Trust An Even Hand

by Chloe Cox

  There was a pause.

  “You planning to clone yourself, Charlie?” Gavin said.

  “I can do it,” Charlene insisted. “Please let me do this for you,” she said, this time looking at Olivia.

  Olivia, who was tearing up.

  “Just don’t cry,” Charlene warned her. “You’ll make me cry, and I don’t want to have to do my face all over again.”

  “Are you sure?” Olivia said, kind of crying. “I mean, that is so much work—”

  “Work is what I do,” Charlene said, and realized how disturbingly accurate that was. “Please let me do this for you. Please?”

  Olivia looked at Gavin, and Gavin looked at Luke, and grinned. Wait. Gavin grinned?

  Charlene’s sixth sense started screaming. Gavin was a Dom, through and through, and she had a feeling she’d just walked into something.

  “On one condition,” Gavin said.

  Charlene looked at Olivia. Olivia shrugged.

  She’d totally walked into something.

  “What?”

  “You let the best man look after you today.”

  Luke. Luke freaking Logan was the best man.

  Charlene closed her eyes, though she knew it wouldn’t matter. She heard the chair next to her move, heard those cowboy boots on the wooden floors. Heard him sit next to her.

  When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her. Grinning at her. Studying her.

  Suddenly that feeling of nakedness, of total exposure, that she’d only ever felt around certain Doms, washed over her. Like he could see everything. Like there was no point in hiding or arguing. Slowly the rest of the world faded away, and she realized she’d stopped breathing.

  Charlene shook her head.

  “I don’t need looking after,” she said. “No offense.”

  “No offense taken,” Luke said, just as easily as before. “But that doesn’t change a thing.”

  Charlene looked at Olivia, then Gavin. Both of them smiling. Both of them traitors. She knew what they were up to—they’d planned this. They’d planned this. And now she felt like she’d been abandoned all alone out in some unknown territory without a map while a relentless Dom hunted her. And the worst part was that, even though she knew better, she wanted to get caught.

  “You knew I was going to offer to plan your wedding,” she said to Olivia. More of an accusation than a question.

  “We had an idea,” Olivia admitted.

  “But why—”

  Suddenly Luke stood up, and Charlene stopped talking. The grin was mostly gone. Just those gold-flecked blue eyes flashing in his chiseled-granite face, his jaw hard, his expression stern.

  All Dom.

  “It’s not up for discussion,” he said.

  And she believed him. Instantly.

  Charlene opened her mouth to try to speak, but no words came out. She looked helplessly at Olivia.

  “I’m afraid he’s right, Charlie,” Gavin said.

  “It’s the only way I’ll feel ok with you taking on all that work,” Olivia said.

  Dazed, Charlene let Luke pull her chair out, and when he offered her his hand, she took it. Stupid. The charge of his touch raced through her and short-circuited her brain—again. She couldn’t take much more of this without completely losing her mind.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Olivia says we have an appointment with a florist,” he rumbled from somewhere above her. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t do anything. Hell, she’d just forgotten about the appointment she herself had made.

  Then Luke chuckled.

  Charlene looked up, intending a withering glare. Then she saw those eyes, and forgot what she was going to do.

  “I bet you’re used to being in charge, aren’t you?” Luke said. “At your restaurant.”

  “I am,” she said softly.

  He grinned.

  “That’ll be a nice change of pace, then,” he said.

  Charlene hated that she believed him.

  Chapter Two

  Luke couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

  That wasn’t new. He could never take his eyes of Charlene Bastien whenever he was lucky enough to see her. But this time, up close, he could see everything. The tension in her body as she gathered up all her things, the way she couldn’t stop moving, not even for an instant, not even when she was sitting down—she still fidgeted with her hands. Like she was juggling a bunch of balls up in the air and if she stopped they’d all crash down around her. She moved like someone who was always running.

  Not your sub, he reminded himself. Therefore not his responsibility.

  Then Charlene turned around and looked up at him with those big brown eyes.

  Yet.

  “Give me those,” he said as she wrapped her tiny arms around a stack of overstuffed binders full of Lord knew what.

  “I can carry my own stuff, thank you.”

  “Nope.”

  The startled look on Charlene’s face did nothing to hide her response. Dilated pupils. Flushed cheeks. To cover it, she glared up at him again.

  Too bad.

  “I saw you stumble,” he reminded her, and wrapped his big hands around the stack of binders. He could carry them in just that hand if he wanted. “You can have them back downstairs.”

  She let her hands fall helplessly by her sides, her fingers rubbing together. He could already tell that she loved restraints.

  He’d let himself think about that later.

  Shaking his head, Luke went ahead of her. Normally he’d hold the door for her, but having seen her totter on those heels on the narrow stairs, he had a better idea.

  When he got to the bottom of the first flight of stairs—the narrow, rickety attic stairs—he looked up to see Charlene peering down at him.

  “You trying to look up my skirt?” she said.

  He was trying to make sure she didn’t kill herself in those heels. She’d be a pleasure to catch if she fell, soft and round in all the right places. And he knew she’d enjoy that as much as he would.

