“Let the government eat their burgers their way,” John said, “and I’ll eat’em mine.”
Ginny settled in one of the chairs, warmed by the midday sun, as the men bantered back and forth. She tried not to clench the beer too hard in her hand as she stretched out. She tried not to look too pointedly at Logan, sweaty and tan, his polo shirt open at the collar, revealing a stretch of skin she remembered licking in the darkness last night.
Then suddenly Logan crossed the yard and headed directly toward her. He slid a paper plate heaping with a thick, sizzling burger on the table beside her chair. His shadow fell over her, and she could smell him—hot grease, sun-warmed skin. He reached out and tipped her sunglasses down her nose just as she raised her lashes to meet his eyes. He brushed her cheek, softly, with one finger. Their gazes met and locked.
What she saw in those intense green eyes drew the air from her lungs. It was as if, in the meeting of their gazes, all the memories from last night passed between them, with all the same heat and passion and intensity. Leaving, in the end, the exquisite tenderness of unspoken promises.
“Hey, if you guys are going to act like this, I’m heading home, you got that?”
John dropped down in the chair across the table, his teeth white in his wide smile, his eyes dancing as he looked at the two of them.
Logan took a step back, swaggered those broad shoulders, and flashed his friend a reluctant grin. “Green-eyed envy, John.”
“Darn right,” John said. “Here I am, living like a monk, and where do I find myself seeking refuge? The House of Sin.”
Ginny made a little sound, a yelp of surprise. She wasn’t used to being the source of such innuendo, and she wasn’t sure if she should feel embarrassed or affronted, or just join in the banter.
“Good to see you’ve got a human side to you, Gene,” John said, fisting an enormous hunk of burger in his oversize hands. “Watching you up there at the podium at all those conferences, I was beginning to think you were all work and no play. I mean, you’re younger than me and it seems every week I see another published article with your name attached to it.”
Logan visibly perked.
“Didn’t you know, Logan? Ginny here is a regular publishing powerhouse. She’s responsible for the death of more trees than anyone else I know.”
“Come on, John,” she said, shifting in her chair, uncomfortable with being the focus of attention. “You know the trade journals use recycled paper.”
“Doesn’t make your accomplishments any less impressive,” he remarked. “Still, I don’t know if I approve of your choice in men.”
“Oh?”
There she was again, being witty Ginny, so full of clever little remarks. She could use the excuse that her mind was still short-circuited from Logan’s steamy look, but the truth of the matter was that she’d always been a social Hindenburg. Not even Miss Marples could teach her basic charm.
“Old Logan here,” John continued, as if oblivious to her discomfort, “has been as thorny as Ulex europaeus since he got back from Mexico.”
“Hey, watch your language,” Logan said, “there’s a lady present.”
“Gorse,” Ginny blurted, not used to being called a lady. “The common name for Ulex europaeus is gorse.”
Logan lifted a brow. “That’s botany humor, right?”
“Bingo, he can be taught,” John said, grinning with a mouthful of burger. “At least he’s got that much going for him. Maybe you can tame him, Ginny. He’s in dire need of some gentling.”
“Gentling?”
“Yeah. You know. Calming. Centering.” He paused for effect. “Settling down.”
“So,” Logan said in a firm and overly loud voice, “how’s that baby of yours, John?”
If a man’s grin could split his face, John’s face would be in two halves. His eyes shone over the ruddiness of his cheeks. “That baby of mine is doing just fine, Logan old pal, as I’ve told you a dozen times now.”
“You haven’t told me,” Ginny heard herself saying. “I don’t even know what you’ve named her.”
“Lily,” he said. “Short for Lilium.”
“Of course,” she murmured as Logan rolled his eyes. “Lily as in ‘of the valley’?”
“More like tiger lily,” John said. “She flails and scratches and has a temper you wouldn’t believe.” John stated this with the softest grin on his face, and his eyes misted over, as if he were seeing something very far away. “But when she smiles it’s like the whole world glows.”
