Giving It All

by Christi Barth

  Then the tears came. Like burning lava, they choked her throat even as wetness made fat trails down her cheeks. It hurt to try and hitch in a breath through it all. It hurt so darned much to relive all those moments.

  This time, though, Logan was there. He folded her into his strong arms and said nothing. He didn’t try to calm her with platitudes. He didn’t offer absolution, or try to talk her into forgiving herself. He just held her. Let her soak in his strength and calm her breaths and her racing heart until its pace finally slowed to match his own steady beats beneath her ear.

  When she lifted her hand from his chest to scrub the tears from her face, Logan asked, “That’s why you took that job in North Carolina?”

  “Yes.” North Carolina had made sense as a place to apply because her parents had moved there to retire. Honestly, though, the where didn’t matter. Brooke would’ve moved to Oklahoma or Alaska or even started a cheer squad at the research station in Antarctica just to escape. “I wanted to get away from the memories. To get away from the grief hanging over the campus. To get away from wondering how things would’ve been different if I’d gotten there five minutes earlier.”

  He tucked her head back into the notch below his collarbone and smoothed slow circles on her back. “What if you’d gotten to the gym ten minutes later? And a student had found her instead? What if some freaked-out freshman had to deal with everything you just laid out for me?”

  Talk about making a nightmare scenario even worse. She couldn’t believe Logan would even think of it. “That would’ve been horrible.” Her tone came out half-shocked, half-accusatory at the mere mention of the possibility.

  “Go with me on this for a minute. Maybe being the one to find her was all you were supposed to do. It’s how you made a difference that day. Sounds like Sarah couldn’t have been saved. You saving another kid from being traumatized—it matters. Let it be enough.”

  Brooke had never once looked at it from that angle.

  True, her squad should’ve started trickling in the door for practice scant minutes after she’d discovered Sarah. The campus security guard Brooke had literally screamed at to block the door until the police and ambulance arrived was all that kept them away from the grisly site.

  Nobody blamed Brooke. Not the other teachers, who had also missed all the clues. Not the principal, not a single one of the local or national news reports. Not even the police. Not when during the autopsy the coroner found evidence of longtime abuse on the poor girl’s body.

  And she didn’t truly blame herself anymore. Getting there five minutes earlier might have stopped Sarah from making the attempt that day, that moment. But she probably would’ve just waited for the next opportunity. Brooke had spent the last few months working through her feelings, and she’d finally realized that what haunted her wasn’t guilt. It was regret. Regret for a life lost, a life wasted. Regret that she hadn’t been in time, hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. It was regret that had kept her frozen in place. Fixated on what would never be. Unable to appreciate what was in her own life…until Logan. Until the inescapable fun of being with him opened up her eyes once more to life.

  But the theory Logan offered her helped mitigate whatever pain, guilt, and, yes, regret were left. Those feelings would never go away. Not ever. The possibility that she’d saved some other student from years of those same feelings, however, from struggling with the horror of finding a friend like that…well, that was a balm over a slowly healing wound.

  Brooke stood on tiptoe to press a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”

  Surprise flashed, widened his melted caramel eyes. “For what?”

  “For not judging. For pushing me to talk to you. For saving me. For opening my eyes, yet again.”

  “That’s a lot. I sound like quite a guy.”

  “You are, indeed, Logan Marsh. Quite a guy.”

  “Hey.” He thumbed one final tear from her jawline. “You’re quite some woman, too.” Brooke automatically opened her mouth to contradict, but he moved that thumb to cover her lips. “Don’t shoot me down. You’re compassionate beyond words. Do you know how rare that is in the world? And you’re brave.”

  She twisted away from him. Sank onto the green bench. “Not a bit. I was petrified. Shaking the whole time.”

  This time he did follow her. Logan crouched, grabbed her hands and held them on her knees. “Brooke, most people would’ve stood there, frozen at what you found. Or run away. Bravery is doing what needs to get done, no matter how scary it is.”

