“I’m great, Laurie. How are you?” He sounded pleasantly surprised to hear from her.
“I’m great too.” There had to be a way to do this that didn’t feel so awkward. “Listen, remember Logan?”
“Sure I do.”
“He’s asked me if I’ll run down to a work party with him. Apparently I went to college with one of his new coworkers, and he thought I’d like to get reconnected. And I remembered how sweet you were to ask me about your date with Kelly, and I just wondered . . .”
Brennan chuckled. “Go and have a great time. But don’t I get a flower?”
“I’m sorry—I wasn’t able to stop at the florist. A rain check?”
“Okay. But I’ll hold you to it.”
That had gone a whole lot better than Laurie expected. Another unexpected surprise came when the doorbell rang and she answered to see Logan on the other side.
“Hi,” he said, breathtaking in a dark suit with a navy tie. “Hope you don’t mind, but the car I sent to fetch you was mine.”
“So I was talking to you while you drove? Don’t you know you’re not supposed to drive and talk at the same time? And what if I’d said no?”
“I would have taken Eddie. We’re practically engaged, you know.” He looked her up and down, his eyes coming right back to her face—just like they should—and he gave an appreciative whistle. “You look amazing.”
“My roommates had fun playing fairy godmother. Oh, hang on—you need to meet them.” She stepped back and motioned for him to come inside, where her friends were trying to check him out without being too obvious about it. “Morgan, Regan, Cara, this is Logan.”
“Hi,” the girls chorused. As soon as Logan turned back to the door, Cara made fanning motions with her hand, and Laurie nodded her agreement.
They climbed into Logan’s car and he steered them to the south. “So, who’s the guy from your work who says he knows me?” Laurie asked.
“I tried to remember after I talked to you, and now I can’t recall his name. He just started yesterday, so I don’t know him very well yet. He seems like a nice guy, though.”
“What does he look like?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How can you not know?”
Logan chuckled. “I’m a guy. Guys don’t pay much attention to what other guys look like. He was average height, average build, and I think his hair was brown. See? Not very helpful, huh?”
“Oh, no, that’s very helpful. You’ve narrowed it down to about twenty of the guys I knew in college.” She shook her head. Were all guys really this clueless?
When they pulled up in front of Logan’s building—well, the building where Logan worked—Laurie was suitably impressed. It was a tall brass-and-glass structure with the name of his firm etched in gold on the door. He escorted her in and led her to the large room where the party was being held, and then went over to the bar to get her the glass of Sprite she asked for.
Everyone there looked rich, intelligent, and articulate. They mingled with various groups around the room, never staying in one spot too long, speaking to each other like old friends at a sorority party, air-kissing and coming across totally fake. Laurie couldn’t help but feel amused. Who were they trying to kid, and what were they trying to accomplish? And was there some other law firm having a party tonight that they could go to instead?
“Laurie Fletcher. It’s so good to see you.”
Without turning around, she knew the voice. She closed her eyes, willing the stab of pain that shot through her stomach to go away. How long could she stand here, pretending this wasn’t really happening? That if she just kept her eyes closed long enough, he’d disappear?
“Laurie?”
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes to see that he had moved to stand in front of her, all six feet two inches of him. “Hello, Chad. It’s nice to see you again.” Liar, liar, pants on fire. She resisted the urge to reach up and check her nose for a few extra inches.
“You look amazing. But then again, you always did.” Chad held out his hand and she took it, giving him a cold-fish handshake, a lot more than he deserved. “How’s life treating you there in Quaking Aspen?”
“That’s Aspen Ridge, and things are good. They’re very good.”
Logan walked up then, holding Laurie’s glass of Sprite and something dark and bubbly for himself—it looked like Coke. “I see you found Laurie,” he said to Chad.
“Yes, he did. Chad and I go way back,” Laurie said, providing his name so Logan wouldn’t have to ask it. She could be gracious, even though every cell in her body wanted to run for the door and into the night.
“I heard you’re now working in a bridal store,” Chad said.
“I am, and I’ll be taking over ownership in a couple of years.” Why had she felt the need to say that? It was none of his business, but she couldn’t resist the urge to show him that she really was doing well, that she wasn’t someone to be pitied.
“I didn’t know that,” Logan said, turning to her with surprise on his face. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. I didn’t really have time to tell you,” she said, feeling a little bit lame. Should she have told him? What, was he claiming all information pertaining to her life just because he bought her a taco salad?
“Well, if anyone could make a go of something like that, it would be our Laurie here.” Chad put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. She immediately stiffened and would have elbowed him in the stomach if it hadn’t been for the fact that she didn’t want to cause a scene at this very high-class party. She also caught a strong whiff of alcohol on his breath—how many glasses of whatever-that-was had he had before she got there?
“Laurie, I’d like to introduce you to my boss. Excuse us, Chad.” Logan took Laurie by the hand and steered her to the other side of the room. She couldn’t have been more relieved to get out from Chad’s over-exuberant embrace. “Mr. Clements, I’d like you to meet Laurie Fletcher. She manages a very successful bridal shop in Aspen Ridge.”
