A pang twisted beneath her ribs. She hid her gaze behind her sunglasses and tried not to look too pointedly at Logan, his polo shirt open at the collar, revealing a stretch of skin she’d licked in the darkness last night. She squeezed her legs together tighter.
Logan turned and headed directly toward her to slip a cheeseburger on the plate beside her chair.
“Breakfast,” he said.
“Of champions,” she murmured.
His shadow fell over her. She could smell him—hot grease, sun-warmed skin, eucalyptus. He slid her sunglasses down her nose just as she raised her lashes to meet his eyes. Their gazes locked. The unspoken promises in those intense green eyes drew the air from her lungs.
“Hey,” John said from what seemed like a very distant place. “You guys should get a room.”
“We’ve got one.” Logan took a step back, canted those broad shoulders, and waved a spatula at his friend as he returned to the grill. “You do, too, John, so no reason for envy.”
“Of course I’m envious,” John said. “I’m living like a monk. And when I ran for refuge I ended up here, in a love shack.”
She spurted a mouthful of coffee. John burst into laughter. Logan grinned, and a moment later a bubble of laughter shivered up to her throat, too.
“By God, the fierce and feared Dr. Jennifer Vance is human.” John handed her the cocktail napkin under his cup so she could pat herself dry. “I was beginning to wonder if some Silicon Valley start-up had invented a lifelike, artificial-intelligence, botanical-research scientist.”
“What?”
“I’m amazed how you manage to speak at so many conferences. Every week I see another published article with your name attached.”
“Oh, that.” She patted at the splatters of coffee and then gave up. “I don’t sleep.”
“I don’t sleep either,” John said. “But I’m not getting nearly as much work done.”
“And you won’t get as much work done, now that you’ve got a newborn.” Logan flipped his overdone burger and glanced over his shoulder. “What’s this about Jenny’s publishing?”
“Your roommate, here,” John said, with a wink, “is responsible for the death of more trees than anyone else I know in the field.”
“Trade journals use recycled paper,” she retorted, tossing the napkin aside to wrap both hands around the dripping burger, “when they bother to publish in actual paper at all.”
“That doesn’t make your research accomplishments any less impressive,” John remarked. “Though I’m not sure why you decided to share saliva with this guy.”
She nearly choked on a mouthful of burger. Spewing water was one thing; spewing half-chewed beef was another, so she closed her mouth to avoid becoming a social Hindenburg.
“You might not know his, but old Logan, here,” John continued, as if oblivious to her discomfort, “has been as thorny as Ulex europaeus since he got back from South America.”
South America?
“Hey, watch your language,” Logan said, closing the grill and approaching an empty chair with his own burger.
“It’s gorse,” Jenny blurted, feeling short-circuited. “The common name for Ulex europaeus is gorse.”
Logan lifted a brow as he sat down. “That’s botany humor, right?”
“He can be taught.” John spoke around the food filling his cheek. “At least he’s got that much going for him. Maybe you can tame him, Jenny. He’s in dire need of gentling.”
“So,” Logan said, in a firm and overly loud voice, “how’s that baby of yours, John?”
If a man’s grin could split his face, Johns’s face would be in two halves. His eyes shone over the ruddiness of his cheeks. “That baby of mine is doing just fine, Logan old pal, as I’ve told you a dozen times by now.” He leaned toward Jen. “We called her Lily.”
She cocked her head. “Short for Lilium?”
“Of course,” John said.
Logan rolled his eyes. “Is that Lily as in ‘of-the-valley?’”
“More like Tiger Lily,” John said with a wince. “She flails and scratches and has a temper you wouldn’t believe.” John’s his eyes misted over. “But when she smiles it’s like the whole world glows.”
“What you’re seeing is gas,” Logan scoffed, as he flipped his burger onto a roll. “You can still count her age in days.”
“She knows who her daddy is.” John finished the last of the burger and settled back in his chair, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Daddy is the one who feeds her at three in the morning. Daddy is the one who changes the really gnarly diapers. Daddy is the one whose shoulder she always throws up on. I don’t think I’ve slept an hour since she’s been born.” A beatific smile spread across his face. “But I wouldn’t give this up for anything in the world. You should try it sometime, Logan. Fatherhood, that is.”
Logan concentrated on the burger oozing grease onto his paper plate. “Are you starting trouble?”
John looked right at her. “I think you found some all by yourself.”
She grinned, and she wondered why, only knowing that it felt good to gang up with John against Logan.
“Jen,” John persisted, refocusing his attention, “Have you ever seen a baby born?”
“Ah…no.”
“Logan has.” John spread his fingers toward his friend. “Has he mentioned that? This man has delivered more babies into the world than he can count.”
Logan gave John an unreadable look as he squirted ketchup on his burger. It was hard to imagine Logan wearing a doctor’s white coat, cocking his ear to patients, wrist-deep in surgery, or coaxing a child into the world. She didn’t know that part of him yet.
She knew so little of him, really.
“Hundreds and hundreds of babies,” John continued. “All brought into the world by this doctor, right here. He understands how fragile and amazing childbirth is.”
