Logan's Way

by Lisa Ann Verge

  “I know that.” He heard her catch her breath. “I jusi can’t believe no other guy has noticed it before now.”

  A silence stretched between them. They were straying on dangerous territory. He felt her hesitation, a vibration in the air around them.

  “Whoever the bastard was,” Logan said, “he must have been missing a vital part of his anatomy.”

  “Well,” she said in a rush of words, “he certainly thought I was missing a vital part of mine.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He left me,” she said, “and told me I was the coldest bitch he’d ever known.”

  The words hung in the air, thick and heavy in the sudden silence. Logan glanced at her profile, saw her chin jutting, the patrician lines of her brow, her upturned nose, her trembling lower lip. She turned her face away, granting him only a quarter, but enough for him to see the quiver of her jaw, a strand of wet hair trailing from the corner of her mouth.

  “I can’t believe,” she said from behind her hand, “I just said that.”

  “Ginny—”

  “No, don’t, Logan. Don’t start with the platitudes. I deserved what he said to me. I hadn’t been the ideal girlfriend.” She hugged her elbows and flattened her back against the seat. “I mean, I was faithful. We lived together. We enjoyed each other’s company—”

  “You’re describing all the attributes of a cocker spaniel, Ginny.”

  “He wanted something more,” she continued. “Something I was incapable of giving him.”

  “He wasn’t the one.”

  “Not that I didn’t try. I tried. For two years I tried to give him what he wanted, but—Excuse me? What did you say?”

  “You had the wrong man, Ginny. If you’ve got to ‘try,’ then he’s not the right man. End of story.”

  She stared at him like a doe staring into headlights. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “It is simple.” He felt the flex of his own jaw. “At least, that’s what I’ve seen with my friends. My family.”

  Over and over again. Each one of them. Coming home from school, or from church, or from work, with a strange light in their eyes. Talk about “this girl” on his lips, “that guy” on hers. Weeks, or occasionally months later, they’d be engaged or even wed. He’d seen it happen over and over, jealously wondering when it was going to happen to him.

  You travel too much, they had said to him. When are you going to find a nice girl and settle down?

  The minute she walks into my life, guys. The minute she walks into my life.

  Suddenly, he was flush with the image of Ginny, naked as the day she was born, walking out of that shower.

  “Why, Logan,” she said, her voice soft. “You are a romantic.”

  “What?” He tried to shake the image free. “Me?”

  “You believe in love at first sight.”

  “Whoa, girl,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know a damn thing about it.”

  “Yes, you do. You don’t strike me as a monkish type.”

  “I’m not,” he retorted. “But I’ve been traveling so much these past years that I haven’t had time for more than the sort of relationship where the word love is never mentioned.”

  “Yet you believe in love at first sight.”

  “I was only expressing my observation of empirical evidence,” he said stiffly. “That’s how it worked for my best friend. For my siblings.”

  “And it’s how you expect it to happen for you.”

  He flexed his hands over the steering wheel, saw the knuckles whiten, set his eyes on the wavering white line in the middle of the road. The rain splashed against the windshield, the wipers squeaked it away. The engine 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 the beckoning warmth of her body. The surprising tenderness of her heart.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I suppose so. Someday.”

  “Someday,” she repeated. “Yes…” She stared out the window at the blur of the wet night. “I hope it happens like that for me, too. Someday.”

  He heard the wistful note in her voice, the almost childlike wonder. The man she’d loved must have been a dolt. Ginny did have a heart. A delicate one, easily bruised. Covered with a lifetime’s worth of emotional armor. Armor he wanted to tear off with raw male energy so he could take that heart in his two hands and hold it safe.

  The engine roared as he pressed down on the accelerator. Not now. He wasn’t ready for this now. His life was in chaos. He had nothing to give a woman, nothing but a few nights of heat and a lot of enthusiasm. Ginny Van Saun deserved much, much more.

