Ms. Starr’s Most Inconvenient Change of Heart (A Raven's Run Romantic Mystery Book 1)

by Dorothy St. James

  “This joker busted down your door,” Rafe said, gesturing with his elbow toward Jason. “I told him to knock. But he’s lost his damned mind.” Rafe lifted his head. He then turned to say to Jason, “You’re lucky you’re not dead right now. I hope you know that.”

  “You’re lucky to still be breathing too, Rafe,” Logan growled. His gun, still raised, shifted from one man to the other.

  Rafe raised his head a bit more and sheepishly smiled at his friend. “Sorry, bro. I held him off as long as I could. He wanted to follow you here last night. I knew that would be a mistake.” His smile stretched into a true rakish grin as his gaze turned my way. “So, things between you and your ex are...sorted?”

  Logan glanced over his shoulder to look at me. One corner of his tight lips inched up. “You could say that,” he said. “But if you don’t get out of my bedroom right now, I will shoot the both of you. I’ll come out to the living room in a few minutes. And Rafe, put yourself to use out there and get some coffee brewing.”

  Rafe jumped up from the rug. “Only if you promise to get some clothes on, for fuck’s sake.”

  “NO, NO, NO,” I SAID as I tugged on the black T-shirt I’d fished out of Logan’s dresser. I’d arrived wearing my wedding dress, and I wasn’t about to don that ripped and tattered reminder of my bad decisions. “I’m not staying locked away in the bedroom like some—like some...ill-behaved pet.”

  He paused in buttoning the fly on his jeans and looked at me. His eyes softened. “I simply thought you might need some sleep. We didn’t get much of it last night.”

  My cheeks heated. “Please. Do you really think I could lounge in the bed after that dramatic wakeup call? I’m up. I’m awake. And I want to hear for myself what’s going on. Plus, I could sure use some of that coffee Rafe’s brewing.” I started to open more drawers. “Where do you keep your shorts or sweatpants?”

  He disappeared into his walk-in closet and returned with a neatly folded pair of gray sweatpants. When he carried them to me our lips instinctively came together. We feasted on each other as if we’d been starving for years. I suppose in a way, we had. My hands explored his chest. The feel of his muscles under rough skin made my body feel overheated.

  We might have tumbled back into the bed if not for the sound of glass shattering in the other room. A moment later, Rafe called out, “Sorry! I’ll replace that.”

  Logan peeled his lips from mine. He sighed. “We’d better get out there before Rafe breaks anything else.”

  Another glass shattered.

  Another shouted, “Whoops. Sorry!”

  “Too late,” I said. “He must really be a disaster in the kitchen.”

  “He’s doing it on purpose,” Logan grumbled as he donned a white tee. “He’s trying to get me out of the bedroom faster.”

  I pulled on his sweatpants. Even though I had to pull and pull the strings at the waist and tie them a couple of times in order to keep them from sliding off, the sweatpants were soft and worn and smelled faintly of him. Feeling them brush against my legs made my cheeks heat again. But we didn’t have time to relive any of the glorious moments we’d enjoyed last night. We needed to get into the other room to find out what had driven Rafe and Jason to breaking into Logan’s apartment.

  Rafe handed me the first mug of coffee, bless him. The strong caffeinated drink tasted delicious. I cradled the mug in my hands and sipped, enjoying the crisp bright flavor of the freshly ground beans. My gaze kept drifting between Logan—gracious, he was handsome—and the stunning view of the morning breaking outside. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so utterly satisfied.

  “Sam? Sam?” Jason sounded frustrated.

  “Um...what?”

  Apparently, Jason had asked me a question. Multiple times.

  “How are we going to stop this?” he ground out the question.

  “How are we going to stop what? And why are you asking me?” I glanced around to find everyone in the room staring at me. Rafe had his head tilted to one side as if surprised by my reaction. Logan shrugged.

  “Why am I asking you? Rafe? You said she’d know,” Jason screeched.

