And that was why he was here, wasn’t it? Because she’d called and asked for him. She’d been scared and alone, and she’d called him.
It wasn’t that he was a good guy; he was not a good guy. It was that she’d needed him—even though she hadn’t. That should have been a repellant; Logan didn’t like needy women. The whole reason he preferred to fuck married women was because they didn’t get attached, and they certainly didn’t turn to him in times of trouble.
His duty and devotion was to his family and the Twisted C Ranch, owned by the Cahills since Matthew and Annabelle Cahill had staked the claim. He had no time in his life or space in his heart for anything or anyone else, and he wanted it to stay that way.
But Honor wasn’t needy. She didn’t need him now, they both knew it, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with him now that she had him. But shit, he liked that she’d called him. He liked that, when she was alone and afraid, even after the way they’d left things—or, more honestly, the way he’d dropped things—she’d called him.
He wanted Honor to need him.
As she padded over to him now, looking tired and stressed and fucking gorgeous, Logan’s heart lurched and his cock swelled.
Sweet hell, this was dangerous goddamn territory.
“Thanks.” She took the glass he offered her, and nodded at the plate of cheese and crackers. “I thought you weren’t hungry.”
“Thought you might be.”
“I was at a banquet, too, remember?”
“Did you stay for the meal?”
“Most of it, yeah.” Picking up a piece of asiago, she nibbled daintily before she added, “Maybe if I’d stayed for the whole thing he’d have given up before I got home.” With a sigh, she sat on a barstool.
Logan took his glass around to that side of the island and sat beside her. “I don’t think that guy had giving up on his mind.”
“You saw him?”
“They were loading him in a squad car when I got here. Looked like he put up a fight.”
“Yeah. God, I was so stupid.” She raked a hand through her hair, tousling it more.
“Do you know that guy?”
“Not really.” She took another piece of cheese and set this one on a cracker. “The last time I went out with my friends, we had a limo. He was the driver. Since none of us were driving, we all let loose and got very drunk. He was nice and professional, even while we were being obnoxious.”
Logan tried to imagine Honor obnoxiously drunk, and he couldn’t get there. She was the most together human being he’d ever known.
Her story wasn’t over. “At the end of the night,” she was saying, “I was the last one dropped off, and he offered to walk me to my door. I guess I was too drunk to see all the ways that was dangerous. I let him all the way up to my private floor, and when he kissed me, I really liked it, and I remember considering letting him in. But he backed off. He gave me his card and said to call him when I was sober. He left, and I thought wow, a nice guy. Rare breed.”
Her eyes fixed on his as she said those last words, and Logan couldn’t deal. He looked away, covering his cowardice by reaching for a cracker.
“Not such a nice guy after all, sounds like.”
“Clearly not. I didn’t call. Not because I didn’t like him, but there’s just too much going on right now, and I didn’t want to deal with possibly dating somebody, on top of everything else. I guess he thought being a nice guy entitled him to a phone call—or more.” She shuddered. “He was really angry tonight. I don’t understand men. I just don’t.” Turning to him again, she flashed fury at him. “Actually, I do understand men. I understand you all too well. I just don’t accept that you’re all such assholes and get away with it! Why can’t you just fucking behave like human beings? How is it that the most decent man I know in the entire state of Idaho is your brother, who explodes into bloody violence on a regular basis?”
Logan fought hard against the defensive anger that churned through his blood, and for once, he beat it down before he said something caustically sarcastic. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to anything you just laid on me, but as for Heath, he hasn’t lost his head in months, so use past tense when you talk about him being violent. Since he stopped drinking, since he’s free and has Gabe, and since Matthew was born, he stays level.”
That took some of the storm out of her eyes. “I’m glad. I’m glad for him, and for Gabe and the baby. I don’t know two people who deserve things to work out more than they do.”
His brother had watched helplessly as his first wife and their little girl burned to death in a fiery car. Logan had held him back, holding on with everything he had to keep his little brother from diving into the fire after them. Gabe, Heath’s new wife, had survived a murderous attack by her father, an attack her mother and grandparents hadn’t survived. So yeah, they were about the two most deserving people on Mother Earth.
“They have that happiness because of you,” he said. “Heath’s not in prison because of you.”
“He’s not in prison because he didn’t kill Brandon Black.”
Black had been fucking Heath’s first wife. He’d been in that car when Sybil, driving drunk, had crashed, and he’d run from it and left Sybil and a five-year-old, beautiful little pixie of a girl to die screaming. Ruthie had screamed and screamed for her daddy, and he’d been right there, struggling against Logan’s restraining arms.
It had taken Heath a very long time to forgive Logan for that. And he’d wanted to kill Black. He’d beaten him nearly to death several times over the next few years, stopping short of murder only because Logan and their friends had pulled him back from that brink. His manifest lust for Black’s death had been a major obstacle to clearing him when Black finally did end up murdered. Heath had been easy to frame.
Honor got up, leaving her glass on the counter, and walked to the wall of windows.
Logan followed her. He stood behind her and studied their reflection in the glass—her small, blonde softness, his tall, dark shagginess. “It’s not like you not to take credit where it’s due. Anybody else would have lost that case.”
