it did—his world, anyway. “You’re like family to me—”
“Oh, spare me.” She pushed up from her chair. “We’re not related, thank God.”
What the hell was he supposed to say? That he walked away because he was terrified of screwing things up? Or that something might happen to her and that he’d flip out and lose his grip on reality? Again.
Or that when he was with her he couldn’t seem to control himself and that scared the hell out of him?
“The reason I walked away had nothing to do with my attraction to you.” He rolled his shoulders back and tried to dispel the tension in his limbs. “That wasn’t a factor.”
“So you were attracted to me?”
He cleared his throat. “Of course I was.”
“It wasn’t a pity fuck? You know, because of...” She blinked and straightened her shoulders. “Because Dad had just died.”
He gritted his teeth and tried to keep his voice at an appropriate volume. “No.”
“Are you still attracted to me?” She stepped forward.
It was too much: her messy blond hair, the wine on her lips. The hungry look in her eyes.
“I’m not answering that.”
She stepped closer again and now he could smell the faint remains of perfume on her skin. Chanel No. 5. He’d bought her a bottle for her birthday. Damn expensive crap that smelled like old ladies in the bottle but transformed into heaven on her skin.
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not why I’m here.”
“Right, I forgot. You’re playing bodyguard.” She rolled her eyes. “You know I always did have a thing for role-playing.”
Tension snapped in the air between them and she seemed about to say more, but she simply shook her head and turned back to the table. Plates clattered as she cleared up their abandoned meal.
“One day you’ll push me away hard enough that I won’t come back,” she said quietly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His stomach knotted as a sense of foreboding fell over him.
“I’m just saying that it won’t always be like this. Change happens and I might not always be around.”
Change. A dirty fucking word as far as he was concerned. Change always meant pain; it always meant loss. And loss meant destruction.
“I don’t want things to change.”
“We don’t always get what we want, now do we?” she said, not looking at him. “Anyway, you’ll need to make up the bed in one of the spare rooms. I was going to do that over the weekend. You remember where the sheets are?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
He’d been dismissed, apparently. By trying to do the right thing, he’d screwed up again. It seemed to be his lot in life.
“Probably for the best,” he muttered to himself.
He wasn’t cut out to care about people, because loss was inevitable and it turned him into a wild beast. Losing his mother had ended his military career, losing Daniel had sent him straight into Addison’s arms, and if he lost her...who the hell knew what he’d do.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t want her. Far from it. He just knew that he couldn’t act on his desires.
LOGAN SET HIMSELF up on the couch with his laptop and a cup of decaf. He was far too wired to sleep, and his vantage point allowed him to watch the thin beam of light from under Addison’s bedroom door. Every so often a shadow flickered, telling him she was unpacking and setting up her room.
Being run off the road wasn’t enough to deter her from organizing every little thing the way she liked it.
He smiled to himself. She’d always been that way—needing to have everything just so. Teenage Addison had been a straight-A student with neat-freak tendencies. She used to visit her dad at the office after school and would happily spend hours reorganizing his filing system and making sure the staff kitchen was clean and tidy. Logan had always pretended not to notice her, of course.
Daniel had once told him that Addison developed her organizational habits after her mother died. A sense of order in her physical environment had helped her sift through the pain and confusion in her head, apparently. Her father had encouraged her to take those skills and turn them into a fruitful career, which she had. Addison was the reason Cobalt & Dane had been able to grow as a company. Without her, they’d still be a couple of scruffy guys too focused on the security side of things to get the rent paid.
He envied her ability to turn her loss into something useful. His pain never seemed to cause anything but pure destruction.
Sighing, he raked a hand through his hair and stared at the laptop screen. Going through his emails might help him relax. Daniel had set up an extensive security system when he’d first bought the cottage, so the chance of anything happening without Logan’s knowledge was slim.
Eventually the light under Addison’s door disappeared, but that didn’t stop Logan’s gaze from wandering there every few minutes. This weekend would be torture. Bittersweet torture.
“Lucky you’re a natural-born masochist,” Logan muttered to himself.
After an hour of trying—and failing—to get any work done, he snapped his laptop shut in frustration. If he wasn’t going to be productive then he’d go to bed and attempt to sleep. A few hours of shut-eye might help his concentration.
“Yeah, ’cause sleep is the problem,” he grumbled as he walked past Addison’s door to the linen cupboard.
It was packed with clean sheets, towels and blankets and smelled musty in a way that brought a rush of memories to him. He’d come to this cottage often, spending Thanksgiving weekend with Daniel and Addison since his own father had made it clear he wasn’t welcome with the shiny new family he’d acquired. Those long weekends had been filled with fishing, eating and letting Addison beat him at poker until she got good enough that she whipped his ass all on her own.
His fingertips brushed a piece of floral fabric sandwiched between two plain blue sheets. The flowers had faces, but the pattern had faded over the years. Time, the cruel mistress that it was, had robbed them of their smiles.
A noise caused Logan to turn. He tiptoed to Addison’s door and pressed his ear to the wood. The muffled sobbing caused pain to wrench in his chest. He touched his palm to the door and sucked in a breath. What the hell was he supposed to do in this situation?
If Addison was in danger, he wouldn’t hesitate to act, because protecting her came second nature to him. But a tearful Addison was totally outside his experience.