  “We all thought she would,” Rafe said still giving me that quizzical look.

  Jason swore loudly as he tossed his arms in the air in defeat.

  “This is about the virus,” Logan explained. He didn’t sound at all rattled by Jason’s outburst or his crazy assertion that I had any clue about what to do about stopping it from activating. I knew how to put new books into a database at the library and could find just about anything a patron could ask on the Internet. But that didn’t make me a computer expert, not by a long shot.

  “Yes, this is about the virus. Why else would we be here? We need to act. Now.” Jason was panting.

  Logan put down his coffee mug with a clatter. He then pushed away from the granite kitchen counter he’d been leaning against. “I suppose we do need to do something.”

  He went to a far corner of the living room and fetched his laptop computer from a backpack. We all followed him as he set it up on the coffee table in the living room.

  While it booted up, Jason paced. “We have less than twelve hours. Twelve hours before I’m ruined.”

  “Not to mention the state of the world after the virus goes live,” Rafe added.

  “Sam can do this.” Logan tapped several keys on his laptop and brought up a screen that contained nothing but a bunch of gibber-gabber. “She can stop the virus.”

  “What are you talking about? I can’t do anything of the sort.” I held up my hands and backed away from the group of men who must have all lost their minds. “I don’t know anything about computer viruses. And I certainly don’t know anything about stopping a computer virus.”

  “Don’t panic.” Logan smiled up at me. “All we need from you is the kill switch. I’ll do the rest.”

  “I don’t have a kill switch.”

  “Yes, you do. You got it from Thacker’s office,” Rafe said as he leaned against the back of the sofa.

  “I didn’t take anything from his office. I’m offended you’d think I would. I’m not a thief.” But apparently everyone in the room thought I was. Including Logan. And that just hurt.

  “I. Don’t. Have. What. You. Need.” I enunciated each word to make sure they understood me.

  “She doesn’t have it?” Jason’s screech increased in pitch. He pulled at his hair. “You said she got it from Thacker’s office, Rafe. You said she could stop this.”

  “She did. She can,” Logan said still sounding far too calm.

  “No, I didn’t. I swear, I didn’t.”

  “The kill switch isn’t a physical item,” Logan explained. He set his laptop aside and took both of my hands in his. “You must have seen something or read something in his office that day you wandered into there. You must have seen the kill switch.”

  I shook my head. “It was just an ordinary office.”

  “There’s a reason Thacker risked everything to try and kill you. This is especially telling after Thacker went through all that trouble of putting you into Logan’s life. Why would he suddenly want you back out? It has to be because he’s worried about what you know,” Rafe said. “Thacker has security cameras in all the offices. Probably in the bathrooms as well. He’s paranoid as hell. He saw what you saw. And it worried him. It worried him so much so he decided he needed to come out of his hiding place to kill you.”

  Shoot. “When you put it that way, it does make sense,” I admitted. “But even if he thinks I saw something I shouldn’t have seen, he’s wrong. I don’t know what a kill switch even looks like.”

  This didn’t seem to worry Logan. “Close your eyes and try to remember what you saw that day, Sam,” he said.

  I did as he’d asked. I closed my eyes and opened them again almost immediately.

  “The numbers. On the paper. It was in the garbage. There was a list of the designers showing at Fashion Week and then below it a list of numbers. I thought they were costs of clo
thes he might have purchased.”

  And because I had thought the numbers were costs of designer gowns I coveted, I easily recalled them.

  Logan’s fingers flew across his laptop’s keyboard as I recited the numbers aloud.

  Jason, who was pacing behind him, stopped and watched. After a moment he shouted a sharp curse. “That didn’t stop the virus. Think woman. Get me the kill switch or else I’ll get a knife and cut open that fool head of yours and dig out the truth myself.”

  “That’s not helping.” Logan looked up from his computer and glared at Jason. “If you talk to Sam like that again, the virus will be the least of your worries.”

  Rafe stepped forward and crossed his arms over his chest while giving Jason his most intimidating glare.

