First to Fight Box Set: Books 1-5

by Nicole Blanchard

  “Let me put this to you straight. I am involved and there’s no amount of back-peddling that will change that fact.”

  Indignation, that has nothing to do with his attitude or the anger I know he must be feeling, balloons in my chest. “This isn’t like any other statement I’ve given. Can we just do what you called me here to do?”

  The fight goes out of him, and he drops to his knees in front of my chair. His head goes into my lap, and I find I don’t know what to do with my hands. After a moment’s hesitation, they come to land on his powerful shoulders. His voice is muffled when he begins to speak. “I’m so damn sorry this happened to you, honey,” he whispers.

  He clamps down around my thighs when I try to heave him upward. Mindless with panic, I don’t realize he’s pulling me into his arms until we’re both standing, and I’m pressed against his broad chest.

  “I changed my mind,” I say, voice obscured by the cloth. “I can’t do this. I can’t go through this again.” I look up at him, eyes beginning to burn with tears. “I’m not strong enough for this.”

  His head is already shaking before I even finish my pathetic pleas, and I want to curse myself for ever even considering the thought that he was attractive. For ever allowing him to see all these vulnerable parts of me.

  “I think you do want this,” he says. “I think you need to get it out. To face it.”

  “What has that done for me?” I hiss fiercely. “I did what I was supposed to do. I wrote the statements. I testified in court. I relived the worst day of my life for public consumption, and they still released him on a technicality.”

  Logan takes my hand and helps me down the hall to a secluded interview room. He pauses by the table to look down into my eyes. “I’m doing this because I’m, at the bottom of it all, your friend and I care about you. I want to help you.”

  “That’s interesting considering you were basically biting my head off when I walked in.” I whirl away, anger clipping my voice and causing my hands to tremble. I tuck them under my arms so he can’t see. “What? Did you think I owed it to you to bare all my wounds?”

  I hear his steps come closer and my spine stiffens. “Of course not,” he says. He doesn’t touch me, but I can sense his presence behind me. I have to snap straight to keep from leaning into his heat. “Of course not,” he repeats.

  Scoffing, I spin around. “Really? So the intimidating conversations about my past were . . . what? Occupational hazard?”

  He rolls his shoulders, his resolve finally cracking. “At first it was that; I guess you could call it. You were a new woman working with my family. Then, it became something more. I started to care about you.” My eyes immediately fall to the floor to avoid this line of the conversation, but he tips it back up. “I could tell something was haunting you, and all I wanted was to take that away. Then you got hurt, and I realized how much it’d fucking bother me if something happened to you.”

  “I don’t want you to care about me,” I say vehemently. “Don’t you see that?”

  His hand drops from my chin and his lips firm. “I wondered why that was. I wondered why you’d guard yourself so much. Why you kept running from what happened to you.”

  I turn again, eyes roving from corner to corner looking for an escape, but I find nothing but walls. “What? Having a murdering psychopath for an ex wasn’t enough?”

  “I’m sure that was nothing compared to the fact that he murdered your twin sister.” His words are muted, but they may as well be a gunshot.

  There’s a stunned silence as his voice trails off, and I’m catapulted back to the moments when I realized it was Paige lying dead on the floor. I don’t realize I’m crying soft, silent tears until he gathers me up into his arms and sits in one of the chairs by the table with me in his lap.

  His arms around me are the only things keeping me grounded. I pour out all my fear and despair and loneliness into his chest until there’s nothing left but a hollow ache in my chest.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” he asks, when there aren’t any tears remaining for me to cry.

  A long sigh shudders through me. “I thought it was nothing, at the time. I mean, not that missing people are nothing, just it didn’t seem like it would touch me in my little bubble. Everyone on campus just assumed they were isolated events . . .” I trail off for a second and then clear my throat. “Our roommate was the second person to go missing. She was the sweetest person. It’s funny. I can’t even remember the sound of her laugh anymore. I used to be able to remember her laugh, but one day, it was just gone. He took that from me. He took away Carly.

  “It wasn’t until Carly’s murder that the police started noticing the pattern, but we still didn’t pay it much attention. We were young and stupid, especially me, and I thought we were invincible.”

  Logan draws soothing patterns on my back, lulling me into a stupor and allowing the memories and words to roll out like they happened to someone else.

  “After that, I walked in on my fiancé, Gavin, kissing another woman. I was upset and I went out drinking. He found me there and tried to patch things up but Paige, P-Paige came and talked to me for a while.

  “It’s funny, the whole time we were dealing with Carly’s death, Paige was the one who couldn’t get out of bed, but the moment I needed her, she was there for me. She was the best part of both of us.”

  “You were identical twins?” Logan asks when my words bubble up and clog my throat.

  I nod against his chest. “Y-yes, but our styles couldn’t have been more different. She was very much the girly girl. They used to make fun of me in high school, saying that she got all the female genes, but it didn’t bother me because no matter what they said, I still had my best friend as a sister, and not many people get to say that.”

  “What was she like?”

  “I used to say she could have been a pop princess if she’d been a tween in the 90s. She was bright and bubbly. The kind of person who puts a smile on your face by just talking to her.”