  “I’ve been a mess ever since,” she admitted. Because it felt safe admitting that to Logan. He’d just heard her deepest, darkest secret. Well, a secret that much of D.C. knew about, but it felt like a major confidence nonetheless. Nothing was worse than that.

  Logan traced the tip of his finger from her wrist to between each knuckle. Despite the mugginess of the air, his touch left a row of goose bumps in its wake. “Did you stop teaching?”

  “No. Of course not. The kids needed me. They needed the touchstones of normalcy to work through their own issues with what happened.”

  A little slower, he repeated the wrist-to-knuckle lines on the other hand. “Did you get medicated?”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I didn’t want to postpone working through everything by being numb.”

  “All of that took incredible strength and bravery. Don’t you dare sell yourself short.” He shot out his arm, rotated his hand back and forth. “I broke my wrist, too, you know.”

  Working in disaster zones, with undoubtedly less-than-stellar equipment in precarious situations, Brooke had no doubt a broken wrist was but one of the injuries he’d collected. “When? Where?”

  “In the Alps. The Sesto Reggimento Alpini wanted to call off the search for Griff, Knox, Ry, and Josh. They said they’d haul me back to a comfortable bed, where I could get a full belly—while my friends slowly froze to death God knows where. Which was bullshit. So I jumped off a small cliff to get away, to force them to follow me and keep going.”

  Quick thinking, especially for a teenager facing off with a company of trained soldiers. Half of her couldn’t believe that after all this time, Logan was finally sharing the details with anyone outside the ACSs, let alone her. The other half of her didn’t want to risk showing him her shock and shutting down the story. So Brooke winked and wagged her finger side to side teasingly. “You went rogue.”

  Logan shrugged. “It felt like the only option. I didn’t factor in the snow, though. So my jump turned into me falling off the cliff. Not too far. Only far enough to knock the wind out of me and break my wrist. I stood up and kept walking. Maybe stumbling a little, but I didn’t stop. Right after that was when I found the ACSs.”

  “That was how you rescued them?”

  “We think of it like a relay.” He stood and mimed passing off a baton. “They rescued themselves most of the way. I just took the final lap. The point is, the doctor told me that when you break a bone, it actually heals to be twice as strong.” Logan bent his wrist back and forth. “The same thing happened to you.”

  Brooke rotated her wrist and waggled her fingers. “It feels the same.”

  “Not just your wrist, Brooke. You fractured a little on the inside from what happened to Sarah. And now you’ve come back, twice as strong.”

  Everything he said was another layer of soothing balm. Brooke wasn’t entirely sure she believed his last statement, but it eased more than a little of the residual tightness around her heart. Enough so that her other massive problem popped to the surface. “I may be strong, but I’m not back to normal. What am I going to do about a job? It’s too late in the summer to hope to find anything else. Schools start in a few weeks.”

  Logan sat next to her. Then he laced their fingers together with an automatic ease that made her heart swell at its rightness. “Roosevelt Prep won’t have you back?”

  “Oh, they would. Seeing as how the principal wouldn’t accept my notice. He didn’t want to tell anyone
I was leaving until I had the signed new contract in hand.”

  “Hang on—you do have a job?”

  Less of a job, more something to stress over. “Technically, yes. Not one I want to keep, though. Not one I can bear to keep. I’m not sure I even want to keep teaching at all.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  As if snatching an answer from the universe were as easy as plucking a leaf off of a tree. Maybe because, in Logan’s world, everything was black and white. Life and death. If an entire village crumbled around you, having any job was probably worth celebrating. And suddenly Brooke felt too selfish, too entitled to be blithely dismissing a perfectly good career—one she both had and enjoyed.

  “I don’t know what I want to do. Aside from the fact that I should officially resubmit my resignation first thing next week to give the school time to find a replacement. Running the cheer program was a full-time job heaped on top of teaching all day. It kept me burning the candle at both ends. So emotional trauma aside, I think I’m pretty burned out. My friend Katrina convinced me to take a couple of weeks and try to have fun.”