  Logan smiled at me. “That wasn’t the kill switch, Sammy Jammy,” he said calmly. “Let’s try something else.”

  I tapped my chin. “What about the designers on the list I found in the garbage?”

  “What? What? What about them? They’re designers, not the key to stopping a global collapse!” Jason shouted.

  Rafe moved quickly. He grabbed Jason by the collar and then dragged the kicking and swearing CEO out of the apartment, leaving me alone with Logan.

  “What about the designers?” It was the same question Jason had asked. But from Logan’s lips, I could tell he trusted my line of thinking.

  “I wasn’t in his office for long, but from what little I saw of the photos on his bookshelf, I could tell Thacker kept his wife dressed in the most expensive clothes. And he mentioned how important it was that he kept her happy. So, I was thinking, if he was doing this for her, then perhaps he linked the kill switch code to one or several of her favorite designers.”

  “That makes sense,” he said as he tapped a few keys on the laptop. “Can you remember who they were?”

  I had to close my eyes again. “There was Hermes, Dior, Alexander McQueen, and Anna Sui. There was one more. Who was it?” I could see the name. It’d been scribbled at the end of the list. It’d been almost unreadable. “Oh right, it was Givenchy.”

  I opened my eyes to find Logan staring steadily at me. A small smile curled the corners of his lips. He looked impressed.

  “Shouldn’t you be typing this into the computer?” I asked.

  “It has to be a series of numbers.”

  “Then it’s something else,” I said.

  “It might be,” he agreed. But before I could start thinking about anything else I might have seen in Thacker’s office, he asked, “Can these fashionistas be described with numbers?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. How long of a number sequence do you need?”

  “Ten digits.”

  “Ten?”

  He nodded.

  My heart beat a little faster. I placed my hand on my chest. “Ten digits. That’s the length of an ISBN number.” As a librarian I knew all about ISBN numbers. And I’d picked up only one book on Thacker’s bookshelf. “A History of Fashion in the Modern World.”

  “What?” he asked, his finger still poised over the keyboard.

  “It’s a book I saw in your boss’ office. I’d picked it up. I’d leafed through it. It’s a great book. Expensive, but great.”

  “And you think it’s the key?”

  I gritted my teeth. “It could be?” How should I know? I wasn’t an expert in how to diffuse a ticking electronic bomb. “It’s the only book in his office that I touched.”

  Logan nodded as his fingers flew across the keys. The book’s cover popped up on the screen. He scrolled down the page and then highlighted the ISBN-10 number. “Let’s try it.”

  The book page quickly disappeared, and we were back to a black screen with stark white numbers and letters that I recognized as computer code. He hit a few keys and the fashion book’s ISBN number appeared on one of the lines of code. The screen blinked.

  Logan hit a few more keys.

  The screen blinked again.

  Still staring at the display, he let out a long sigh.

  “What?” I demanded.

  He shook his head. He placed his hands on his head as he leaned back.

  “It didn’t work?” My heart started to pound even harder. I didn’t know what else to suggest. What else could I have seen in the office? The book and that piece of paper that I’d found in the trash were the only two things I’d touched. And nothing else really stood out to me. Tears sprang to my eyes. “I-I don’t know what to—”

  He abruptly wrapped me in his arms and hugged me so tightly I could barely breathe. But I didn’t mind. I needed his arms around me. I needed to feel his love.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as I clung to him. “I wanted to help. But I don’t—”

  “It worked,” he said. “You did it. You stopped the virus.”

  His lips landed on mine. Or was it my lips that connected with his? Perhaps we’d met in the middle. It didn’t matter, really.

  It had worked.

  It was over.

  And all I wanted to do is kiss this man, the grown-up version of the boy I’d long believed dead, for as long as I had breath in my lungs.

  Chapter 42

  A week had passed since we’d saved the world. Logan had been kept busy with interviews and interrogations with all levels of law enforcement. I’d been equally busy returning presents, writing cards of apology to friends and family members who’d traveled to New York for the ceremony, and explaining to my mother over and over how it wasn’t Logan’s fault that his boss had turned all super-villainy.