“Listen to you,” Logan scoffed as he flipped his burger onto a roll. “You still count her age in days. What you’re seeing is gas.”
“That’s what the pediatrician said, but I say it’s baloney. She smiles, right at me. She knows who her daddy is.” John finished the last of the burger and settled back in his chair, cradling his belly with his hands and looking very much like a snake who’d just eaten something big and whole. “Daddy is the one who feeds her at three in the morning. Daddy is the one who changes the really gnarly diapers. Daddy is the one she always throws up on. I don’t think I’ve slept since she was born.” A beatific smile spread across his face. “But I wouldn’t give this up for anything in the world.” He winked. “You should try it sometime, Logan. Fatherhood, that is.”
Logan flashed him a look and then concentrated on the burger oozing grease onto his paper plate. “You’re fixing for trouble, John.”
“I think you found enough trouble for yourself.” John glanced at Ginny. “You ever see a baby born, Gene?”
“Uh…no.”
“Logan here has. He’s delivered more babies into the world than he can count.”
Logan kept his head down but gave John an unreadable look as he squirted ketchup on his burger. Ginny glanced at Logan, found herself looking at his hands. Those long-fingered hands. It was hard to imagine him as a doctor, in a white coat, tending to patients. Coaxing a laboring woman into pushing a child into the world. It was a part of Logan she didn’t know yet.
She knew so little of Logan, really.
“Hundreds and hundreds of babies, I imagine,” John continued. “All brought into the world by Logan here. He knows how fragile and amazing a thing it is.”
Logan’s voice held a hint of warning. “John…”
“I never knew how terrible a beauty it was,” John said, ignoring Logan and settling back in the chair, “until I was forced to watch the process myself. I’m glad I did, now. But boy, was I scared then.
“I mean,” he continued, struggling for words, “so much can go wrong. But when it goes right… Seeing that baby—our baby—come out into the world yelling with all the power in her lungs… First there was one woman with a swollen belly, suddenly there’s two people. There’s the baby, a whole new person, and she’s all ours to tend to and care for. It’s…” John shrugged. “It’s the most amazing thing in the whole wide world.”
A soft silence fell around them as John’s words lingered. The midday sun beat down hard upon Ginny’s skin, warming the part in her hair. Idly, she thought, I should go inside, get some sunscreen. With her redhead’s skin she’d be burned within the hour if she didn’t protect herself. But for some reason, she was reluctant to rise from the cushion of the chair. With John’s words, a sweet camaraderie fell among them, despite the sexual quivers shivering between her and Logan.
She glanced around the backyard, the blue smoke of the grill rising into the trees and the birds chirping amid the leaves. A bee lazily buzzed around a thatch of dandelion gone to seed. The laths of the outdoor chair slashed across her back, cushioning her still. A simple summer barbecue, she thought. This was what people did when they weren’t working. They sat in their backyards and grilled up some burgers or hot dogs and soaked in the sun and enjoyed the company of family and friends. This was what her friends did all those summers while she was hiding in the dampness of some musty laboratory filling her notebook with calculations and experiments. This was how people with normal lives lived.
A pang twisted her heart. Longing, yearning. She hid her gaze behind her sunglasses but fixed it on Logan. And felt the warmth of the loving afternoon twist around her heart and squeeze.
“You know,” John said abruptly, sitting up in his chair. “I shouldn’t be here right now.”
Logan straightened as if he’d been lost in thought, too. “John, you just got here.”
“No,” he said, rising quickly to his feet. “I really shouldn’t be here. This was a crazy idea. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t believe Judy let me leave.”
“John,” Ginny said, “it’s a three hour ride—”
“And the sooner I get on the road, the sooner I’ll be home.” He patted her hand absently. “I’m not being polite, Gene, trust me. I’ve got to get back to Judy. To Lily.”
“Oh.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say except goodbye. Ginny promised to call and give him her test results when she’d got everything settled. John shook Logan’s hand and thanked him for the burger, then the two men headed around the house toward John’s car, leaving Ginny alone in a suddenly empty, lonely backyard.