The man in front of her was in his early sixties, with white hair and a small moustache. He reminded her only slightly of Melvin—his eyes weren’t twinkly, and the lines around his eyes spoke of years of hard work rather than laughter. “I’m glad you were able to join us tonight, Miss Fletcher. If Logan here had shown up with his sister one more time, we were going to make him sign up for an online dating service.”
“So, I’m saving you from a fate worse than death?” Laurie turned to Logan with a smile on her lips.
“Yes, something like that.”
“I have a quick question for you before you wander off with your date, Logan. What can you tell me about the injunction from yesterday? I saw the memo, but it wasn’t entirely clear.”
While they were chatting, Laurie stepped off to the side and noticed a chocolate fountain. She didn’t think it was appropriate for her to overhear whatever they were discussing, and she could certainly think of worse ways to kill a little time. She picked up a small plate and was working her way around the dessert table, trying to decide between the brownies and the cake—so she got both—when she heard Chad’s voice again.
“Yeah, she tried to hack it in law school, but she never really had the chops for it. I bailed her out on so many tests, I lost count. And now she’s running a wedding dress store or something in that backwater town—it’s sad, really.”
“I guess no girl could recover from being left behind by you,” a girl’s voice murmured flirtatiously.
Laurie took a deep breath. She seemed to be doing a lot of that lately—her yoga instructor would be proud. She would let this go—Chad would not ruin this perfectly lovely evening for her. As she reached out for a napkin, she heard even more.
“She even told everyone that she planned to take the head of the class. Can you believe that? She was so dumb, she couldn’t even take the head of a pin.”
Okay, that was enough. No human being should be exp
ected to remain calm under that kind of attack. Laurie slowly set her plate down on the table and rounded the corner to find Chad leaning up against the wall, talking to an obviously captive group of women who were just as mesmerized by him as she once was. She considered just walking away, trying one last time to be the better person, but then Chad glanced up and caught sight of her.
“Laurie! We were just talking about you.”
“So I gathered. But I can’t imagine why.”
“You’ll have to forgive us,” one of the girls said. “We’re naturally curious about anyone Logan would bring to this event. He’s so quiet about his personal life.”
“And Chad isn’t,” Laurie remarked. Chills ran down her arms, but instead of making her shiver, she could feel steel enter her soul. “Dear Chad, who knows so much about me and could always read me like a book. It’s such a good thing he was there to bail me out of all those tests. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, Laurie,” Chad said, his face going a little pink.
“Oh, but I’m sure you did. And it’s all right. You can remember the past any way you like.” She picked up a glass of something from off a nearby table—she didn’t even know what it was, but that wasn’t important. “And I’ll remember tonight however I like.” She went up on tiptoe and poured the liquid all over his head while he spluttered.
She stepped back out to the main party area and looked around for Logan. He was still talking to his boss. She crossed the carpet in a few determined strides. “Excuse me, please, gentlemen. Logan, I’m ready to go home.”
“Okay, we’ll go in a second.”
“No, I’m ready to go now.” She kept her voice calm, but it was firm. She’d had all of this “party” she could take.
Logan turned and met her eyes. She didn’t know what he could see when he looked at her, but he nodded slightly in understanding. “All right. Let’s go.”
“I wasn’t done talking to you,” Mr. Clements said.
“I’ll be in early tomorrow and we can finish up then. Good night, Mr. Clements. This was quite the shindig.” Logan tucked Laurie’s arm through his as they walked toward the door. On the way, they passed Chad by the refreshment table, using a napkin to dry his hair. “What on earth . . .”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
They’d left the Denver city limits before Logan finally broke the silence. “You said you’d tell me a story.”
Laurie chuckled. “Which story would you like—the one about the starry-eyed girl who headed off to Harvard Law School on a full-ride scholarship and gave it all up because of a boy? Or the story of why Chad’s hair was suddenly so wet?”
“I get the feeling they’re one and the same—just different chapters.”
“You would be right.” She settled into her seat, wondering if she was doing the right thing by opening up to him. He deserved some sort of explanation, at least, and she could feel her way through how much she wanted to say and stop talking if she felt uncomfortable. “I met Chad a week after I started at Harvard. He was something else. He had this charisma that just pulled people toward him—girls especially. When I first saw him, he was standing out on a patch of grass under a tree, with girls all around him. I was coming down the sidewalk, and he looked right at me, cut through those girls, and walked me to my next class. I was blown away by that. Who passes up ten girls just for me? I mean, I was pretty cute in college, but still.
“He asked me out, and we dated pretty steadily from then on. But I started to notice some odd things—he’d come over and wait for me to finish doing my hair or something, and later I’d find that my study notes were all out of order, like someone had been pawing through them. I was so smitten that I couldn’t even see what was going on right under my nose.”
Laurie paused and stared out the window. Talking about it brought up all her pain, but it also made her feel like an idiot. How had she been so stupid? How had she let Chad use her like that? At least Logan wasn’t interrupting. It allowed her to tell her story without feeling rushed or judged.
