“I’ve got all the time in the world now,” Logan said. “So I’m couch-surfing across America.”
She tilted her head, contemplating. “That actually sounds appealing.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Maybe not couch-surfing,” she said, “but I envy the lack of a schedule, the ample time you have. Summers with my grandmother were freewheeling like that, days that unfurled without a single lesson or appointment or plan. And those were the happiest months of my life.”
“Is your grandmother the rich relative?”
Her stomach tightened. “Rich?”
“Come on, Red. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
She hated to admit that Logan pinned her good. “It’s the Saab, isn’t it? I have a weakness for foreign cars.”
“It’s not the car or jewelry.” His gaze dropped to the pearls at her throat. “It’s the boarding school and the Mozart you hum in the shower. You ooze class. It’s like a scent rising off your skin.”
“My parents are wealthy,” she said with a tilt of chin, “but I worked hard to get where I am.”
“I didn’t say otherwise.”
“Last time I looked, you couldn’t buy a Ph.D. Or an M.D.” Or love, for that matter. The only wealth that really counted.
“I’m making an effort to point out the gulf between us, Red.”
“So did you go hungry to bed as a child? Had no shoes for your feet?”
He swung his face away and scanned the crowd as the speakers hissed static between twanging country songs. “Not me or my eight siblings. There’s a lot of room on a cattle ranch.”
“Did you all sleep in one bed, head to foot?”
He raised the beer to his lips. “My wit and charm are working on you already, I see.”
“Working like magic.” She took another gulp of the tasteless beer. “So what did your parents do on this ranch?”
“He was a veterinarian.”
“So his son didn’t fall far from the tree, then.”
“I still had to work two jobs to help pay for medical school. Wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise.”
“I have no doubt.” She’d never had to worry about money for schooling, but her family had other ways of making sure she understood the value of a dollar.
“Working on a ranch put dirt under my fingernails,” he said, slugging down the last of his beer. “The kind that never comes out.”
He frowned into his mug, as if surprised to find it empty. Her gaze fell to his hands. They were nicked here and there, clean, strong, and work-hardened hands. All she could think about was how rough they’d feel running up her inner thigh.
His throat flexed. “I’m acting like an ass.”
“Isn’t that the point of this date?”
The honesty of her own words caught her by surprise. The truth was that she didn’t really want to argue with Logan, even if he always knocked her off-kilter. With a half a glass of beer in her, she was willing to admit she liked the challenge. She liked the attraction.
She liked him.
Just like that, he kicked back on the rear legs of his chair as if he couldn’t get far enough away from her. “You went to boarding school as a kid.”
Back to that, are we? “Yes, I did. When I was eight years old.”
And just like that, his chair legs rattled against the linoleum floor.
“I know.” She was used to that response. She didn’t know that was unusual until she went to medical school with scholarship students. “My parents are both surgeons at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Everyone we knew sent their kids to boarding school. It seemed the natural progression.”
“Did you have pigtails?”
Odd question. “Yeah, sometimes, I suppose.” Does he really want to know the ugly? “I had freckles and buck teeth, two.”
“And so, freckled and with your hair in ribbons, they sent you off to Switzerland when you were in second grade.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Zurich, actually.”
“Sounds lonely.”
Her throat pulled. Boarding school had been terrifying, until she’d finally learned enough French to made friends with the other girls. She knew no other kind of life, until she started spending summers with her grandmother.
“When I was eight,” Logan said, “I was riding horses, sweeping out stalls. I helped my father with birthing the foals. And every night, without fail, our family of ten ate dinner together.”
“Holy Norman Rockwell.” She spoke it like a joke, but it opened up a new hollow inside her. “We grew up very differently.”
“Worlds apart.”
“Couldn’t be farther.”
“Absolutely.”
The point was agreed upon. So why were they laboring to make it? Ignoring, in the process, that they were both of a scientific bent, had fought through graduate school, and weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
A tray clattered on the table between them. The steam of the hot pizza filled the space.
“One pizza, everything on it,” the waitress said, tearing off the check. “I’ll get you more beer.”
Jen barely heard the woman, feeling as hot as the confection of melted cheese sizzling between them.
“It’s too hot to eat,” Logan said.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “We should let it cool.”
He pinned her with that clear, green gaze. “That’s one thing, Jenny Vance, that we can agree on.”
***
A soft, cool rain greeted them when they left the movie theater later that evening. Logan welcomed the chill. After sitting in a dark room with Jenny’s smooth thighs constantly in his visual field, he needed an icy shower.
“We’d better get to the truck,” he said gruffly, shrugging his jacket over his shoulders, “it’s going to pour.”
The air in the car was heavy and humid, and the insides of the windows sweated with moisture. He turned the key and revved up the motor, trying to ignore the subtle scent of strawberries as Jenny settled in beside him.
“So,” he said, “how did you like the movie?”
“Fabulous.”
He didn’t believe that for a minute. “Got a favorite car crash?”
“I wasn’t keeping count.”
“But you were counting the bodies, yes?”
“Nope.”
“Admit it, Jenny.” He turned out onto the highway
