“I imagine she knows him well enough to not get him mixed up with another man.”
“It isn’t that you look like him. Your eyes are that same blue. And there’s more. It’s the way you hold yourself. The way you smile. It’s like it’s mixed in with your blood.”
“It’s not like it is. It is.”
“Logan, I wish so much that one of my parents was still out there. Yours is.”
“Well, that’s just evidence of the cruelty of the world,” he said. “Because if Hank dropped dead tomorrow, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings any. In fact, I’d trade him to bring your daddy back in a second. Your father was like a father to me. He mattered. My mom mattered, your mom mattered. Hank Dalton doesn’t mean anything to me. Blood doesn’t mean anything to me. Not with him. Not now.”
“West?”
She could see that was a regret.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. You might not want it to matter, Logan, but I know it does. It’s okay.”
“You’re suddenly a safe space?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel very safe between us right now. But what it is... I don’t know what it is. I’m never going to let you do something that I think might hurt you. I trust it’s the same with you to me. We’ve got each other’s backs. Through anything, right?”
“You know I’ve got your back.”
“So maybe we can just trust each other there. Maybe we don’t agree. Things might not be safe. But they are as inevitable as the Christmas decorations on the street outside. And the mountains around the town. Things between us just are.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.”
“It’s just sex,” she said.
“You don’t know what that means.”
“Well, maybe I need to learn.”
“I can’t keep track of this conversation. Did you want me to reconcile with a father who never wanted to know me? Or did you want me to take you to bed?”
“Can’t I want both? Your emotional and physical well-being?”
“Sadly, I don’t think you know enough to help me find either.”
That stung. The rejection stung. And even though she was pretty sure that what he said was a lie, and he knew it, it still stung.
“I’m going to go to the booth.” She kicked the chair back and stood, making her way out of the coffee shop. And he didn’t go after her.
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS DIFFICULT for Logan, Rose and their mutual irritation to fit in the booth. But somehow they managed. They were both heating metal and hammering before the parade ended, getting things ready to go, the pounding of iron on iron a welcome ring in the air over the top of Rose’s highly unusual and blessed silence.
He didn’t need her opinions on the way that he chose to handle the family that he decided not to think about. It was his choice, dammit.
Rose didn’t have the right to say a damned thing. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t possibly. She had been a kid when their parents had died. So young that she didn’t have the kinds of memories that allowed guilt and blame to take hold. And anyway, she didn’t have the cause to. Not the way that he did.
But the other thing she didn’t have was memories of how his mother’s life had been.
He did. He remembered. He remembered, always, the wound his mother carried that his father had refused to involve himself in their lives. That she had never been able to get access to him after she had found out she was pregnant.
Stopped at the door by his wife. And then, again, years later when she had tried with some other women who had children by Hank to get what they were owed, they had all been stopped again.
He knew that she was ashamed of that. Of the fact she had taken a payoff, because Hank Dalton’s wife had offered that if they would go quietly.
He’d known she was ashamed she’d taken the money until the day she’d died. They’d needed that money, no question. Still, his mother had felt as if she had sold his relationship with his father for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver.
He remembered her ducking into a supermarket aisle or a store when she saw Tammy Dalton coming.
He’d overheard Ryder’s mom in the kitchen with his once. While his mother had cried.
“The embarrassment would be worth it to me, if he wanted his son. It’s not fair he has those other boys that get to have a dad, and he doesn’t. He always sends his wife out to handle me. I haven’t even spoken to him since before Logan was born.”
“It’s better for him to have us,” Linda Daniels had said. “All of us, than one stupid man who doesn’t know what he’s missing. He’s a sperm donor, that’s it. And Logan will always have us. And so will you.”
Logan had known who mattered before then, but it had all been cemented in that moment.
Logan had never cared about Hank. And he’d told her so. His mother had done everything she could to take care of him. And to take care of him well.
It had been all he could do to stop himself from driving across town, going to that big, beautiful Dalton ranch and defacing their property.
He’d been so angry when he was a teenager.
And then his mother had died.
The only anger he’d had left had been at himself.
Past that, he realized that the best thing he could do was forget. Forget that the Daltons were anything to him.
It was strange, the way that West had come into his life. Strange and wholly unexpected. But he realized that the likelihood that one of the women his mother had gone with was West’s. That there had been a connection between their mothers, and never with them hadn’t seemed strange until West had shown up in town, and ended up part of Logan’s day-to-day thanks to his