  Despite our packed schedules, Logan managed to text several times a day to let me know that he was okay and that he was thinking of me. At the end of each day, he’d call to say goodnight and to tell me how much he missed me. But whenever I’d asked if we could get together, he’d changed the subject.

  By the end of the week, I was starting to worry that he was pulling away, that he didn’t want to continue whatever crazy, magical thing we’d started with that leap off the top of Global Tech’s building.

  Saturday morning arrived without a “good morning” text from him. The text I’d sent to him went unanswered. I started to scrub any surface I could find in my house. An hour later, I texted him again, “When can we get together?” And then a half hour later, “Hello? Are you there?”

  Pathetic.

  Totally.

  I was about to toss my phone across the room to keep from sending him anymore texts when my phone chirped. “Can you meet me outside?”

  My heart did a little tap dance in my chest. I was dressed in faded blue jeans and an oversized T-shirt. I smelled of disinfectant and bleach. My blonde hair—uncombed and hastily pulled into a clip to keep it out of my eyes while I’d cleaned—looked as if rats had been chewing on it. And I didn’t have a lick of makeup on my face.

  “Give me an hour,” I texted back.

  The doorbell rang.

  “I need to take a shower.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  I ignored him.

  “Sam?” he called out. “Open up. Please?”

  It was the “please” that had weakened me. I tossed open the door. “You can sit on the sofa and wait while I make myself presentable,” I said without looking at him. I motioned toward the living room while I rushed toward the bedroom.

  He grabbed my arm. “You don’t need to run away from me.”

  I stopped, turned, and took in the sight of him. His rugged good looks took my breath. He was dressed in worn jeans, a crisp white t-shirt, and a battered leather coat. He smiled at me.

  “I’m a mess,” I explained. “I’ve been cleaning the house.”

  “You’re beautiful. And I can’t wait. We’ve been apart for too long. You need to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “My place.” He pulled a hand through his hair. Was it my imagination, or did I notice a tremor in those fingers? Was he nervous?

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. Was some new trouble b
rewing?

  “I need you. I missed you.”

  I leaned into him. “I missed you too.”

  “Then come with me.” He smiled as he said it.

  “I’m not stepping foot out of the house looking like this.”

  “Looking like what? All I see is beautiful.”

  As a compromise, he joined me in the shower. I don’t think I’d ever gotten that soaped up or that clean. We snacked and napped a bit before making it to his apartment.

  His fingers shook as he fiddled with the key in his lock. He slanted a sheepish look in my direction when the bolt finally turned in the lock.

  “You’re kind of making me nervous,” I told him. “What’s up?”

  “This.” He pushed the door open. He then stepped aside to let me enter the apartment first.

  My jaw dropped when I saw what he’d done. His living room had been filled from top to bottom with lavender flowers. On every table, on every chair. The precious petals even coated the hardwood floor.

  My purple lavender.

  Tears filled my eyes. I pressed my hands to my mouth. “Oh, Logan.”

  He came around to stand in front of me and then bent down on one knee. “Sam, years ago I spoke pretty words, words I’d felt deep down in my heart, words I have never stopped believing.” He drew in a ragged breath. “When I look at you now everything I can think to say seems too small, too meaningless. So, here’s the thing.”

  He drew out a small box from his pocket. He then placed it into my hand as if he were entrusting me with his heart. Even though my fingers were shaking, I managed to pry open the lid.

  Inside I found a small golden ring. It looked nothing like the flashy diamond engagement ring that had sat like a dead weight on my finger for far too long. This ring winking up at me had been delicately crafted as if fairies had woven it. Tiny golden vines and leaves together to create a masterpiece. And at its center was a purple amethyst, the same shade and color as the lavender flowers. It looked like a fairytale ring. And it was the perfect symbol for fairytales and adventures Logan had spun for us during our time together in the hospital.