With her hand on the knob, she took a deep breath and exhaled in hopes that she would at least appear calm. Then she opened the door, grateful that her vague request that Hadley watch Tia and send Logan to the apartment had been met.
Logan didn’t seem happy to be there, though. His handsome face was drawn, he looked more tired close-up than when she saw him sitting on the edge of the deck, and he didn’t spare her more than a split-second glance before his eyes went to the suitcases and boxes beside the door—as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her…
“Do you need help getting this stuff to your car?” he asked, apparently guessing that that was why she’d asked him to come.
“I hope not,” Meg said softly. Some of her courage was waning but she pushed through and added, “I was hoping maybe we could talk—on a scale of one to ten with ten being that you’d like to see me hung by my thumbs from the barn roof, how mad would you say you are at me?”
As if he were assessing how best to haul her things out of there, he still hadn’t let his gaze move away from them. But now he did, slowly pivoting his handsome head in her direction and raising his hands to his hips.
And for the first few moments that his pale blue eyes were on her, she thought that if there had been a fifteen on her mad-scale he would have chosen that.
But then he shook his head and said, “If this is some closure exercise to begin the healing or for some other psycho-babble reason, skip it.”
Or maybe he would choose seventeen…
“That isn’t what this is,” Meg said, fearing more and more that she’d done irreversible damage.
“Then what is it?” he demanded.
“Maybe you could come all the way in and close the door?” she suggested since he had yet to cross the threshold.
He seemed disinclined to do that but after a moment he did it anyway, shutting the door and then leaning back against it, this time crossing his arms over his broad chest.
Confronted with Logan’s obvious—and understandable—anger with her, Meg wasn’t sure what the best way to proceed might be. And she was too nervous for any of her work skills to kick in. Plus she was beginning to think that if this endeavor was going to blow up in her face she’d rather get to that part fast, so she said, “I don’t want to go…”
He arched an eyebrow at her. “I’m not the one who said you had to.”
“I know. But…” There was just no easy way to eat crow…
“I was wrong,” Meg finally blurted out. “I was wrong and you were right, and I was stupid and pigheaded and stubborn and closed-off and blind and—”
“Wow,” he said as the other eyebrow shot up, joining the first one. “And here I just thought you were scared.”
“That, too,” she confessed, feeling slightly better because while he might have said that with some resigned acceptance, he hadn’t said it with any malice.
“I know a lot in theory,” she continued then. “And I’m not saying any of it is worthless or unfounded or should be ignored because most of the time it has merit, but—”
“You’re talking like a textbook—why don’t you just relax and tell me what you have to say?” he said as if he were attempting to calm her down.
But his tone was warmer than it had been, his expression wasn’t as forbidding, and that helped.
“Sometimes you have to throw the book out the window,” Meg said. “Sometimes no matter how fast it’s happened, or under what kind of circumstances, or even if the timing isn’t perfect—” she shrugged, “—it really is just the feelings that have to rule because the feelings are a six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room and they won’t let you get past them.”
And her eyes were welling up again for no reason she could fathom, and she was blinking like crazy to keep from crying again.
Which was when Logan pushed off the door and came to wrap his arms around her, to pull her against him and hold her head to his chest with one of those big hands that felt so, so good…
He dropped his forehead to the top of her head then and said in a quiet, emotional voice of his own, “On a scale of one to ten with ten being petrified, how afraid was I that you were never going to realize that?”
Meg laughed and that was what actually kept her from crying again. “So I wasn’t the only one scared?”
“Of different things, but yeah, you weren’t the only one scared.”
“I’m sorry,” she said then, her own arms around him, her hands splayed against that magnificent back. “It wasn’t that you weren’t what I wanted all along. It wasn’t that being a mom to Tia wasn’t what I wanted all along. It was just that I thought—”
“I know what you thought and it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t think it anymore.”
Meg let go of him enough to veer backward slightly, to peer up at him. “I still think it,” she admitted with a laugh. “It just doesn’t change what I want and what I want is—”
“Me,” he said with so much cocksureness that it made her laugh again.