Logan poked his head around the side of the house a few minutes later. “I’m going in to make some phone calls,” he said. “After that, Ginny, we’ve got to talk.”
A chill washed over her though the sun still beat hot on her head. We’ve got to talk. She’d heard that before, and the words struck her hard enough to bruise. She curled her hand around the heated metal of the lounge chair and dragged it through the lush grass to a shady spot under a spruce tree, bracing herself for the “last night was a mistake” discussion.
Here we go again. Another ending, truncating a relationship that had hardly had a beginning. She’d spent a lifetime struggling with loss in one way or another. One nanny after another, gone. Granny, gone. Friendships with girls who lived in other countries across the sea, across the mountains, sustained for a few months with a barrage of letters that slowly petered out A lifetime of aborted relationships, of uncomfortable “discussions.”
She sank down in the chair, kicked off her sandals and curled her bare toes in the cool grass. Logan took a long time in the house. She closed her eyes and tried to doze, but memories of the night kept making her curl her toes into the ground. Best not think of that, she told herself. No use hoping for the impossible. Maybe she had only imagined that he had wanted her as much as she had wanted him.
She had to be cool and calm and not make a scene, she told herself. Then she could go back to the basement and finish her work as quickly as possible so she could leave this place. So her mid-thirties’ body had kicked into sexual overdrive. A natural process. Nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to be sorry for. No reason to mourn a relationship that had never truly been born.
Then he was there, standing before her, his arms crossed, his thumbs beating a rhythm of his own devising upon the balled mass of his biceps. She blinked open her eyes and met his fierce green gaze and felt every self-protective instinct inside her melt into pudding.
“I just got off the phone,” he said without preamble, “with my mother, my two sisters, three brothers and another old friend.”
“Oh?”
“I had to make sure they were all safe and secure in their homes or places of business.”
“Oh.”
“They have a bad habit of ‘dropping by’ unannounced. John wasn’t the first to do so. I think it’s a conspiracy.”
“Oh.”
Wasn’t she the soul of wit today. She struggled to find something sensible to say. Something cool and unruffled and reasonable. “They must worry about you.”
“Like hens. Every last one of them. Male and female.”
His black hair was haloed by the blue-white brightness of the sky, making him look achingly handsome. She wondered if he knew how fortunate he was to have so many people who loved him so deeply, then realized, with a start, that he had no need for one more person to love him so deeply.
Her blood went cold. She didn’t love Logan. She must have stayed out in the sun too long. Or she was too giddy with last night’s goings-on. This thing between her and Logan, whatever it was—and she expected it would soon be a “was”—was certainly not an affair of the heart. She must be crazy to be turning a fling into the sound of wedding bells.
“Ginny,” he said, his chest expanding as if he were bracing himself for something, “you’ve got to answer me one question first.”
“Yes?”
He hesitated. His knuckles turned white against his arms. He waited, almost expectantly, as if she knew what the question would be, when she didn’t have the least clue.
“Ginny,” he said finally, “what’s going to prevent last night from producing a whiskey-eyed boy with an aptitude for science?”
“Oh!”
“I didn’t do anything to prevent it,” he continued, all but growling in his discomfort. “I didn’t have much else on my mind but getting you in that bed. I didn’t stop to think of the consequences until this morning, when John started talking about his baby.”
Baby.
The word sang in her head. She’d never really thought about babies, about having some of her own. She’d long come to the conclusion that married life wasn’t going to be her destiny, that she’d live a more “interesting” life, devoid of husband or children or any such human responsibilities, with only her career as her rudder, guiding her through the murky waters of the future.
“Ginny…”
“You don’t have to worry, Logan,” she said as a strange dark hand closed around her heart. “I’m not pregnant.”
“If there was a ripe ovum anywhere in your body, lady, then there isn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell that you’re not pregnant—unless you’re on the pill.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But I wore…a diaphragm.”
