The more I got to know Logan the more I found myself being drawn to him. I appreciated the way he didn’t talk too much and how he was genuinely interested in my line of work. We had a mutual appreciation of hard work and independence, something that I was deeply attracted to in a man. In this day and age a man who could support himself, maintain a career, and take care of his body was hard to come by. But Logan made it all look so easy.
I was getting myself into trouble, I felt it. Feelings were developing somewhere deep inside a heart that I’d long ago closed off, and that wasn’t part of the plan. I’d made a promise that I wouldn’t open up and wouldn’t fall in love because, from what I’d seen over the last twenty seven years, nothing good came from falling in love. A career, a nice home, and travelling were attainable. Falling in love and having my happily ever? That couldn’t happen because I wouldn’t let it. I couldn’t.
Which was something that I clearly needed to remind myself as I thought about how nice it would be to drink coffee in Logan’s kitchen every morning while he complimented my legs and I checked out an ass that I could bounce a quarter off of.
“I can do that,” I offered as he moved to take two coffee mugs out of a glass doored cupboard. “I can make breakfast, too. What do you want?”
He rolled his eyes and then pointed to the table. “I want you to go sit down.”
I fidgeted next to him and gave him the once over. He seemed to be standing firmly on both feet and his body didn’t seem as stiff as yesterday. No dark circles under his eyes and his hands looked much better than yesterday. But still I didn’t feel comfortable letting Logan do everything while I just sat there and did nothing.
“You should be resting.”
“This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you.”
I huffed, wanting to prove him wrong. I wasn’t a mother hen and if he wanted to do it on his own then fine, so be it. Tongue in cheek, I walked to the table and sat down, drumming my fingers against the light stained wood and watching Logan silently.
He moved quickly and his movements were sharper than yesterday. He took bacon, eggs, cheese and bagels out of the fridge and dumped them on the counter before turning to me and laughing.
“What?” I asked and sat up straighter.
“Your face. You’re scowling at me.” He laughed again and shook his head, his abs flexing. “You hate not being in control, huh?”
I didn’t hate not being in control, I just didn’t like not being in control. It was a personal preference that I liked being the boss. Essentially, I was my own boss at work, I lived alone and made all of the decisions involving my house and my dog. Being in control was natural for me. It was comfortable.
“I don’t hate not being in control,” I protested.
“But you don’t like it.”
With no proper response coming to mind, I simply narrowed my eyes at him.
Logan cocked his head to the side and narrowed his own eyes at me, curious. “I wonder…”
I waited for him to continue but he said nothing and turned around to finish making what I assumed were breakfast sandwiches. When he went to put bacon on mine I explained that I was a pescatarian and the look on his face was absolutely priceless.
Sitting across from each other at his small kitchen table, we shared breakfast and good conversation. Logan made jokes and told me about his his family and growing up in one of the most popular families in Port James. He was sweet, funny, compassionate, and had an obvious love for his siblings. His cooking skills were out of this world and I don’t know why I was surprised by that, but I was. Plus, he was a good dog owner and his love for Mac was obvious with all of the affection he gave the spoiled puppy.
I could get used to this, I thought for the umpteenth time that morning.
Chapter 7
T he next day, I was at work when there was a knock on my office door. I was in the middle of updating the adoption list, and with all of the snow things at Arden had been a real mess when I arrived. My list of chores was a mile long and something was wrong with the wifi, making things that much more difficult.
It felt like a day where nothing was going right and I should have known that it wouldn’t get any better when the door opened.
I was staring down at my notebook that was filled with my chicken scratch handwriting when someone cleared their throat.
When I looked up, my heart dropped down to my stomach and I got the sudden urge to vomit. Why hadn’t I thought to screen my visits through Rose or Violet? We all had walkie talkies attached to our hip and communicated with one another all day. But I’d been so wrapped up and overwhelmed with everything going on at the farm that I didn’t think to have visitors check in with them first. But, seeing as their was a small mountain of snow covering the south shore, I didn’t think there would be any visitors in the first place.
I was oh so wrong to think that.
Greg Conlon stood in my doorway looking tall, greasy, unshaven, and menacing. He looked like gravity was pulling him down and exhaustion weighed heavy on his shoulders, but there was something more than that. An acrid odor that radiated off of him and wafted across the room towards me. Booze. Strong, nostril burning booze that made it clear Conlon had gone on a serious bender. His skin looked sallow and the bags under his eyes were worse than Logan’s on a bad day.
Logan.
My eyes darted to my backpack on the floor. My phone was in the front pocket of the worn brown leather and I briefly wondered if I’d be able to get to it in time. Conlon surely wouldn’t try to go after me in the middle of my workplace. We were surrounded by staff members and it would only take a small scream or rough scrape of furniture for people to come running.
“Can I help you?” I asked as I leaned back in my chair, false bravado radiating from me.
He smiled a nasty, thin grin and leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. I hated how tall he was. I felt dwarfed, intimidated. Small. It was an uncomfortable feeling that left me on edge.
“You know who I am,” he said it as a statement rather than a question.
My heart beat just an iota faster and a thin sheen of sweat coated my palms. “Yes.”