  I pause and realize I’m smiling, which only makes the tears well up again. I haven’t remembered Paige and smiled in so long, and I know how wrong that is. Memories of her should bring me happiness, but all I feel when I think of her is the profound loss.

  Logan wipes away my tears, his big hands reassuringly gentle, and I lean into him like a cat seeking affection. “You sound like you were very close.”

  “The closest. We were the kind of twins who finished each other’s sentences, had the sixth sense type of connection.”

  “Did you notice something off the night she was killed?”

  Unable to look him in the face, I study his shirt instead as a miserable sucking blackness inside of me clouds out everything else. “That’s the thing, I didn’t. I didn’t, and I should have known. The one time it should have mattered for me to pay attention, I didn’t. I was so upset about stupid things that I didn’t even consider being more careful. I never should have let her go home alone.”

  “She came to the bar to cheer me up, like I said, but she had a project due, and I didn’t want to distract her.” I choke back another sob. “I didn’t even think about having someone go with her to make sure she got home safe, even after what happened to Carly.”

  “You said your ex was with you at the bar. Did you see him leave after you two spoke? Did he follow her out?”

  “The cops asked me all these questions, Logan,” I say wearily.

  “Humor me,” he says.

  I think back to that night like I have so many times before. “The last time I saw him was after I walked out of the bathroom. I didn’t see him after Paige showed up. Then he showed up at our house after . . . after.”

  “After Paige left, what happened?”

  “Logan,” I plead. “I don’t—”

  “I’m right here,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to face this alone anymore, honey.”

  “After Paige left, I stayed at the bar for a while. She told me to drin
k and dance and let off some steam—so that’s what I did. Then I went home.”

  “Did you notice anyone around you? Anyone who had been particularly interested in you or Paige?”

  I shake my head mournfully. “No one. No one that I can remember. I was so focused on me that I didn’t pay attention to anyone else.” I look up at him. “If I could go back, I’d do things so much differently.”

  “I can’t compare my experiences to you losing your sister, but I know well enough what it’s like to relive memories you’d rather forget. Wish you could change decisions that resulted in a loss of life. You may think I’m a fucking jerk for making you open these wounds, but I do it not only because it can help save other lives, but because you can’t let things like this fester. It eats you up.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get over what happened to Paige. I’ve tried.”

  “Let me help you.” He tucks the curve of my hair around one ear. “Let me help you put this to rest. You don’t have to fight alone anymore.”

  “I don’t want to fight at all.”

  “I know you don’t.” He kisses my temple. “After this, I’ll take you home, and we’ll get a shower and you can sleep for a week.”

  The tension melts out of me because a shower sounds amazing. “What else do you want to know?”

  “I’m going to be straight with you. The most recent attack leads us to believe it’s the same person who committed the crimes in Miami, but I want you to know before we get into anything else, that we’re already in touch with them and we’ve even put in a call to the F.B.I. as a precaution.”

  All the good vibes from the promise of the shower fade away. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “The files on the Miami cases mentioned he had a unique signature.”

  Bile rises and sticks in my throat. “You mean—the hair,” I choke out, “He cut her hair.”

  “We have officers checking on Gavin’s last known address and a detail tracking his movements since he was released from jail. If he jaywalks, we’ll know it.”

  With a thick swallow, I try to stem my rising panic. “I wish there was something else I could do to help.”

  “You’re talking to me, you’re dealing. We can’t ask for more than that.”

  We spend the next hour going over my memory of the walk home, then the attack. I tell him everything I remember, even the things I’d rather forget. He doesn’t push or prod. He just lets me tell the story at my own pace. I break down again when I tell him about finding Paige and he holds me through all of it.

  “What now?” I ask, when he’s done.

  “Now, we go home,” he says as he puts an arm around my shoulders. “And we take that shower. I’ll make you dinner for a change. Then we’ll have a beer and watch television until our brains are numb. After that, I think we both need some sleep.”

  We walk out of the police station together and for the first time in over a year, I don’t feel the empty loneliness that had once been such a constant companion. I hold the feeling close and press myself more securely against his side.

  I’m not sure what tomorrow holds, but for today, I’ll take the comforts he’s offering.

  Logan

  After an exhausting day for the both of us, I almost sleep through my alarms the next morning. My back creaks when I sit up, and I glare down at Rocky who’s curled up between my legs. The bed is barely big enough for Piper and me as it is, but Rocky’s decided he sleeps with me or doesn’t sleep at all. At three a.m. I caved and let him hop up and curl up next to me. Curling up next to me turned into snuggling. Finally, I just let him and dozed off.

  I let Rocky out for his morning business as I down a cup of coffee, then brush my teeth. When he’s done, we both check on Piper, who is still sleeping. Even though he whines, I shut the bedroom door and cross to the bed where she’s curled up around a pillow, her gold hair fanned out around her.

  She simply looks too good for me to ignore. I dive back in to bed and wrap an arm around her from behind. She automatically arches back into me, searching for warmth and mumbling. She’s just as soft and warm as I imagined and I couldn’t dream up a better way to get up in the morning.