“John.” Logan’s voice held a hint of warning.
“I never really knew how scary and beautiful it was,” John said, focusing on her, “until I watched the process myself. I would have been happy pacing the hall outside the delivery room, but I’m glad Judy insisted I be with her. How often do you get to see that, really, if you’re not someone like Logan, who does it for a living?”
Logan said, “You need another burger, John?”
“No, thanks, I’m fine—”
“Might give you something else to do with your mouth.”
“But Jen’s loving this story.” John grinned, his eyes full of teasing. “Aren’t you?”
“Riveted.” And she was, as much the riptide rushing between the men as by John’s words.
“The thing is,” John continued, “so much can go wrong during the birth. But when it goes right it’s a miracle. Seeing that baby—our baby, our flesh and blood—come into the yelling with all the power in her little lungs. She’s already a whole new person, all ours to tend to and care for.” John shrugged and shook his head. “It’s the most astonishing sight in the whole wide world.”
John stopped talking, his gaze traveling a thousand miles away. The midday sun beat hard down upon her skin, warming the part in her hair. Idly, she thought, I should go inside, get some sunscreen. With her redhead’s skin she’d be burned within the hour if she didn’t protect herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to rise from the cushion of the chair. Waiting for John to say something more, or for Logan to add to the conversation, because there seemed to be a lot more to the story that wasn’t being said and she’d be damned if she missed it.
“You know.” John stood up from his chair. “I shouldn’t be here right now.”
Logan straightened as if he’d been lost in thought, too. “You just got here, dude.”
“Yeah,” he said lifting his hands to his hips, “but I’m feeling weird about it now. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t believe Judy let me leave, or that I thought it was a good idea to just take off.”
“John,” Jenny said, “You wanted to see my
research—”
“Maybe another day. The sooner I get on the road the sooner I’ll be home. Shoot me an email instead, I’ll have more time to pour over your numbers. But right now I’ve got to get back to Judy. To Lily. That’s where I belong.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say except goodbye. Jenny promised to forward him her test results when she finished the last of the extractions and analysis. John shook Logan’s hand, thanked him for the burger, and then Logan walked John around the side of the house toward John’s parked car, leaving her alone in a quiet backyard. Moments later, she heard the pop of gravel under tires and then Logan came back around the side of the house. She curled her legs up tight on the lounge chair, clutching the wooden arms, not knowing what to expect as he approached, his hands curled into fists in his pockets.
“I have to make some phone calls.” He stopped a safe distance in front of her, his face inscrutable. “I have to do it now.”
“Okay.”
After that, Jenny, we’ll talk.”
A chill washed over her, despite the sun beating hot on her head. She’d heard those words before, and they struck hard enough to bruise. He swiveled away before she could read his face. He headed up the stairs to the deck to enter the house, leaving her heart beating a tattoo into her chest. We’ll talk meant I have something bad to say to you. It meant news of Granny dying. It meant she was to be sent away to boarding school. It meant her ex had found a more exciting woman and didn’t want anything to do with Jen Vance anymore.
No, that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t imagined the current sizzling between her and Logan. Even John had noticed it. She jolted out of the lounge chair and pulled it back, out of the sunshine, into a spot under the shade of a spruce tree. In that shadow she dropped back in the chair, bracing herself for the inevitable.
Logan took a long time in the house. She closed her eyes and scrabbled for cool distance from what was about to happen. She itched to return to the comfort of the basement lab, but that would mean crossing through the kitchen where he was probably pacing, making those calls he said he needed to make, if that wasn’t just a lie to give himself time to pack his things and make a quick exit. She would thank him, she thought, for the night’s pleasures, make it clear to him that she’d expected no more. Her body for reasons unknown had kicked into sexual overdrive, probably from too long an abstinence. She certainly wasn’t sorry. She only wished she could have pleased him as much as he’d pleased her.
Maybe she just wasn’t capable of that.
Then he shot through the kitchen door, came down the deck stairs, and made a beeline toward where she lounged in the grassy shade. He stood and crossed his arms, his thumbs beating a rhythm of his own devising upon the balled mass of his biceps. She looked up at those bulging biceps and every self-protective instinct inside her melted into pudding.
“I just got off the phone,” he said, without preamble, “with my mother, my two sisters, three brothers, and two of my college friends.”
“Oh?”
“I confirmed they were all in their homes or places of business and made sure they had no intent of traveling to Washington State.”
“Travel?” The soul of wit, she was.
“My friends have a bad habit of ‘dropping by’ unannounced,” he said. “John wasn’t the first to do so. It’s a conspiracy to keep an eye on me.”
She blinked at him, scrabbling to understand. “Do they have a reason to be worried?”
“No,” he said. “They’re old hens. Every last one of them. But I’ve had enough of meddling.”