“Well, then everything just blew up. I got called in to the office and asked about a paper I’d written. Seems that Chad had turned in almost that exact same paper, and they wanted to know who had cheated off whom. Of course I told them it was my original work and that I hadn’t cheated, but Chad said the same thing. They called us into a room together to talk things out, and Chad stood up and gave this long speech about how I’d been stalking him all year and never left him alone, hanging out at his apartment even when he wasn’t there and asking his roommates all kinds of questions about him—stuff like that. He said I’d show up whenever he had a date with another girl and harass her until she left. He made up this whole string of lies and said that he wasn’t surprised that I’d stolen his paper—it was exactly the kind of thing I would do.”
Laurie got up the courage to glance over at Logan. His eyes were fixed on the road, which was good, because he was driving and all, but she wished she could see the expression in them. What was he thinking of her right now?
“So they called in a bunch of witnesses, and he, of course, got all his friends to come in and tell lies about me. I brought in my roommates, classmates—anyone I could think of to back me up. In the end, they decided to chalk everything up to a romantic spat, which was totally unfair, and they let us both off the hook if we’d write another paper. We each wrote one, we each turned it in, and that was supposed to be that. But it wasn’t. I was told over and over again by just about everyone that if I expected to go into the law, I’d have to get used to stuff like that because the law is full of manipulation, deceit, and doing whatever it takes to win. I decided that wasn’t the way I wanted to live my life, and so I left law school.”
Logan didn’t say anything. Instead, he slowed the car down and pulled off onto an extra-wide shoulder that let them look out across the valley and see the stars up above and the twinkling lights of houses below. Some of the lights came from cabins tucked in the trees, and they reminded Laurie of lightning bugs she’d seen back east, one of the only pleasant memories she had of that time.
Logan cut the engine and they sat there for a minute, silent. Laurie wished he’d say something and end the suspense. The muscles in his jaw were tense, so she knew he was fighting some kind of emotion, but she didn’t know what. Only her roommates and Millie knew what had happened—she didn’t open up like that to just anyone, and she’d taken a huge risk in telling Logan. If he’d just say something, anything . . .
Finally, Logan reached out and took her hand. She was too surprised to resist. “You would have been an amazing lawyer,” he said at last, “but you’re an even more amazing human being.”
Laurie shifted in her seat a little bit so she could see him better, but she didn’t pull her hand out of his. “My uncle thought I was a big ol’ quitter, said it wasn’t like me to let a boy ruin my whole career. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just Chad. It was the whole cutthroat atmosphere. The competition, even just in class. It wasn’t me.”
“You’re not a quitter.” Logan’s voice had taken on a rough edge. “You knew what you wanted out of your life, and you knew what you had to do in order to get it. I admire that, Laurie. I admire that a lot.” He began stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. “I really enjoy what I do, most of the time, but there are days when I feel like I’m giving away flecks of my soul in order to do it. The law is a beautiful thing and we need to have it, but there are games and there is corruption, and you run into those people who have decided that they’ll win at any cost. And you’re right—that’s not you. That could never be you.”
“How do you know so much about me? We’ve just met,” Laurie said, trying to lighten the heavy mood a little bit.
“You asked me why I keep coming back. You intrigue me, Laurie. There’s something about you . . . and I think I figured out what it is. I spend all my time navigating between the various shades of gray,
and you are white. You just are. You know where you stand, your feet are firmly planted, and there’s no swaying you. I like that. Even when you’re telling me where to go.”
She laughed. “You like me telling you off?”
“I like it because I deserve it and you say so.” He turned and met her eyes for the first time since they’d gotten in the car. “Don’t ever change who you are, Laurie. Don’t let life drum that out of you.”
All too soon, he let go of her hand and started the engine again. The rest of the drive to Aspen Ridge was silent, but this time, it was the good kind of silent, the kind that lets you think and analyze and settle into yourself. When Logan walked her to the door, he took her hand again and squeezed it. “Good night,” he said softly, and then stood there and waited until she’d let herself inside.
Cara was waiting up for her when she walked into the living room. “How was your night?” she asked.
“It was . . . confusing,” Laurie answered. “I’ll give a full report tomorrow—right now, I just need to go to bed. I’m wiped out.”
“Okay. Good night.”
As Laurie lay in the darkness, she thought back on her little altercation with Chad. She smiled when she recalled pouring the drink on his head—that had been a lot more fun than she wanted to admit. But then her thoughts rolled forward and she fell asleep remembering Logan and the look in his eyes when he said good night. She’d seen respect in his expression, and that meant more to her than anything Chad could ever say or do.
Chapter Twelve
“Chad? Stupid jerk from law school Chad?” Morgan’s mouth fell open. She’d heard the whole story not long after it happened, and she probably remembered scraping Laurie up off the cement over the weeks that followed.
“Yeah. Can you believe that?” Laurie quickly told her incredulous roommates the rest of what had happened the night before, including the fact that she’d opened up to Logan. “I didn’t tell him everything, though,” she said.
“What didn’t you tell him?” Cara asked.
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