He was talking. Saying so many things and she couldn’t get them all straight. His father. But he was so close and she couldn’t breathe.
“It...”
“You don’t know what it means to have a man want you. And no, I don’t mean him. He’s got a little schoolboy crush on you because he doesn’t know what it means to want a woman any more than you know what it means to want a man. But I know, Rose. I know.”
His stare was hard and hot and she felt like it was pinning her right to that wall. “I’m so confident you’re going to lose our bet, I could give you lesson one in chemistry right now.”
She shivered, and he kept talking. “And if I were to teach you even half of what I know you would burn and bend like that metal I was just pounding. You wouldn’t survive it. So strong, little girl, until you get heated up. You don’t even know where that begins and ends.”
He reached out then, and rough fingertips made contact with her cheek. She shivered as he traced a line down the side of her neck to her collarbone, where he dragged his thumb back and forth. Just like he had done on the dance floor.
That touch.
It wasn’t just a touch.
There were layers to it. More to it than she had realized.
And she felt it. She didn’t just feel it where he touched, but she felt it down deep. Felt it in her stomach. In her lungs, as she fought to drag in breath.
Felt it between her legs.
Logan’s touch.
Chemistry.
She gasped, and she pulled away from him, putting as much distance between the two of them as possible.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Why don’t you run along, and we can forget that this happened. You can go back to seeing life the way you want. But when you have to get reality checks, don’t you get mad at me. Don’t you get mad at me for telling you all the things that you refuse to see, Rose Daniels. Because you want it that way. You want to keep running. And sometimes I have to stop you from running off a cliff.”
She did run. She ran like he was the very devil, chasing right after her. She ran like her life depended on it.
She started walking when she approached the house, when she got to the porch. She walked up the steps slowly, and pushed the door open.
Her whole family was in there. Dragging boxes out of the closet and unpacking Christmas decorations.
The one good thing about Christmas was that it would ward Logan off like it was garlic and he was a vampire. But right now she didn’t feel like being in the middle of the circus, either.
She couldn’t face this. Not now. Couldn’t deal with cheer, Christmas or otherwise. Couldn’t deal with her family, especially not en masse. Not while everything inside of her felt like it was bright with heat. Just like that horseshoe.
Just like he’d said.
Except, right about now she didn’t feel like she was going to bend. She felt like she was going to break.
“Rose,” Iris said. “We’re getting Christmas decorations out.”
“I was thinking tomorrow we could go up to Caleb Dalton’s place and cut down our own Christmas tree.” That suggestion came from Pansy.
“I... Sure,” she said. She ducked her head, and moved through the room. “I just have to... Bathroom.”
She ran upstairs as quickly as she could, her breath coming in harsh, uneven bursts. She flung the door open to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.
Horror twisted her stomach.
There was a dark smudge on her cheek, a trail down her neck, to her collarbone.
She leaned in closer, drawing her shirt down, examining the path that his touch had taken. She started to breathe hard, and she felt dizzy.
She wasn’t afraid of Logan. This wasn’t fear. It couldn’t be. He was the closest thing to...
Not a brother.
No. He wasn’t.
He wasn’t now, and he never could be.
He was...
She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t fear that had her breath coming in the short, harsh gasps. It wasn’t fear that made her heart race like this.
It certainly wasn’t fear that made her pulse echo between her thighs.
Wasn’t fear that had stopped her in the doorway and kept her staring at his muscles, either.
Logan Heath had turned her on.
It was like a flash bomb had gone off in her stomach, decimating everything, and lighting it up at the same time. She had never been turned on by a man in practice. In theory, sure. Handsome men who graced movie screens and country artists who sang the sort of songs that spoke of dark nights and intimacy she didn’t quite understand.
This was personal. It was real. He had been close enough to touch, and he had touched her. They had been sharing the same air. And his eyes... His eyes.
Why had no other men ever gotten to her? Now it seemed important to know, and she couldn’t sort it out. Were there really no men around that seemed attractive to her or was it something to do with him?
The thought made her stomach pitch.
Nothing about him felt familiar right now.
Nothing about herself felt familiar.
She had to forget that happened. She had to.