  This “date” had been a mistake. The more he got to know the woman, the more the ice melted off her. The more he wanted to reach the molten heat of her… The more he wanted her. He’d spent the evening lightheaded, his loins engorged, erotic visions roiling through his mind. He didn’t know how much longer he could share a house with her without sharing her bed.

  Something had to give.

  6

  AS SOON AS LOGAN TOOK THE KEY out of the ignition, Ginny tumbled out of the truck. She couldn’t take another minute in the close space with that brooding hulk of a man. He exuded heat, power and sexuality in waves so powerful she couldn’t breathe. She needed fresh air, she needed to clear her head of too many fleshy images.

  She splashed down into a puddle, spraying her bare legs with mud. Rain pounded her head and shoulders, soaking her in an instant. Hunching over, she scrambled around the pickup and headed blindly for the deck.

  “Here.”

  Logan loomed out of the darkness and thrust his jacket over her head. Out of reflex, she clutched it against the roar of the rain and tried to ignore the fragrant warmth of it seeping around her from the brushed cotton inside. She followed him up the stairs. He snatched the key out of the turtle near the geraniums and fumbled with the lock. He thrust the door open and they both burst inside.

  Ginny slipped his coat off her head and flicked the light switch. She glanced up at the fluorescent bulb as nothing happened.

  She flicked it again.

  “Power’s out,” he said, his deep voice rumbling in the darkness. “I noticed it while we were driving. For the past mile or so, none of the houses have lights on.”

  “Oh.”

  “There are candles in the drawer by the fridge. Stay here—I’ll get them.”

  He moved into the darkness. She pulled off one of her sandals, smearing her fingers with grit and mud. She toed off the other one and pushed them to the side of the mat. She heard him yanking open drawers, then fumbling amid the clanking 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 on. She rubbed her hands free of grit under the cool stream of water. By the flickering light, she noticed the array of candle nubs rolling on the counter as he set them up and lit them, one by one.

  She murmured, “Lights go out often around here?”

  “Every time there’s a decent storm,” he said. “It’s an old transducer or something.”

  “No flashlights?”

  “Can’t keep them in batteries.”

  She jerked the faucet off and shook her wet hands. An awkward silence filled the room, 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 dark hair into the hot wax.

  He lit the last of the candle stubs and then blew out the match. A curl of blue smoke rose, hazing between them. He raised his lashes and looked straight at her.

  “Who needs flashlights,” he said in a voice that made her skin tingle. “Candles are much more romantic.”

  She froze, her flimsy skirt pasted to her legs, her cotton shirt heavy and clinging to the fullness of her breasts. She could only see his eyes—those fierce green eyes. The rest of him was an outline of
a shadow against the gloom. Standing here wet, but fully clothed, she felt as naked as that day he’d seen her damp from the shower.

  Ginny expected the lights to buzz on, the coffeemaker to burble, the old electric mixer to spark up and whir. If there were a way to tap into the electricity zapping between them, there’d be no need for a new transducer in this neighborhood.

  “It’s customary,” he said, his voice husky and close enough that she could feel his breath on her cheek, “for a man to get a good-night kiss after a date.”

  “Logan…”

  “I’ve decided we should stop pretending.” His wel khakis brushed her wet skirt; his chest brushed the hardening nubs of her breasts. “Pretending,” he continued huskily, “that we don’t want each other.”

  She couldn’t seem to find her tongue, to make it work, to protest as she should. He was too close. His lips hovered a kiss away from hers, his large body loomed warm against her. She wanted this. The knowledge was beyond question. She wanted to lick the rain off his chest, feel the softness of hair against her tongue.

  “I want you, Ginny.”

  His words rang hushed in the flickering light of the candles. Phantom words, phantom lover, veiled by the night. She made a sound. She didn’t mean to. It slipped through her lips, half moan, half protest. The heat rose between their bodies like steam.

  “I’ve wanted you,” he continued, “since the day I walked in on you and saw you as naked as the day you were born.”