  “A summer of fun, huh? Sounds like you should’ve stayed on that island.”

  “I don’t think so.” Dominica—or, more to the point, Logan’s presence there—had served its purpose to reboot her. As soon as that happened, she’d been ready to move forward. “D.C.’s a great town. Now I have time to enjoy it.” A little frantically, Brooke tried to come up with something summery and fun and relaxing. “I can go to the zoo.”

  “With all the tourists?” Logan reached over to pinch her nose closed as he shook his head. “Smelling steaming zebra shit on a hundred-degree day? I don’t think so.”

  Fine. There were other things. Things besides unpacking, and maybe steam cleaning her carpet. “I need to help Katrina think of a business opportunity. Trust me, that’s going to take up oodles of my free time.”

  He made a buzzer sound. “Nope. That’s doing something for her. What are you going to do for yourself?”

  Brooke grabbed at the obvious. Because this was too much to think about after an emotional revelation, in the heat, and massively distracted by the way Logan’s dark brown chest hair peeked out the top of his shirt. “I’m pretty happy with this hot date I apparently have lined up for tonight.”

  “It’s got potential,” he intoned solemnly. Then he slid one arm beneath her knees, one behind her back, and picked her up, twirling her in a circle until she laughed breathlessly.

  That was all it took to dislodge a real idea of fun that’d been percolating for years. “I want to take tango lessons,” she said. “Café Centro offers them for free every Wednesday night. I’ve been wanting to for a while, but I couldn’t find a partner.”

  “I learned to tango in Argentina.”

  Wow. Logan casually dropped that awesome personal trivia as if everyone got to fly around the world to take lessons. “The real deal? With a rose clamped between your teeth and everything?”

  “Not the rose. But definitely the and everything.” He waggled his eyebrows again, like he had at the start of the evening. It brought them full circle out of the dramatic trough she’d accidentally dumped them into. Their date was salvaged after all. “I’d love to dance with you. An ex-cheerleader? I’ll bet you’ve got moves, Escarlata.”

  “There you have it,” she announced with a flourish of her arm as Logan set her back on her feet. They started out of the Summerhouse and toward the Mall. “We can go Wednesday night. A nice, normal summer vacation activity.”

  Instead of congratulating her for coming up with something, Logan’s hand tightened on hers. He walked a little faster and stared straight ahead. “I can’t do Wednesday. That’s soccer night with the ACSs.”

  “I’m sure we can maybe alternate weeks or—”

  He cut her off. “Brooke—you know what I do. How my life works. I don’t do normal. And I don’t ever stick around.”

  Right. She knew that. She wasn’t asking him to stay for her sake or anything. Logan was the one who brought her out tonight and slapped the date label on it. She didn’t need the warning.

  Okay, maybe her heart needed the warning, but her mind knew for certain that he’d walk out of her life again sooner rather than later. Guaranteed. “I know,” she snipped a little more shortly than intended. “I don’t want you to commit to a semester or anything. If you’re here, if you’re free, we can dance. Nothing more complicated than that.”

  “Okay.”

  But as they kept walking toward the throng of people and their romantic picnic, Brooke wondered, Was it?

  Chapter 15

  Logan yanked at the half-Windsor knot of his mint-green tie. “You guys know I’m officially on vacation, right? If there’s no shovel in my hand, if there are multiple working toilets within a thousand feet, and if I’m drinking Kona coffee with real cream”—he sloshed around what was left in the silver Nats travel mug with a giant cursive W on the side—“then I’m the fuck on vacation. And vacation means no ties.”

  “You’re such a whiny little pussy about the stupidest shit, Marsh.” Knox recinched Logan’s tie what felt like halfway through his Adam’s apple. “You haven’t had to wear a tie in, what, three months? Four? The dress code at your work on your fanciest day consists of wiping the thick layer of sweat off the back of your neck. That’s what you need a vacation from.”

  “Hard labor’s hard on clothes.”