Standing before her, haloed by the blue-white brightness of the sky, Logan looked so fierce and ravaged that her heart turned over. She wondered why so many people were worried about him, wondered if he’d ever tell her that story. She wanted to know it, wanted to know everything. Maybe she’d been in the sun too long. Or she was too unhinged from last night’s going-on. She didn’t know this man standing before her, she hadn’t earned the right to feel so strongly. She hadn’t earned the right to know his troubles, either.
“Jenny.” His chest expanded as he breathed in deep. “Answer me one question.”
“Anything.”
His knuckles turned white against his arms. “I think I know the answer to this,” he said, “but I need to hear you to say it aloud.”
“Okay?”
“What’s going to prevent the appearance in nine months of a squalling newborn with an aptitude for science?”
She caught her breath. Oh. My. God. He thought…he thought they’d had unprotected sex. And they had, really, in one sense. He hadn’t used a condom, which was always the best choice in a new relationship. And she’d said nothing to him about her own preparations in the whirl of their foreplay. He didn’t know her well enough to understand that she’d always made sure to protect herself against an unexpected pregnancy. Her own mother had seen to it that she was ready to make the responsible choice when she was still a teenager, drilling into her from the moment she’d become interested in boys about how an unplanned baby could derail a promising career, like Jenny’s birth had almost done to her mother’s.
“I damn well know better,” Logan said through a tight jaw, “but I had nothing in my mind last night but getting you into bed with me. You blew the top of my head off, Jenny. I didn’t even stop to think about this possibility until John started going on about Lily—”
“No worries,” she interrupted on a stutter, still caught on you blew the top of my head off, Jenny.
His gaze pierced through her. “Diaphragm, right?”
She nodded.
“Thank God you had sense.” He let his head fall back. “If there was a ripe ovum in your body and we didn’t stop to prevent the natural consequences, we’d be having a different kind of discussion right now.”
She nodded, flexing her fingers over the arms of the lounge chair, her toes curling under. Did he have condoms tucked away somewhere? Would they be giving it another go? You blew the top of my head off Jenny didn’t sound like a bad thing. I sounded like he wanted more. And now John was gone, they were alone, and this certainly wasn’t the conversation she’d feared when he said we need to talk.
“Wait,” he murmured, stilling. “You didn’t stop in the middle of everything last night. To put it in.”
A flush rose up her neck, a heat that had nothing to do with dappled sun through the spruce boughs.
“I did the responsible thing,” she said. “I prepared before our date.”
His face lit. For a moment, he didn’t look like the guy at the end of the bar who could beckon a woman with a flick of a brow.
“You can’t blame a girl for hoping.”
The corner of his mouth rose, then fell, then rose again. “You wanted last night to happen.”
“I hoped it would.”
“And I’ve wanted it since the first time I laid eyes on you.”
“Of course you did. I was buck naked.” She tucked her knees a little higher and dropped her voice. “I can be naked again, if you want.”
“Jenny,” he said, like he was choking on the word. “I have to be honest with you.”
Her mood dipped. “So this is the talking part.”
“Yeah,” he said, with a nodding frown. “Yes.”
A solid lump formed in her chest. She didn’t want honesty right now—not the kind she suspected he was about to dish out. She wanted sexual honesty. She wanted Logan to haul her off this lawn chair, drag her into his arms, and make her brain and body melt. That was the easier path.
“You’re John’s colleague,” he said, “and a hell of a woman.” A muscle flexed in his cheek. “You deserve to know what you’re getting into.”
“Your shorts, hopefully.”
He twisted his head and made another strangled sound. “You might not want that, after what I’m going to say.”
“Say it quick then,” she said. “Hedging hurts.”
“I don’t have a job.” He crossed his arms ev
en tighter. “I live on other people’s couches. My life is a mess, and I don’t know when things will improve.”
She shrugged. “You’re a medical doctor. You’ll find work.”
“There’s more to it.” He grunted. “I’m in a weird place.”
“Tell me.”
He dropped his head and stared at clover. The sun beat hot down upon them and the world was all brightness and light. She suspected the things he needed to say needed to be said under shadow. She suspected she hadn’t yet earned the right to hear the story he wasn’t sharing.
“What’s important,” he said, raising his chin to pin her with his clear green gaze, “right in this moment, is that you know that I’m in no state for a relationship. I can’t make any kind of commitment of any sort, beyond a few weeks.”
“Hell, Logan,” she said, her throat narrowing as her chest pinched. “Neither can I.”
She’d hardly managed to crawl back into her skin after her ex had dumped her. She’d barely dared to poke her head out of her lab in the intervening year. She wasn’t sure she’d ever again be ready to make any kind of commitment. Her heart was still tender. She couldn’t think beyond her next encounter with Logan, which her whole body was tingling for.
“So it’s understood,” he ventured, his voice low, “that we’re a compatible pair of adults willing to spend the next ten days enjoying some inventive, mutually pleasurable activities…right?”
A sexy shudder all but launched her off the lounge chair. “Works for me.”
He sucked air between his teeth. “Full consent?”
“Oh, yeah.” She swung her legs over the edge of the chair. “And I’m tired of waiting.”
Alone With You (Cabin Fever Series Book 1) Page 9