  Luke said, “If I wanted to look up that skirt, I wouldn’t have to try this hard.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Luke grinned. She knew exactly what it meant.

  “Get your ass down here,” he said. “I’m not gonna be late my first time at a florist.”

  Despite herself, Charlene laughed. Just a tiny bit.

  He put out his hand to help her with the last few steps, but she shook her head, and climbed down by herself. Two steps forward, one step back with this one.

  “Are you going to tell me what this is really about?” she said as they started down the rest of the stairs together.

  Luke played dumb.

  “I think it’s about flowers,” he said.

  “Really,” Charlene said acidly. “That’s why you’re taking a day off work? Don’t you have some huge company to run, some giant building to…build?”

  “Nah.”

  She looked up at him, like she expected more of an explanation. An explanation she wasn’t going to get. Eventually Charlene looked away, her eyes forward, her whole body language screaming “pissed off.” But she put her hand on the railing the rest of the way down.

  “You want a ride?” he asked her as he handed her back her stack of paperwork. They’d made it down. She hadn’t died.

  “No,” she said. She paused as he held the front door open for her, her eyes lingering on his hand holding the door. Finally she wrenched her gaze up to meet his, and it was beautiful. Even pissed off, she was beautiful.

  “Just this one day, Luke,” she said. “One appointment, you can do whatever it is that you and Gavin secretly plotted between the two of you, and then please leave the real work to me.”

  “What secret plot?” he said innocently.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “There is literally no reason for you to come along, so obviously there’s some sort of…plan.”

  Luke grinned down at h
er. He liked her fire.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Charlene said, and looked away, because she was lying. “I just work best by myself, and it really makes no sense, and—”

  Luke didn’t do lies. He walked straight through the open door while Charlene was still making up reasons to make her life more difficult, juggling his car keys in the air.

  “If I get there first you owe me a Coke,” he said.

  “I don’t like being kept in the dark!” she shouted after him.

  He had to give her that. It did suck.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t last much longer.

  As it was, Luke took a wrong turn and got stuck behind a delivery truck on the way to the flower place. A couple of guys were unloading two by fours from the back of the truck and into the old building on the corner, making quick work of it. Good materials. Someone was renovating. He felt a pang of drywall jealousy.

  He hadn’t been able to get his hands dirty much in the last few years. His company had gotten big. Lots of engineering contracts, lots of construction contracts. But Luke had always been a hands-on kind of guy, and while he would always love the design and control of engineering, he needed to build something soon. And the big stuff wasn’t so interesting anymore, and he knew why: he’d already beaten it. Boring.

  Luke needed a challenge.

  And he knew all the ways it was wrong, but damn if Charlene Bastien didn’t feel like a challenge. She was more than that, obviously. She was her own woman with her own broken heart, her own burdens. And she was the only woman Luke Logan had never been able to get out of his mind.

  He’d been waiting a long time. Luke still remembered the first time he’d ever seen her, at a house BDSM party here in NOLA, years before they had a club. When she was still with her spineless shitstain of an ex.

  Hell, he remembered every time he’d seen her. It was like a spotlight followed her around. He couldn’t explain it any more than he could take his eyes away.

  But Charlene had disappeared from the scene when she broke up with her ex—Luke remembered him, too, some guy named Jimmy Walters. The one time Luke had gone to get involved, one night when he saw Charlene crying, she’d waved him off. There hadn’t been any club protocol, nothing that allowed Luke to go over there and take care of a shitty Dom with house authority, other than just his fists. And Charlene obviously hadn’t wanted that.

  And then she disappeared.

  Luke’s hands tightened on the wheel as he thought about it. He would have tracked her down, would have made sure she was ok, if Gavin hadn’t warned him. Charlene meant to disappear, so Luke respected it. But he’d hated it.

  And he knew what Gavin and Olivia were up to, having Luke look out for her, just like Charlene did. Well, she knew half of it—the good half. Charlene sure as hell knew about the chemistry that she had with Luke; anybody with eyes knew about that. And now that Gavin had Olivia, he believed in love and marriage and all that and wasn’t shy about trying to get Luke and Charlene together. Luke tolerated it, because his friend was in love. But Luke knew better, and so did Charlene. Marriage wasn’t for everyone. That was why they were perfect for each other.

  The other half of why he was following her in his truck, the bad half? Luke was hoping that that never came up. That Gavin was wrong, that he was just paranoid, after all the trouble the club went through when it was opening. That Alan Crennel, the guy who ran the other BDSM club in town—the guy who’d spread all sorts of rumors about Gavin, trying to get Club Volare shut down—might be kind of a sore loser, but not a terminally stupid one.

  Because if Crennel was trying to sabotage Gavin and Olivia’s wedding, too, that qualified as “terminally stupid.” But there had been a lot of mishaps so far. Luke didn’t know the details, but he knew Gavin was concerned.

  Whatever the danger, Luke wasn’t going to let it get to Charlene. She had enough to worry about. And that’s why Luke was stuck behind a goddamn delivery truck in the first place—because it was his job to look out for that kind of trouble, not Charlene’s. The idea that she might have to deal with Crennel’s harassment was simply unacceptable.