“Where’s my dog?”
“I haven’t seen your dog, but if I had, I have a distinct feeling that I wouldn’t tell you where he was.”
Conlon stepped into the room and Sadie, who had been sleeping peacefully on a wool blanket in the corner, rose up on all fours and moved closer to the chair I was in. She knew, my girl felt it that something wasn’t right. The rigidity of her body let him know that it wasn’t a safe idea to mess with her master, and he cocked his head to the side.
I wished Logan was there with me and the thought caught me off guard. I never wished for any man to be with me, ever. But I knew that, had he been with me, Conlon wouldn’t have stepped foot in the room because Logan wouldn’t have let him. He would have been there, between us and keeping me safe. Maybe they would have gone outside and handled it the only way men knew how, or maybe he would have done something as simple as call the police. Logan would have known what to do.
But I had no fucking clue.
Conlon’s mouth turned down at the corners and he nodded a few times before licking his dry lips. “You Logan’s new girl?”
My spine straightened and my temper flared. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t anyone’s girl. It was true, I wasn’t. But I hesitated and I didn’t know why. In all my life, I’d never been anyone’s “girl”. Serious relationships were something I was completely inexperienced with and when I hooked up with someone it was a one time thing. I never stuck around long enough to be referred to as someone’s girl, so I didn’t know why I was hesitating answering the question.
I could have lied to myself and said that it was none of Conlon’s business which, technically, that was true. But I was mature enough to know that there was another reason.
A part of me, maybe just a microscopic part, wanted to be Logan’s girl.
“Ah, you are.
” He smiled when I didn’t give him an answer. “He’s a bit over protective, huh?”
I cocked my head to the side and then cleared my throat, trying to play it cool when in reality my skin was burning and my heart was beating like a racehorse. “You have sixty seconds to tell me what you want and then I call for backup and have you thrown out of here.”
His eyebrows shot up and a satisfactory, if not downright snarky, grin appeared on my face. I did a mental fist pump that I’d caught him off guard. It was clearly obvious that he wasn’t expecting such a sassy, if not bitchy, response from a petite redhead. But over the years I’d learned to use my size to my advantage. People perceived me a certain way and surprising them was always fun.
Especially if I was surprising a greasy, abusive criminal who had no idea who he was messing with.
“Tell Logan I want my dog back. And I want to know where Nicole is.”
“One,” I held up my index finger. “This isn’t a messenger service, so I’m not sure what you were expecting when you showed up to a farm. Two,” I held up my middle finger. “I can say with absolute certainty that you will never get your hands on that dog again. I saw what you did to him because I’m the one who patched him up and Logan’s the one who nursed him back to health. And three, if you don’t get out of here right now, I’m going to have my dog use your balls as a chew toy for the remainder of the day.”
I wanted to intimidate him, piss him off a little. But more than that I wanted to scare him off to keep Logan and Mac safe. From what I learned about Conlon, he was a dangerous criminal and I had no idea what lengths he would go to in order to get to Nicole and Mac.
It was clear that my plan didn’t work when he stepped into my office a little farther, ignoring Sadie when she bared her teeth and gave a vicious growl.
“Where. The fuck. Is Nicole.”
“Safe. From. You.”
“You little fucking bitch-” he started when a familiar face appeared over his shoulder.
“Is there a fucking problem here?” Rose asked with her arms folded across her chest, a scowl on her face.
Conlon straightened and looked at her over his shoulder. As soon as he looked away from me, I took the opportunity to shake my head at my friend. Her eyes flickered from me to him multiple times before she spoke again. “You need to go. Now. Or I’ll call the cops. Which would be a safer option than letting her dog maul you to bits.”
Sadie growled again for good measure and my heart beat at a frantic pace, adrenaline coursing through me. This whole situation could go one of two ways and I was praying that it wouldn’t end in a bloodbath.
Finally, Conlon nodded his head and brushed past Rose, who didn’t take her eyes off him as he moved towards the barn’s exit. “I’ll see you soon, Red.”
A chill went down my spine at his words. I didn’t doubt that. He wasn’t going to go away until he got what he was looking for, which meant that a violent, catastrophic storm was coming my way.
Rose looked at me, brown eyes searching my face. “Are you okay? Juliette, what the hell was that?”
I was frozen in my seat, stuck on the fact that Greg Conlon knew where I worked, knew I had some kind of relations with Logan, and knew that I knew about Nicole. It put me on edge that I was being watched like that. For all I knew he was following me to work or trying to peek in my windows at night.
“Juliette?”
But I didn’t answer her. I was too busy throwing myself out of the chair and rifling through my bag to get to my phone. With trembling fingers I dialed and pressed the phone to my ear, chewing my thumbnail as Rose came into the room and closed the door behind her.
“‘Lo?” mumbled a gravelly, sleepy voice.
“We have a serious problem.”
I WAS A STRAIGHT A STUDENT. Not once did I get detention nor did I get scolded or spoken to by a teacher. Gran always told me to keep my head down, mind my own business, and make a good life for myself. There were definitely times when she was hard on me, harder than most grandparents were on their grandchildren. But she saw first hand what happened when a kid didn’t have any goals, when they didn’t have a good head on their shoulders. She tried to keep my mother on a good path, but the woman who birthed me couldn’t help but stray. And Gran made damn sure that the same thing wasn’t going to happen to me.