  Well, I could, but she deserves what I have in mind instead.

  With my body bracketed behind hers, I use the hand wrapped around her waist to dive under her little sleep shirt. She makes a purring sound in the back of her throat and stretches, her body rubbing against me in a way that makes me hiss out a breath. My hands meet bare, soft skin and then it’s my turn to make a sound in the back of my throat. She fills my hand perfectly and I knead her breast until the purrs become low moans. When I take her nipple between my fingers the way I remember she likes, her moans intensify.

  “Logan, what—” her voice breaks as my hand abandons her breasts and glides down her stomach. “Oh my god.”

  “Good morning.”

  Her response is lost on a moan as my hand dips under her shorts. One of her hands grips my wrist, her nails digging into the skin, but I take my time tracing a leisurely path around her abdomen. I mark her hip bones from one side to the other, then feel her thighs quake under my hands. When her shorts become too restrictive, I deftly maneuver them down, but leave them imprisoning her thighs.

  “Off,” she whispers impatiently.

  I nip at her ear. “No way in hell. I don’t want to give you any chance to escape.”

  She chuckles, but it’s breathless. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Not taking that chance. You’re gonna stay here. I’m gonna finish what we started the other day, then it’ll be your turn to have breakfast in bed.”

  Her breath catches. “I’m not going to argue. I promise there won’t be much of a wait this time.”

  I leverage up so I can see her face. “Wanna bet?” The tortured grimace makes me grin and I use the distraction to slip my fingers between her softness. Whatever objection she was going to make dissolves and her eyes drift closed.

  I arrange her underneath me so I can reach her nipples with my mouth as my fingers start to make her writhe beneath me. She clutches me to her chest and the sexy as hell look on her face alone would have me hard as a rock if I weren’t already. I’m teasing her to the edge with flicks of my tongue on her rosy nipples when her own hands find my hardness underneath the sweats I forced myself to wear to bed.

  I look at her and find a misleadingly innocent look on her face. “Piper,” I growl. “The hell are you doing?”

  “It’ll be worth the wait,” she says with a grin that lights up her blue eyes. “I promise.”

  She pulls down the waistband of my sweats and delves under my briefs to palm me. I hiss out my own breath as her fingers ring my cock with one confident, devastating hand causing me to lose rhythm with my own attention.

  “This is why you need a headboard.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can make you hold onto it until I’m done.”

  She bites her lip, releases. “But I like touching you.” To emphasize her point, her hand tightens and explores my length. “I like touching you very much.”

  All ability for conversation fails me, so I decide to put my mouth to better use. I rip off her shorts and panties in one swift movement, then stretch out alongside her. She sits up at my abrupt movement, but her eyes are on my cock where her hands are working me up and down. Before I can make another move, she leans forward and wraps her lips around me. I look up at the ceiling and my whole body tenses as the pleasure of her mouth on me washes through me.

  For a few long minutes, I revel in the suction of her mouth and the grip of her hands. When she uses one to cradle the weight of my balls, I reach over and arrange her naked thighs on either side of my head. The action is so quick she can only shiver and then my mouth is on her. The sensation is double-fold because the second my tongue comes in contact with her clit, she sucks in a sharp breath around my cock.

  I’m surrounded by the scent and taste of her and I feast like a starvin
g man. With my hands clamped around her thighs, there’s no way for her to escape, and based on the moans she’s making against me it won’t take long for her to come against my tongue.

  Normally, this position doesn’t do it for me. I’m either too focused on my own pleasure to attend to the woman’s or so focused on her to come myself. That’s not the case with Piper. Each of her movements, her sounds of pleasure, only fuels my own. The closer she gets to orgasm, the wilder she gets as she sucks me deep into her throat.

  I circle her waist with my arms to hold her still as I intensify my own attention on her clit, sucking it between my lips and laving it with my tongue. She screeches against me and her thighs begin to tighten rhythmically on either side of my head. I have to ignore everything she’s doing while I follow the line of her to the source of her desire.

  After only a few strokes she tightens against me, then takes me deep into her throat. Her hands constrict around me and the combination of her orgasm and the head of my cock bumping the back of her throat rips my own orgasm straight through me. I try to pull away, but she locks herself around me until I see white.

  When I come down, I pull her trembling body back up mine and fit her warmth against me. “So,” she says after a deep, satisfied sigh, “you said something about breakfast in bed?”

  A few minutes later while Piper’s in the shower, I leave her a note, letting her know I took Rocky with me and that I’ll be right back, and then I gather up his leash and lead him out to the truck.

  We stop at the Sunshine Cafe where Sofie and Livvie like to get breakfast, and I order us a couple breakfast platters and some to-go coffees while Rocky waits outside.

  The server is handing me the to-go containers when the two women come in through the doors, their various kids in tow.

  Livvie brightens when she sees me, tugging her son Cole along behind her. “Logan! Good morning.”

  “Hey, ladies,” I say and kiss her cheek, then lean down to ruffle Cole’s hair.

  Sofie gives me a hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “Yeah,” Livvie adds. “We don’t normally see you up this early. Or this happy. What have you been doing?”