“No, thanks, I’m fine—”
“Might give you something else to do with your mouth.”
“But Jen’s loving this story.” John grinned, his eyes full of teasing. “Aren’t you?”
“Riveted.” And she was, as much the riptide rushing between the men as by John’s words.
“The thing is,” John continued, “so much can go wrong during the birth. But when it goes right it’s a miracle. Seeing that baby—our baby, our flesh and blood—come into the yelling with all the power in her little lungs. She’s already a whole new person, all ours to tend to and care for.” John shrugged and shook his head. “It’s the most astonishing sight in the whole wide world.”
John stopped talking, his gaze traveling a thousand miles away. The midday sun beat hard down upon her skin, warming the part in her hair. Idly, she thought, I should go inside, get some sunscreen. With her redhead’s skin she’d be burned within the hour if she didn’t protect herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to rise from the cushion of the chair. Waiting for John to say something more, or for Logan to add to the conversation, because there seemed to be a lot more to the story that wasn’t being said and she’d be damned if she missed it.
“You know.” John stood up from his chair. “I shouldn’t be here right now.”
Logan straightened as if he’d been lost in thought, too. “You just got here, dude.”
“Yeah,” he said lifting his hands to his hips, “but I’m feeling weird about it now. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t believe Judy let me leave, or that I thought it was a good idea to just take off.”
“John,” Jenny said, “You wanted to see my research—”
“Maybe another day. The sooner I get on the road the sooner I’ll be home. Shoot me an email instead, I’ll have more time to pour over your numbers. But right now I’ve got to get back to Judy. To Lily. That’s where I belong.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say except goodbye. Jenny promised to forward him her test results when she finished the last of the extractions and analysis. John shook Logan’s hand, thanked him for the burger, and then Logan walked John around the side of the house toward John’s parked car, leaving her alone in a quiet backyard. Moments later, she heard the pop of gravel under tires and then Logan came back around the side of the house. She curled her legs up tight on the lounge chair, clutching the wooden arms, not knowing what to expect as he approached, his hands curled into fists in his pockets.
“I have to make some phone calls.” He stopped a safe distance in front of her, his face inscrutable. “I have to do it now.”
“Okay.”
After that, Jenny, we’ll talk.”
A chill washed over her, despite the sun beating hot on her head. She’d heard those words before, and they struck hard enough to bruise. He swiveled away before she could read his face. He headed up the stairs to the deck to enter the house, leaving her heart beating a tattoo into her chest. We’ll talk meant I have something bad to say to you. It meant news of Granny dying. It meant she was to be sent away to boarding school. It meant her ex had found a more exciting woman and didn’t want anything to do with Jen Vance anymore.
No, that couldn’t be right. She hadn’t imagined the current sizzling between her and Logan. Even John had noticed it. She jolted out of the lounge chair and pulled it back, out of the sunshine, into a spot under the shade of a spruce tree. In that shadow she dropped back in the chair, bracing herself for the inevitable.
Logan took a long time in the house. She closed her eyes and scrabbled for cool distance from what was about to happen. She itched to return to the comfort of the basement lab, but that would mean crossing through the kitchen where he was probably pacing, making those calls he said he needed to make, if that wasn’t just a lie to give himself time to pack his things and make a quick exit. She would thank him, she thought, for the night’s pleasures, make it clear to him that she’d expected no more. Her body for reasons unknown had kicked into sexual overdrive, probably from too long an abstinence. She certainly wasn’t sorry. She only wished she could have pleased him as much as he’d pleased her.
Maybe she just wasn’t capable of that.
Then he shot through the kitchen door, came down the deck stairs, and made a beeline toward where she lounged in the grassy shade. He stood and crossed his arms, his thumbs beating a rhythm of his own devising upon the balled mass of his biceps. She looked up at those bulging biceps and every self-protective instinct inside her melted into pudding.
“I just got off the phone,” he said, without preamble, “with my mother, my two sisters, three brothers, and two of my college friends.”
“Oh?”
“I confirmed they were all in their homes or places of business and made sure they had no intent of traveling to Washington State.”
“Travel?” The soul of wit, she was.
“My friends have a bad habit of ‘dropping by’ unannounced,” he said. “John wasn’t the first to do so. It’s a conspiracy to keep an eye on me.”
She blinked at him, scrabbling to understand. “Do they have a reason to be worried?”
“No,” he said. “They’re old hens. Every last one of them. But I’ve had enough of meddling.”
Standing before her, haloed by the blue-white brightness of the sky, Logan looked so fierce and ravaged that her heart turned over. She wondered why so many people were worried about him, wondered if he’d ever tell her that story. She wanted to know it, wanted to know everything. Maybe she’d been in the sun too long. Or she was too unhinged from last night’s going-on. She didn’t