“You wore a…?”
She nodded, and as Logan stared and stared she felt a flush of color rise up her neck. By dropping that little piece of information, she realized she was telling him more than the form of birth control she used. He knew she hadn’t stopped in the middle of their coupling to slip the thing in. In effect, she’d just told him that she’d been prepared for a sexual encounter last night, long before they left the house for their date.
She tilted her chin and tried to summon her usual patina of frost. She shouldn’t be ashamed for behaving like a responsible adult. She shouldn’t be ashamed for anticipating a possibility that had hovered between them since the day he’d caught her naked in his bedroom. This was the nineties, after all, and she was an adult female who finally—after all these years—was flexing her sexual wings. Responsibly. If she looked deep into her heart, she knew she didn’t regret last night—not at all.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“At least one of us was thinking last night,” she said, hating the coldness of her voice. “Thinking of the consequences.”
“I pretty much couldn’t think straight the moment I touched you, Ginny. That’s been the way of things since I first laid eyes on you.”
She took a deep breath, waiting for the hanging clause. The “but now that it’s the bright of day, you and I have to have a talk. Last night was fun, but…”
“I’m going to be honest with you, Ginny.”
Don’t. She didn’t want honesty. She didn’t need to know how cold she was underneath him last night, how stiff and awkward in lovemaking. She’d already heard one man tell her that, in excruciating detail. She wanted Logan to shut up and haul her off this lawn chair, drag her into his arms, kiss her senseless as he did last night and not wonder at the why of it.
“I’m a burn, Ginny.” His knuckles tightened on his biceps. “I’m unemployed. I have no plans to be employed. My car is in marginal health, I have no house or apartment of my own, my life is in total disarray.”
Her sunglasses slipped out from between her fingers and fell to her lap.
“There’s a lot yo
u don’t know about me,” he said. “There’s a lot you don’t know about what I’ve done, how I got to be in this place.”
Tell me. The words sang from her heart, but she did not say them out loud. For the sun beat hot down upon them and the world was all brightness and light, and she suspected the things he wanted to tell her needed to be told in darkness and in shadow.
“There’s no place in my life for a full-time woman,” he continued. “I can’t make commitments—of any kind.”
She sat there staring at him, thinking that something had definitely short-circuited her brain last night, because for the life of her she couldn’t think of anything to say to him. Nothing that would make sense. Because she wasn’t anyone’s “full-time woman.” She’d tried that once with a man and it had all blown up in her face, costing her more in emotional grief than she could ever pay. She’d vowed never to try again. It hurt much, much too much to try.
“Now,” he continued, “if you’re looking for a couple of weeks of really great sex, well, then that’s a different story. I’m able, ready and willing to be your stud, Ginny, but that’s about all I can offer.”
Really great sex. She let his words sink in deep. I’m able, ready and willing to be your stud, Ginny… She shuddered with a new sexual heat, a shudder that all but launched her off the chair. He wasn’t pushing her away. He was offering her a short-term commitment. He was offering her more really great sex.
“Uh…that’s okay.”
Logan started. “Excuse me?”
“Hot sex,” she said, her lips growing swollen and tender. “A few weeks of really great sex. I can handle that.”
Logan stepped forward, seized her by the shoulders and hauled her out of the lawn chair. “We’ll find out,” he said, his voice a rasp, “because you’re about to get more hot sex than you bargained for.”
9
LOGAN ATTACKED THE BUTTONS of her sleeveless shirt first. He thumbed the tiny pearls free of the holes and peeled the cotton back from her flesh. When she’d come sauntering out of the cabin dressed in this tailored shirt and matching shorts with their tiny gathered pleats and neat, even stitching, she’d looked as crisp and cool as an early autumn breeze. At the sight of her, he’d wanted nothing more than to toss John out of the backyard and strip the lady bare so he could reassure himself that the hot-blooded woman he slept with last night was still there, as eager and willing as before.
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