  She met his eyes, searched them as her throat closed up on her. His eyes blazed with naked passion. This was where she pushed him away, she thought. This was when she told him she wanted nothing to do with him. Ginny Van Saun never “gave out” on the first date. She rarely gave out at all. Certainly not to a man she had nothing in common with; a man who made it quite clear his intentions were purely physical. Such lusty displays used to always put her off. Control yourself, she’d think, feeling a jolt of scorn at a date grown too randy. Control yourself, she’d think as her heart closed up.

  Her heart wasn’t closing up now. No, at the sight of Logan standing before her, in the heated glow of his eyes, amid the echo of the bald, honest passion of his words, she felt her heart opening, unfurling…she felt lightning striking twice.

  “This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, Ginny,” he said, his lips rolling over her name. “All I know is that I want you naked on my bed.” He curled one work-hardened hand around her waist and thrust the other into the wet tangle of her hair. “I want to thrust myself deep inside you. I want to make you moan.”

  A tremor rippled through her with all the might of an earthquake, shattering her inhibitions, settling with molten liquid heat between her legs. He seized her close, so close she felt the breath of his words on her mouth.

  “You want it, too, Red.” He spoke in a strained whisper. “I can feel how much you want it. Feel how much I want it.”

  He pressed his erection against her. The thin layers of cotton separating their skins couldn’t muffle the feel of him—the long, hard ridge, the indentation at the tip—the throbbing strain of it. Her legs slipped open, one of his thighs slipped between. He pressed up against her loins.

  She scraped the fibers of his shirt with her fingernails. She told herself that all he wanted was to ease that pressure in his loins, she was just a convenience, nothing more. But it didn’t matter, for she felt the pressure, too. She felt the heat and the moistness, the engorged sensitivity of her tissues—now masterfully being manipulated by the subtle thrust and scrape of his thigh.

  “Damn it, Ginny—”

  He made a sound. A deep-throated grunt of a sound, then claimed her lips in a kiss.

  She slapped her hands open against his chest. Out of reflex, out of instinct, in an effort to hold on to something as the world slipped off its axis and spun wildly through the cosmos. Logan was solid, Logan was strong—and Logan kept on kissing her though she was sure the kitchen floor had just given out beneath them. Amid the swirling muddle of her mind came one clear thought: I want him and he wants me—we can have each other.

  His flat nipples beaded under the wet shirt; his heart throbbed under her palms. He smelled like rain. Crisp and clean and hot-wet. The edge of the counter cut into her hip. Her body swayed over the sink; rainwater dripped from her hair on the chrome. The rain roared outside; the raindrops beat a rhythm against the windowpane. Her heart raced, stumbled, and then raced anew. She slanted her face against his.

  He shifted and pushed his thigh hard between her legs. Her leg slipped up, over his hip, and she was open to him. He moved his leg in a way that made her cry out, then he sucked her mouth open and claimed her tongue.

  She stopped thinking. There would be time enough tomorrow to analyze her behavior. There would be time enough to wonder how a frigid, heartless professor who’d never found any sexual pleasure with a man would suddenly be moist and hot and eager and willing with this stranger. She couldn’t begin to understand it now, her brain was so fogged with desire for Logan. So…she let herself go.

  She scraped her hands up past his shoulders and wound them around his neck. She explored his tongue in her mouth, she reveled in the rumbling music rising from his chest. His lips broke from hers, trailed wet kisses down her jaw. He plundered the delicate hollow beneath her earlobe, traced the quiver of her throat, lower, to where he’d seized her breasts with eager hands and pressed them up, to where her nipples strained against the damp cotton sweater.

  Her head fell back. He closed his mouth around one of the buds, heating the tender flesh with his breath through cotton knit and satin bra. She clutched his head in her hands, her voice constricted with passion. “Logan…”

  He stopped abruptly. Yanked his face off the pillow of her breasts. Dragged himself up and seized her head still.

