View, and West Sixth Street. “That mob scene is for you.”
Still gripping the handkerchief, she leaned toward the window which made her head throb. A large crowd pressed up against the entrance to the building, swarming the front steps, completely surrounding the front, with more bodies covering the back.
It was a mob scene. They were lying in wait for her. “Why didn’t they go in?” she asked.
“I chained the front door. Hopefully your Joe will find the key, or he’ll be in there a while.”
Logan reached for her purse and slipped the handkerchief inside and then removed her phone. “Where did you put the key? Joe can’t stay in there—”
“That’s right. You’ve left him with instructions to manage things at home.” He watched her from beneath heavy lids. “What a good boy.”
She ignored him to shoot a quick text to Joe.
Rowan swiped the phone from her hands before she could hit Send.
She nearly kicked him. “Why are you so hateful?”
“Come on, babe, a little late now to play the victim.”
Logan turned her head away to stare out the window, emotions so chaotic and hot she could barely see straight. “So where are you taking me?”
“To a safe spot. Away from the media.”
“Good. If it’s a safe spot, you won’t be there.” She swallowed hard, and crossed her arms over her chest. “And my father. He’s really dead?”
“Yes.”
She turned her head to look at him. Rowan’s cool green gaze locked with hers, expression mocking. “If it makes you feel better,” he added, lip curling, “it was natural causes.”
Blood rushed to her cheeks and her face burned. Good God, he was even worse than she remembered. How could that be possible? “Of course it makes me feel better.”
“Because you are such a dutiful daughter.”
“Don’t pretend you cared for him,” she snapped.
“I didn’t. He deserved everything he got, and more.”
She hated Rowan. Hated, hated, hated him. Almost as much as she wanted to hate her father, who’d betrayed them all—and she didn’t just mean the Copeland family, but his hundreds of clients. They’d trusted him and he’d robbed them blind. And then instead of facing prosecution, instead of accepting responsibility for his crimes, he’d fled the country, setting sail in a private yacht, a yacht which was later stormed off the coast of Africa—he was taken prisoner. Her father was held captive for months, and as time dragged on, the kidnappers’ demands increased, the ransom increased. Only Morgan was willing to come up with money for the ransom...but that was another story.
And yet, even as much as she struggled with her father’s crimes and how he’d shamed them and broken their hearts, she still didn’t want him suffering. She didn’t want him in pain. Maybe she didn’t hate him as much as she thought she did. “So he wasn’t murdered. There was no torture,” she said, her mouth dry.
“Not at the end.”
“But he was tortured.”
His eyes met hers. “Shall we just say it wasn’t a picnic?”
For a long moment she held her breath, heart thumping hard as she looked into his eyes and saw far more than she wanted to see.
And then she closed her eyes because she could see something else.
The future.
Her father was now dead and so he would never be prosecuted for his crimes, but the world still seethed. They demanded blood. With Daniel Copeland gone, they’d go after his five children. And while she could handle the scrutiny and hate—it was all she’d been dealing with since his Ponzi scheme had been exposed—her daughter was little more than a baby. Just two and a quarter years old, she had no defenses against the cruelty of strangers.
“I need to go home,” she choked. “I need to go home now.”
* * *
Rowan had been watching the emotions flit across her face—it was a stunning face, too. He’d never met any woman as beautiful. But it wasn’t just her bone structure that made her so attractive, it was the whole package. The long, thick honey hair, the wide-set blue eyes, the sweep of her brows, the dark pink lips above a resolute chin.
And then the body...
She had such a body.
He’d worshipped those curves and planes, and had imagined, that night three years ago, that maybe, just maybe, he’d found the one.
It’s why he became so angry later, when he discovered who she was, because he’d felt things he’d never felt. He’d felt a tenderness and a connection that was so far out of his normal realm of emotions. What had started out as sex had become personal. Emotional. By morning he wasn’t doing things to her, he was making love with her.
And then it all changed when he discovered the pile of mail on her kitchen counter. The bills. The magazine subscriptions.
Logan Copeland.
Logan Copeland.
Logan Lane Copeland.
It had blindsided him. That rarely happened. Stunned and then furious, he turned on her.
Many times he’d regretted the way he’d handled the discovery of her true identity. He regretted virtually everything about that night and the next morning, from the intense lovemaking to the harsh words he’d spoken. But over the years the thing he found himself regretting the most was the intimacy.
She’d been more than tits and ass.
She’d meant something to him. He’d wanted more with her. He imagined—albeit briefly—that there could be more, and it had been a tantalizing glimpse at a future he hadn’t thought he would ever have. But then he saw it and realized that he wanted it. He wanted a home and a wife and children. He wanted the normalcy he’d never had.
And then it was morning and he was trying to figure out the coffee situation, and instead he was dealing with a liar-deceiver situation.
He wasn’t in love. He wasn’t falling in love. He’d been played.
And he’d gone ballistic. No, he didn’t touch her—he’d never touch a woman in anger—but he’d said things to her that were vile and hurtful, things about how she was no better than her lying, crooked, greedy father and how it disgusted him that she’d bought him with money that her father had embezzled.
He didn’t like remembering that morning, and he didn’t like being responsible for her now, but he could protect her during the media frenzy, and he’d promised his friend and her brother-in-law, Drakon, that he would.
“There’s no going home,” he said tersely. “Your place must be a zoo. You’ll be staying with
