Memories like ours lived with you forever, and I’d managed to numb them out. Now, with Logan back, they hit full force. “Sculpt, you gave me my dream. I ... I can’t even find words to tell you what that did for me after ...” I closed my eyes and felt him stiffen. “But I can’t.” The words were soft, and I didn’t even know if he heard me.
Kat cleared her throat, and it took him a second before he moved away and turned to Kat and said, “Matt reserved a table for you both near the stage.” Then he looked at me again. “Stay and hear me sing, Eme.” He paused briefly as if waiting for a response from me, then turned and strode down the hall, and disappeared around the corner.
“Shit. What was that?” Kat said.
I needed escape. Fast. With tequila in my blood and my head filled with Ping-Pong balls smashing around, I was a mess. I had to get out of here. Away from him and what he could do to me.
“Kat. I have to go.”
Kat took my hands in hers. “You’re emotionally fucked up. I get it, and this is my fault. If I’d known they were here, I’d have never suggested we come. I didn’t even know the whole band was in town. Come on. Let’s go before they rock the stage.”
Logan playing the guitar and singing was the last thing I wanted to see. I knew what he could do to me with his voice. He could wrap me up inside him with a pretty little bow and then with one pull unravel me into his arms. “You stay. Hang with Matt, calm him down. I’ll grab a cab.” Since we’d decided to stay at the condo tonight, which we usually did on our nights out, it was only a ten-minute cab ride.
“No way. I’m coming with you.”
I squeezed her hands. “Kat. You’re my bestie, I love you, but I need some time ... Sculpt ...” Fuck. How did I say that I just wanted to be alone?
“Let me call Deck. He can take you to the condo and hang with you for a while.”
“Kat. No.” Deck wasn’t a babysitter. Jesus, the guy had been part of the most elite task force for counter terrorism.
Her eyes narrowed, and I tried my best to give her a half-smile. She nodded. “You want to be alone and don’t want anyone pestering you.” I nodded. God, she knew me too well. “Fine, but I don’t like it. And text me as soon as you get home.”
“Tell Georgie I’m sorry. I’ll see her tomorrow for brunch.”
“Georgie hasn’t even left her place yet. She texted me ten minutes ago, said Deck stopped in to check in on her.” Kat lowered her voice. “Her words, Emily, ‘Deck needs a fucking army of red ants shoved up his ass.’ Then she told me she had to go change her outfit. I swear Deck should just fuck her and get it out of both their systems.”
I liked Deck, but I suspected he was the type who needed complete control and Georgie ... Georgie letting a guy like Deck tell her what to do ... well, that was an explosive overload.
We weaved our way through the crowd. I had just ducked under a guy’s arm when I heard him speak into the microphone.
I sucked in air, closed my eyes, and stopped dead. I knew without looking it was his voice. It made my pulse leap and my stomach drop as if I was in a free fall. It felt like his words were drawing across my skin.
Logan.
I slowly turned and saw him on stage.
I was locked on him.
His presence was captivating. He dominated as if nothing could touch him up there. He was sexy with his half-smile and messy hair yet still dangerous and unapproachable.
God, he was confident, always had been, and now looking up at him on stage I realized that this was where he belonged. Not in the ring beating his opponent to a bloody pulp, but up there with a guitar slung over his shoulder.
I knew why this band without even singing a single note would hit the big time. Him. Logan. His magnificence on stage drew you to him. That ease in his stance, how he held the microphone as if he was holding a woman in his arms.
Jealousy bit a chunk out of me as I thought of Logan with another woman. It was a lead weight in my stomach, and I never wanted to picture him with his arm slung over a girl again.
As he spoke to the crowd, I was mesmerized ... lost to the sound of his voice that trickled down my spine and heated my entire body. If felt like he was next to me, his breath wafting over my ear, his hand pressed to the small of my back. Oh God, he was in me.
“Damn, he looks smoking. Matt told me they’ve been touring small-time gigs for almost a year and just got noticed by some manager who’s taking them on,” Kat said.
Yeah, they were going to be big. I’d known that since the day I first heard Logan sing. And listening to him sing tonight would undo me like it had before.
Did he think he was absolved because he let me go? Because he gave up his tour money? Because he did it to protect me? Because he was a victim of Raul too?
Yes. God, yes. He did deserve forgiveness, but I couldn’t forget the image of him looking so cold and heartless at me. Was that inside him? Was there a part of him that could walk away if someone held a gun to my head?
I remembered him staring at me, expressionless, as I fell to my knees after being whipped. He watched it happen. He let it happen.
But Logan had saved me. Logically I knew that, but finding that trust again ... it was like reaching for an apple too high up in the tree.
Logan said something to the crowd, and then he laughed. It was the most magical sight. Logan rarely laughed, but when he did it was captivating. I couldn’t look away from his bright smile, his sexy bedroom eyes. I swear I could hear the women in the bar moan, and I was among them.
I was about to uproot my feet and stop gawking at the man who made my body ignite when he found me.