  “Well, the only thing laboring on the podcast today will be your tongue.”

  “Stop right there. I hear a dirty and wholly workplace-inappropriate joke coming.” The hot blonde Logan vaguely remembered from the last time he hit the SER studios—or got hit there, as it turned out—clicked over to him in what he’d call fuck-me pumps if he saw them in a club. Probably the same thing he’d say about her halter-style top that left her entire back exposed. Seeing as how she was a dead ringer for Brooklyn Decker, Logan didn’t intend to say shit, though. He just zipped his mouth and soaked up the view.

  She energetically pumped Logan’s hand three times. “I’m Lara, your producer. Thanks for coming in early to do this photo shoot.”

  “Didn’t know I had a choice,” he said dryly, tongue firmly lodged in his cheek.

  That earned him another dazzling smile. “You truly didn’t. Lieutenant Montgomery’s told us from day one that there are five, not four, Naked Men. I’m not losing another day of promo-ing the heck out of another hot hunk.” And then she gave him a once-over that pretty much stripped him down to his navy boxer briefs faster than an X-ray.

  “I usually like to split a beer or two with a woman before she measures me for a condom,” he joked.

  “There’s no time to finesse you. The podcast goes live whether we’re ready or not.” She grabbed his wrist as it was moving to his throat. “Stop with the tie. Keep it on for one shot or I swear I will make you strip to your skivvies.”

  Logan liked her bluntness. But before he could respond, Josh beat him to it. “Is that a threat or a promise?”

  “Give it up, Hardwick,” Riley sneered at him. “You know Lara isn’t interested in anyone with XY chromosomes.”

  Logan took another look at Lara. Smoking hot. Sassy. Catnip for Knox. An auto-flirt for Josh. And yet nobody had mentioned making a move on her. Yeah, he should’ve figured it out sooner. “How many of you got shot down before Lara took pity on you and fessed up?”

  Riley tipped his outstretched hand back and forth. “Your boy Knox has finely tuned radar for this sort of thing. He saved us.”

  Of course he did. Knox had banged so many women, he could tell on sight from blocks away if there was a chance of panties dropping. “Well, Knox didn’t get to be a zillionaire by wasting his time trying to force a square peg into a circle.”

  “Keep Logan in the center,” Lara ordered. “We’ll alternate hair color.”

  Josh scruffed a hand over the blond hair that got him mistaken as Griff’s brother half the time. “Don’t you want to know
if the carpet matches the drapes?”

  “Not one bit,” she retorted. “Riley, Griff, then Logan, Josh, and Knox.”

  As everyone shuffled into place, Logan thought how good it sounded to hear their names all strung together like that. The five of them, reunited. Even if it was for a stupid photo shoot. And even if he had the pain of watching Josh repeatedly flirt the wrong way on a one-way street. God, he’d missed this. He’d missed out on so much. It would’ve been fun to share that first podcast with them. To watch Griff and Knox fall in love, and yank their chains about it. Logan was really damned sick of missing everything.

  He looked down the row. “Anyone plan to tell me how this works?”

  Griff angled sideways. Guess he’d picked up a few photo shoot dos and don’ts. Wasn’t that fucking hilarious, to watch the lieutenant shift his shoulders without being told. Logan wanted to make a crack about Griff practicing for his wedding-day photos—and barely stopped himself at the last minute, remembering that Chloe hadn’t accepted Griff’s proposal yet. Or whatever weird way they’d set it up. “We pick a topic a couple of days ahead of time. It gives us time to let anything big burble to the top of the old brain pan.”

  “Don’t overthink it,” Riley ordered. Because he always had to put in his two cents about the right way to do things. He’d once told them the proper number of times to shake after peeing. They’d all then thrown him in the pool. “Pretend we’re on the roof deck. Holding beers and eating sliders. Just shoot the shit, like we always do.”

  “Okay. But I think you skipped a step. Nobody told me the topic.” Conversation halted as the photographer snapped a fast series of shots.