But her heart was too full and she was too relieved that this was working out the way it was to do anything but agree with him and feed his show of ego. “Yes, what I want is you.”
“More than your career?” he asked then, testing.
“More than my career in Denver,” she qualified.
She’d thought about that part of this while she’d waited for him, and she’d admitted to herself that she didn’t really care if she returned to her work at the hospital, that maybe the time for a change had come even before this and that that was why she’d needed to get away this summer. Which she told Logan now.
“I think I can still work here, though—there’s the school, the hospital, there’s the home for disturbed kids that’s reopened. I think that offering my services on a case-by-case basis at any one of those will keep me busy enough. But not too busy…”
Logan smiled down at her, warmly, softly now. “I love you, Meg,” he said for the first time.
“I love you, too,” she could respond without a single doubt.
“And that’s all that matters.”
“Maybe sometimes it is,” she conceded.
He kissed her then, his mouth coming to hers in a deep, deep kiss right from the start that bridged the gap that had separated them and reconnected them on a whole new level.
A deep, deep kiss that didn’t have far to go to ignite passion in them both.
Logan’s hands rose into her hair, holding her head to that kiss as his mouth opened over hers and his tongue rekindled some hotter, sexier things. Things that Meg welcomed and helped to flourish.
And then clothes began to come off and hands and mouths found unveiled parts of each other’s bodies that they’d learned well during their one night together, recalling what each of them liked, reawakening hunger and need in the blink of an eye.
Turning round and round, they crossed the short distance to the bed Meg had made and, naked by the time they reached it, Logan eased her down onto the quilt.
Maybe the thought that this might not have ever happened again spurred them on, but little more was called for before Logan found his way into Meg, before he took them both to a simultaneous peak that, when it subsided, had sapped every last drop of energy from them both.
Lying in those arms she knew she would have missed forever, Meg wilted and willingly went along when he rolled to his back and took her with him to lie on top of him, his chest her pillow.
“Go ahead, try and live without that!” he challenged then, once again cocky.
“Forget it, you’re mine from here on, anytime I say,” Meg countered the same way.
Logan laughed, a low, raspy sound that rumbled beneath her. “I’m just gonna be your sex slave?”
“Maybe.”
“Uh-uh,” he decreed. “I’m making an honest woman out of you whether you like it or not. I need a wife, my daughter needs a mother—”
Tia…
“Did you tell her I was leaving?” Meg asked, h
er alarm instantly turning off the tone of teasing.
“No,” Logan answered. “I couldn’t. I could hardly think of it myself, let alone tell anybody.”
“Even Hadley?”
“Even Hadley. I figured that until you actually drove off, I wasn’t saying anything.”
Relieved, Meg returned to their teasing. “You just didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”
“I didn’t think I’d be able to stand it if you did,” he answered quietly, seriously. Then, in a lighter note, he said, “Now tell me you’ll marry me even though it might not be psychologically sound.”
Meg laughed. “I’ll marry you, even though you may not be psychologically sound,” she teased.
“Better strong of body than mind,” he joked in return, holding her tighter and flexing against her.
Still, regardless of how strong of body he was, their recent stress and lack of sleep was catching up with them both.
“What do you say we have a nap and then go tell Tia and Hadley what’s going on?” Logan suggested then.
“I say yes,” Meg agreed.
Logan rolled a half roll so that they were on their sides, his arms making sure she didn’t get away from him, his chin resting on her head.
“I love you, Meg,” he said again, as if he just wanted to.
“I love you, too, Logan,” she whispered back.
As she listened to the steady beat of his heart, the way his breathing was growing slower, she was thinking of the days, the weeks, the years to come. Of being his wife and Tia’s mom.
And a rush of happiness washed all through her to let her know as surely as she knew her name that allowing her feelings for Logan, for Tia, to be her guiding light had been exactly the right way to go.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5214-5
MARRYING THE NORTHBRIDGE NANNY
Copyright © 2010 by Victoria Pade
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**Northbridge Nuptials
‡‡Most Likely To…
¤Family Business
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¶Montana Mavericks: Striking It Rich
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†Back in Business
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‡The Foleys and the McCords
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Marrying the Northbridge Nanny Page 17