  He rolled down his window.

  “Pull over,” he said, loud enough to carry.

  One of the delivery guys flipped him off.

  He didn’t have time for this.

  Luke put himself through school doing these kinds of jobs. He moved people, drove trucks. Did work. And he knew that these guys had plenty of room, could just go up on the curb. No reason to stop traffic.

  In the distance, an ambulance blared. Luke got out of his truck.

  One of the guys in the back of the delivery van jumped down, came toward him—and stopped.

  Luke was a big guy.

  “You hear that ambulance?” he said.

  The delivery dude was just a young guy, wearing the jumpsuit, but not happy about it. End of a long day, probably. Maybe he even wanted to pick a fight, but not with Luke.

  “We’re almost done,” he said. After a second, he looked down.

  “You’re done now,” Luke said. “Get in the cab, pull up on the curb and let these people pass. Or I’ll do it for you.”

  The young guy opened his mouth, then shook his head.

  “You know how much shit I’m gonna get?”

  Luke turned around, back to his truck.

  “Don’t care.”

  He had somewhere to be.

  Chapter Three

  Ok, it was official. In addition to being the hottest Dom on the planet, Luke Logan was also the most irritating man on the planet. Someone should call the Guinness Book of Ridiculous Records.

  He had all but confirmed that he and Gavin had cooked up some sort of plot involving Charlene, but they were keeping her in the dark. That kind of thing drove her crazy. Charlene could manage and organize the invasion of freaking Normandy if she had to, but only if she could be in control. Trusting other people to get it right was where you went wrong. Plus, keeping her in the dark was just rude.

  Charlene blew a non-existent strand of hair from in front of her face and opened the door to Grimaldi’s. She half closed her eyes and let the scent of flowers and plants wash over her—it was bright and earthy at the same time, and she loved it. If she hadn’t found cooking, she would have been perfectly happy being a botanist, or a gardener, or just a general-purpose plant lady.

  And this was by far her favorite florist. Mrs. Grimaldi kept the place crowded and overgrown, with bougainvillea soaring up to the ceiling, coral honeysuckle and moonflower hanging from living walls along the sides, rows of delicate orchids towards the back. It was like one of those scenes in Jurassic Park, except without any dinosaurs trying to kill you. Definitely one of her happy places.

  Charlene was smiling by the time she got up to the register.

  “Hi,” she said to the young girl working the desk. The girl looked up from her phone and blinked through her bangs, which were dyed blue and gray. And ‘girl’ wasn’t wrong—she was young. Charlene would bet an adult beverage that Blue Bangs here had a fake ID.

  “Hi,” Blue Bangs said softly. She was folded up onto the chair behind the register, long, skinny legs and arms at angles all over the place.

  They looked at each other.

  “I have an appointment,” Charlene said helpfully.

  Blue Bangs unfolded from her perch on the chair and leaned forward towards the computer monitor in front of her, giving her face that weird pale-blue glow to match her bangs. It was kind of cute.

  Well, until she cringed.

  “There a problem?” Charlene asked.

  “Um. I have to talk to my manager?” Blue Bangs said.

  Charlene smiled at her encouragingly. “I talked to Mrs. Grimaldi a few days ago. It’s for the Colson/Cress wedding.”

  “No, I know,” Blue Bangs said, not making eye contact. “It’s just, I still have to talk to my manager? About that?”

  Something was off. Charlene studied t
he young assistant even as she heard the door open and close behind her, the sounds of a mother coaxing a child wafting through the scented but otherwise-silent store. Blue Bangs looked up with obvious relief as another customer appeared, and Charlene felt bad for her. Whatever the problem was, this young girl did not know how to deal with it. Charlene remembered feeling like that practically all the time when she was younger, and not feeling like that was pretty much the best part of getting older.

  “Is your manager in the back?” she asked gently.

  Blue Bangs nodded, still not sure who to pay attention to.

  “I’ll just wait until she comes back, ok?” Charlene said and stepped aside, waving a young, frazzled-looking mom and her adorable pig-tailed child up to the front of the queue.

  “I’ll be right over there,” Charlene said, and waved to the smiling little girl. Blue Bangs smiled with relief and nodded. But the look she gave Charlene was weird. Curious, maybe, but also…wary?

  Like Charlene was the weird one here.

  She shook her head and turned back towards the plants and told herself she was just being paranoid. She’d get it handled, whatever it was. There was no way another wedding thing could go wrong; that would put Olivia’s streak at, like…she didn’t even know. But pretty much every vendor had cancelled on them so far. Whatever, Charlene would fix it.

  And she’d let herself smell these wonderful flowers, rather than think about how an eighteen-year-old girl had just managed to make her feel like she didn’t belong, somehow. Which was ridiculous. It was like one of those feelings out of memory—for a second Charlene had been a little kid again, out with her mostly deadbeat father, acutely aware that she never quite belonged in any of the expensive places he ever took her (but only during off hours). The only other time she’d ever felt like that was when her ex, Jimmy, had made it pretty obvious that he’d begun to find his wife’s presence at kink parties to be an inconvenience.