She sighed and crossed her arms, neither denying or acceding to his point.
“Honor, what’s going on? There’s more than this stalker bastard, isn’t there?”
In the dark glass, he saw her eyes lift and meet the reflection of his. “Why are you here, Logan?”
Before, when she’d asked that question, he’d evaded a real answer. This time, with her so vulnerable, Logan gave her the best truth he had. “Because I want to be.”
She let her head drop forward until it hit the glass.
“I don’t have a better answer, Honor.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to go?” Going would be better for them both, but he didn’t want to leave.
She shook her head without lifting it from the glass. “No. I want things to make sense. I want you to make sense. I want the world to make sense. I want my life to make sense again. But I don’t want you to go.”
Turning suddenly around, so fast she bumped into him as she did, Honor stared up at him. “I was sitting in my room just now, asking myself the same question I’m asking you, trying to get something to make sense. I know there’s something between us. Now. Still. I know you feel it. I can see you feel it. That’s why you’re here. It’s why I called, and it’s why you came.”
They were statements—accusations, even—but not questions. True as they were, they didn’t demand a response, so Logan didn’t give one. What would he have said? She knew she was right. And he knew he’d fuck up anything they started. He was forty-one years old and had never been in love in his life. Women had said the words to him, and every time, no matter how much he’d enjoyed his time with the woman, as soon as those words were out of her mouth, his primary reaction had been dismay and an overwhelming impulse to run, an impulse he had never tried to curb. His family, the ranch—that was all he loved.
Maybe
he wasn’t even capable of romantic love. Probably he wasn’t.
Her sharp blue eyes, keen and sparkling, refused to let him go, but Logan didn’t want to say, again, out loud, to Honor, this unique marvel of a human, what a dick he was. They both knew it; he’d provided ample evidence.
But.
She didn’t want him to go. He didn’t want to leave. She clearly wanted him to answer her challenges, but he very much did not want to say the words in his head.
Instead, Logan did what he wanted to do. He took hold of her arms, pulled her close, and kissed her.
And goddamn.
Honor moaned as his mouth covered hers, but she didn’t go tense or duck away. Her arms untwisted from their shielding grip across her chest, and she grabbed handfuls of his shirt. Her mouth opened more, inviting his tongue; when he obliged with a grunt that tore up from his gut, she softened entirely against him, so lithely liquid that he released her arms and wrapped her up close, afraid she’d slip from him otherwise.
Oh fuck, she felt good. She was exactly right in his arms, no awkwardness of limbs or lips or breath. He had to bend low, but she bent with him and eased his way.
He was painfully hard, swollen with need, and she was pressed against him just so, offering everything he wanted. It would be nothing, so simple, to lift her up and carry her to her bed. In the way she gripped him, kissed him, filled his mouth with sweet, soft moans, Logan knew she’d let him, she’d finally let him, have what he wanted.
They’d kissed once before, and only once—on a night during Heath’s trial, just after the prosecution rested its case and before Honor presented her defense, the point at which Heath’s prospects had seemed bleakest. As witness after witness, called up by the prosecutor, took the stand and described Heath’s rage and grief, his violence, his threats against Black, as photos of all the injuries Black had sustained the multiple times Heath had gotten his hands on him, Logan was ashamed to admit that sometimes, sitting in the gallery just behind the defendant’s table, he’d studied his little brother’s rigid back and wondered if maybe he had actually done it. Heath was honest to a fault, and he’d steadfastly sworn his innocence. But the evidence had been so overwhelming that it had sometimes been hard not to be caught up in the story the state told. Logan loved his brother, trusted him, believed him, and still had felt doubt. It had been impossible to imagine how a jury could have heard the prosecution’s case and not been sure Heath was a murderer.
That night, when things looked really bad, before Honor had had her chance to work her legal magic, they’d all gone to dinner at Angelo’s, a Boise steakhouse, to talk strategy. Things had been especially tense; Honor had had some hard truths for Heath, and Heath had barely kept his shit together. Everyone thought his days with his brand new wife were numbered and that the baby she carried would grow up without his father at home.
After dinner, as the family was working out hotel arrangements, since they’d stayed so late in Boise that evening, Logan had found himself alone with Honor in the private dining room his father had reserved.
He remembered it vividly. She’d been putting papers back into her sleek black leather case, like a cross between a handbag and a briefcase, that she carried when she wasn’t in court. A paper had slid away and fluttered to the floor, and he’d picked it up.
There had been no cutesy movie moment when they’d both gone for it and found their lips nearly touching. She’d taken the paper with a muttered thanks and put it away. But he’d seen something in her eyes, something sad, or simply tired, and he’d brushed her hair back, letting his fingers skim her cheek. She’d flinched at the touch and frowned up at him, surprised and perplexed.
He’d done then what he’d done now—what he’d wanted. He’d kissed her. And then, like now, she’d been right with him, wanting it as much as he.
Until she’d remembered herself and stepped back, out of his reach.