  “Look at me, damn it.”

  She blinked and stared at him, her eyes heavy-lidded, through the flickering light of the candles.

  He hissed a breath between his teeth and his eyes widened. “Look at you,” he said. His hand tightened on her hair. “You’re supposed to push me away, Ginny. Go all cold or something.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  The words came out breathy, uneven, but as sure in conviction as if she’d stated that the world was round.

  He shook his head, cast his gaze over her features from her forehead to her throat. “You were supposed to turn into the ice queen, Ginny, not this hot sexy thing.”

  Something seemed to have short-circuited her brain functions, because she couldn’t seem to put words together—she couldn’t give a darn right now that she was leaning back over the counter with a virile stranger pressing against her, his intentions hard and obvious. Her body felt alternately hot and cold, but mostly hot—from the sparks that tingled across her breasts to the honeyed liquid heat pooling between her legs.

  She was no ice queen, not tonight; she knew thai with a surety that came from some previously unknown instinct. She wanted Logan in the most basic, primitive way. She didn’t want to think beyond that.

  “I’m beyond the point of conscience, Ginny, so don’t count on my being a gentleman anymore. I’m about to drag you to my bed.”

  “Oh,” she said, breathlessly. “Oh…okay.”

  He swore then. “Push me away. Tell me how different we are.”

  “We should stop pretending,” she said in a voice she did not recognize as her own, “that we don’t want each other.”

  His pupils contracted to pinpoints and his face went tight. Ginny sucked in a breath that trembled all the way to the deepest part of her lungs, and she felt the strangest surge of sensation…the strangest surge of raw female power.

  “I want you, Logan,” she continued, her voice coming hoarse through her tightening throat. “I want to feel you deep inside me. Now.”

  THE MOMENT THE WORDS LEFT her lips, Logan seized her hand, swiveled on one foot and dragged her out of the kitchen. He strode through the darkened living room, yanking her behind
him. She stumbled over the corner of the couch, bumped her shoulder in the hallway, let her fingernails scrape the wall while he pulled her along—until he kneed open his bedroom door and drew her inside.

  Without the candles it was as dark as pitch. A flash of lightning speared rows of silver light through the blinds, illuminating a computer sitting on a desk, a smear of papers and—dominating the room—a rumpled, unmade bed.

  He pulled her against him. Claimed her mouth in one sure, hungry kiss. Walked her backward until the bed bumped against the back of her knees.

  For a brief flicker of a moment, panic fluttered in her belly. It felt, oddly, like virgin panic. For this was where it was going to happen. On this bed, with this man. It wasn’t her first time sleeping with a man, but it felt like it. She trembled like a young woman. She wanted him as if she’d never had a man before, as if she’d never been touched before.

  She responded to the subtle pressure of Logan’s body; she fell back upon the twisted sheets. The mattress bounced her up, then let her settle. She let her arms fall above her head. The stretch lifted her breasts. She waited for Logan’s body to fall upon hers—she couldn’t see him in the darkness. She arched, wanting him with growing urgency.

  Lightning flashed again, illuminating the ripple of muscles of his bare shoulders as he wrestled his shirt off and tossed it away, then the light faded, leaving them in darkness again. She heard the clink of a belt buckle, the whir of a zipper, the anxious rustle of clothes being kicked off. She raised herself up on her elbows, silently begging for the lightning to flash anew.

  “Take off your clothes, Ginny.”

  She sat up, crossed her arms, seized the hem of her cotton sweater and yanked it over her head. Her hain swung out of the neckline and brushed her bare shoulders. She tossed the damp sweater away; it fell with a thump to the floor. She reached back, unhooked her bra, set her breasts free of the underwire. The cool air licked her skin.

  As she struggled with the tiny buttons that fastened the whole length of one side of her skirt, the lightning flashed again. She was acutely aware of the light on her bare skin, illuminating the curve and sway of her breasts.