.
“Jenny.” Logan pulled back so he could see her face. “Was that a yes yes or just a random articulation?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes as in you’ll let me strip off your clothes?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll let me run my hands over your body?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you’ll let me—”
“Stop talking, Logan.”
She dragged her hands up the hem of his polo shirt to feel the ripple of his naked abdomen. A liquid heat surged between her legs. He made a sound, a deep-throated grunt. He smelled like rain. Crisp and clean and hot-wet. The ridge of his erection pressed against her lower belly. The solid wall of his chest crushed her breasts.
She watched a pulse throb in his throat, beating away the seconds. Images rose in her mind of tangled sheets and love-bites and rug-burned knees and the rough surface of a man’s tongue where she now squeezed her legs together. Then he lowered his head and kissed her like he did in the sunshine of the woods, proving that lightning could strike twice.
Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Page 6