I was up early every morning, went home right after school, had all of my homework done before dinner, and then read before I went to sleep. She taught me the ins and outs of being a responsible adult and never let me stray from the path that we’d both carved out for me. She was my best friend and my teacher.
I didn’t have so much as a speeding ticket and I gave Gran full credit for that. The woman taught me how to drive when I was thirteen and I passed my driving test like a pro on my sixteenth birthday.
Which was why I was so overwhelmed by the time Logan showed up at Arden thirty minutes later. I’d never been in any sort of trouble and I was absolutely not equipped to deal with it. My first instinct was to call the police and then lock myself in the house until all of this blew over. But there was a sense of impending doom that told me none of this was going to blow over soon and we needed a plan. Fast.
Rose sat in the chair in front of my desk while I sat in the one behind it. Logan paced off to the side, hands in the pocket of the black hoodie he wore. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his face and his blonde hair was a mess as per usual. But even with the stress that the day brought I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to have that stubble scrape against the sensitive skin of my neck. I wondered how it would feel against my palms if I grabbed his face and pulled his mouth down to mine. That full, soft looking mouth…
“Juliette, hey, you okay? You’re flushed,” Rose commented.
Logan glanced at me and I realized I was still gawking at him while sensual, dirty fantasies filled my head. I shook my head and looked away, but not before I caught the wicked gleam in his eye and the smirk on his face.
There’s no way he knows, I assured myself. I turned to Rose. “What? Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I’m just overwhelmed.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Logan said and leaned a hip against my desk, head cocked to the side as he studied me.
“It’s been a long morning. Now, let’s figure this out. What are we gonna do about Conlon?”
“I have a few friends in Boston looking into him. They’ll see what he’s up to and if it’s anything shady we’ll bust him and have his ass locked up within a week.”
“Okay, well what are we supposed to do for the next week? He knows where I work, Logan. He knows that we’re… friends.”
Logan stared at me for a minute, not saying anything. His dark, almost black eyes bored into mine and a tick appeared in his jaw. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking but the look he gave me was dark. Menacing in a way that had me clenching my thighs together and averting my gaze.
“I say we call the cops.” Rose piped in with a raised hand. “I love you, girl. But I can’t have some fucking criminal showing up here on a whim. What if he comes back again and this time he’s not alone?”
He was shaking his head before she even finished her sentence. “He wouldn’t do that. Conlon’s an idiot, but he’d have no reason to show up here if...”
“If I wasn’t here.” I said what he didn’t want to.
He gave a solemn nod and start pacing again, scrubbing a hand over his face.
“Even more reason to call the cops,” Rose said with a raised voice. “You’re in danger!”
Logan stopped walking and stared her down. “Nothing is going to happen to Juliette.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I would never let anything happen to her,” he shot back, the finality of his tone leaving no room for argument.
Rose wasn’t satisfied with that answer but sat back anyway, eyeing him carefully. I sat there and watched the exchange, both of them staring each other down. Logan’s mouth was set in a grim line but there was a fi
re in his eyes. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I trusted him. Believed him when he said nothing was going to happen to me. He’d protect me, and I’d let him.
I watched as my friend stood and adjusted the hat on her head before she zipped up her jacket. She pointed a finger at me and gave me a serious look. “I love you and I’ll have my phone on me if you need to call. Don’t hesitate, understand?” After I nodded she turned and gave Logan a look. “Anything happens to her and I’m coming after you, Ashford.”
He nodded his head and gave a small smile. “I believe you.”
With nothing else to say, Rose left and Sadie followed after her knowing that it was time for lunch. And then it was just me and Logan. Alone. In my tiny, cramped office that barely fit my desk, chair, and small filing cabinet that I kept in the corner.
“Thanks for coming out here,” I said conversationally.
“Why were you blushing?”
I was taken aback and looked away, standing up and organizing the list of adoption papers on my desk. “I wasn’t.”
“You were.” I could hear the smile in his voice.
“Stop talking.”
“Make me.”
Make me. The two most sexually charged words in human existence. Oh, but I wanted to make him. I wanted to press my lips to his and shut up him so that I wouldn’t blush again. Or maybe I’d blush more. I wanted to feel his tongue slip into my mouth as he grabbed me by my hips and hauled me against him. I wanted to-
“Do I make you nervous?”
I finally met his eye and suddenly I couldn’t look anywhere else. I was frozen where I was, papers in a white knuckled grip in my hands.
Something had changed. The atmosphere, the air between us. It was thick and hazy and I was dizzy with need. Aching in a way that I knew only Logan could handle. It was throwing me for a loop, but then again life had been throwing plenty of curveballs lately so why stop now, right?
Slowly, I shook my head.
He took a slow, methodical step forward and tapped a finger against his chin. “I think I do. I think I throw you off your game and you don’t like it.”
Reckless and Wild: A Small Town Romantic Suspense (Port James Series Book 1) Page 5