He’d tried for more. That night, and several more times over the rest of Heath’s trial, he’d tried to woo her into bed with him. Always, she’d held him off, insisting that they could do nothing while she represented his brother. Asking him to wait.
God, watching the way she wove a story that proved Heath’s innocence, watching her command a small army of experts who found the proof, watching her mind go at warp speed as she put all the pieces together, he’d wanted nothing more than all of her.
By the time the trial was over and Heath was free, and no longer represented by counsel, Logan had seen the danger in Honor Babinot. She didn’t need him. For the first time in his life, he’d wanted a woman to need him, and she absolutely did not. She was more than he was in every way; he had nothing at all to offer her.
That realization was a mirror he didn’t want to look into.
So he’d done what he was good at. He’d ghosted.
What was different now? Nothing. She was still a stellar example of humanity, and he was still a dick.
He turned his head, ending the kiss, but when he meant to stand straight, to pull away, he couldn’t do it. She was so soft, smelled so sweet. His arms were so full of her.
“Logan,” she sighed against his cheek.
“Honor,” he groaned. “I can’t do this.”
She settled onto her feet; she’d been up on her tiptoes, making it so he didn’t have to bend so far down. “Can’t, or won’t?”
“I mean it when I say can’t. This isn’t who I am.” The words actually hurt him to say, leaving gashes on their way up from his chest.
“Then who are you?”
“Not somebody who can love you.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry. You deserve more than a tumble in the covers, and I don’t want more than that.”
“Jesus, Logan.” She stepped back—quickly, and to the side, like she meant to duck out of the way of the splash zone of his dickishness—and put her hand to her throat. Her pearls weren’t there to be fiddled with this time.
“Shit, I’m not trying to hurt you. That’s the whole goddamn problem. I don’t know how not to hurt you.”
She stood where she was, her hand to her throat, looking small and soft and goddamn vulnerable. Her eyes searched his face, moving back and forth, reading him, or trying to.
“I’m gonna go, Honor. It doesn’t matter why I’m here. I shouldn’t be.” Jesus Christ, he needed to get out of this apartment and away from this woman. He felt about as bad about himself right now as he ever had in his life.
He got back to her island and had his tuxedo jacket in his hand—so absurd that he’d been in formal dress while all this shit was going down—when she said,
“Wait. Please don’t go.”
“Honor …”
“If you can’t be with me, okay. I’m not going to push for something you don’t want. But are you capable of friendship, Logan?”
He turned back to her. She’d taken a few steps closer and now stood against the back of her sofa.
“What?”
“I’m … I don’t want to be alone tonight. I hate that that man was up here, pounding on my door, shouting at me, making me feel unsafe. Making me afraid in my own house. I can’t stop thinking about it. I could call my girlfriends, and they’d be here as fast as they could and do everything they could to make me forget my shitty night. They’d entertain me. But I don’t want to be entertained. What I want is to be held. Just that. Can you be my friend and just sit with me, put your arm around me, and watch a dumb movie until I can sleep? Can you be my friend and help me feel safe tonight?”
Could he be her friend? Despite all the shit that got stirred up inside him when he was around her? How did that work?
He didn’t know. But he draped his jacket over the barstool again. “I think I can do that, yeah.”
*****
Much to Logan’s surprise, Honor had what appeared to be Will Ferrell’s entire filmography in her streaming library. They settled on her sofa and watched Anchorman on the television hanging above her minimalist, m
odernist gas fireplace. At first, they simply sat side by side, and Logan stretched his arm across the low back of the sofa, not holding her, but close enough to feel the warm draw of her body. He found himself watching her more than the screen, enchanted by her laughter, and the way she said her favorite lines of dialogue along with the actors. Another thing he wouldn’t have guessed about this woman: her enjoyment of lowbrow humor.
At some point, he noticed that each of her laughs and giggles had begun to end with a quiet little sigh, and then she yawned behind the back of her hand and let her body lean on his. Logan curled his arm over her shoulder, and she tucked closer, resting her head on his chest. He shifted so that she could recline more.
Soon after that, she no longer laughed at the manic foolishness on the screen, and her presence was still and calm; she was asleep.
It was then, when Honor was wholly unguarded, leaning on him, feeling safe enough in his arms to sleep quietly, that Logan let himself feel, fully and for the first time, the truth of this woman.
He was afraid of her.
No, that was ridiculous; even in the safety of his own head the words were ridiculous. What hurt could she do to him? He was the one who did the hurting.
Though he thought of himself as a gentleman, he knew himself to be a dick. He was good to the women he favored, until it was time to go. Then, when he wanted his exit, he’d found expediency in making them angry, making them hate him, never want to see him again. A clean break, no clinging threads reaching out to pull him back in, no weepy late-night phone calls.
Well, fewer, at any rate. Some women were gluttons for punishment.
But how many times in the past day had he thought that being around Honor was ‘dangerous’? Many times. Over and over, a chant in his head. Dangerous, she was dangerous. He’d been trying to get to the exit since he’d arrived in this apartment. Since he’d first kissed her last fall. Since he’d first laid eyes on her last summer, maybe.
Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2) Page 8