He found me with his eyes and didn’t let go. He was still talking to the crowd, but his eyes remained on me. His smile was gone, and even from a hundred feet away I noticed his hand tighten on the microphone.
Then he stopped talking and just stared.
My heart pounded at its cage. My blood pumped so quickly through my veins I thought I might combust. Logan was caressing me with his eyes and pulling at me to run to him.
And I did run—in the opposite direction—pushing my way through the crowd, ignoring Kat’s shouts. I was out the door before Logan sang his first note.
Chapter 15
I woke to Kat jumping onto the bed.
Kat landed on her stomach beside me, alcohol wafting off her skin. Her face was flushed, and she was smiling ear to ear. I groaned, flinging my arm over my eyes.
“What time is it?” I mumbled.
“Two. Nope, hmm, maybe fourishy. And you need to get up.”
I pulled the duvet up over my shoulders and turned on my side. “Kat. Four in the morning? Not a chance. I have Georgie’s brunch tomorrow morning then five horses to ride.”
“It’s tomorrow, and you really need to get up.” She yanked on the covers.
“Kat, seriously. Whatever it is can wait til morning.”
“Um, no. It can’t.”
I groaned and pried open my eyes. “Hope I’m waking up to some hot story about you and that guy Ream.”
Kat barked out, “Bah. Fantasy fuck denied. Nope. Ream won’t touch me with a thousand-foot pole. Actually, when he saw me tonight, he looked ill, then he walked away. So, I partied with Crisis. Jesus, that guy is crude, but hilarious. Man-whore and totally fuckable.” She put her finger to her lips. “Why did I come in ...? Oh yeah, your man is here.”
I bolted up. “What?” Holy shit. Oh my God. At the condo? “What? You mean here? In the condo here? Or downstairs and wants buzzed up?”
Obviously drunk and unconcerned over my panic, Kat shrugged. “In the kitchen here.”
“What?” I repeated then pressed my head into the pillow mumbling every swear word I could think of.
Kat fluffed her pillow and plopped her head down, closing her eyes. “I think he’s hurt you didn’t stay for the show. I saw him looking for you while he sang. He looked sad. Shit, I’m drunk.” She moaned and curled onto her side. “I tried to stop him from coming here, but ... I’m drunk, and well ... even when I punched him and told him you wanted nothing to do with him ... he kept coming. Did you know that he has abs like a damn brick house? Shit. Yeah, of course you do. I think I broke my hand punching him.” She lifted it up then let it flop back down on the bed.
“You didn’t break your hand.”
Kat mumbled something unintelligible. I think it was some sort of apology.
I heard a cupboard closing and then the fridge opening and closing. Then the sound of something being poured into a glass. He was here. Logan was in the kitchen. I shoved the covers aside, shaking my head at the passed-out Kat sprawled face first on my bed, her hands and legs spread-eagle.
Logan looked up the moment I appeared. It was an open-concept condo, and the only walls that existed surrounded the bathrooms and three bedrooms.
Time was in slow motion. His eyes started at my face, dipping down my body to my bare feet then back up again to meet my eyes. He leaned back against the counter and took a sip of his orange juice. A wave of desire hit me as I remembered him leaning against his truck eating ice cream and looking so ... so sexy. Like nothing in the world could touch him. I didn’t know why, but his confidence was a huge turn on for me.
Suddenly I felt naked in my pink flowered boxer shorts and white camisole. His eyes taking me in, it felt like his fingertips were reading brail across my flesh.
But anger could undo my embarrassment, and it did as I stopped a few inches away and glared. “Not cool, you being here.”
“Not cool, you taking off alone at midnight, drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk exa—”
“You drink four tequila shots?”
How did he know that? “Well, yeah, but—”
“Then you were drunk. You should’ve had Kat or Matt bring you back here, Eme.” He set his orange juice on the counter, and the sound made my pulse jump. His eyes remained on me, never once wavering. It’s what he did well. He could make someone quiver in fear without even opening his mouth.
He nodded toward the bedroom. “Kat?”
I huffed. “What do you think? Passed out. It’s four in the morning, and she’s drunk as a beaver.”
“Beaver.” He frowned as he thought about it. “Your dad used to say that about your mom.”
He remembered. I’d told him that one afternoon while we sat and had ice cream on the way back from the horses. My dad said beaver, because my mom used to move shit around in the house whenever she got drunk. I told Logan how my father tried to help my mom get sober, but then he got lung cancer and within six months he was gone. I’d been ten years old, and he died around the same time Kat and Matt lost their parents. I think that’s why we all connected so well. We needed one another. “Yeah.”
“Why’d you run, Mouse?”
“I have horses to ride tomorrow ... today and—”
“Stop biting the inside of your cheeks and tell me the truth. Why’d you run?”
Fuck. I so wasn’t ready for this conversation. He didn’t deserve to know that his voice lit me up like a firecracker, that staring up at him on stage undid me, and I couldn’t control the want inside me.