Just thinking about it made him grin. This could work.
“Friday night’s good for me,” he replied. “How about you? I could call you around eight, if that’s okay.”
Stunned, Abby couldn’t believe he was agreeing so easily. If every man the dating service set her up with was as accommodating as Logan St. John, she was going to love dating! “You don’t know how much this means to me, Logan. I was afraid you’d think I was weird or something.”
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I don’t blame you for being nervous. Blind dates are the pits. There’s nothing worse than having a drink or a meal with someone you don’t know and sitting there in silence, trying to think of something to say.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s awful! I just can’t put myself through it.”
“There’s no reason you have to. We can talk on the phone as long as you like. If either of us decides that we don’t have anything in common and don’t ever want to meet, that’s okay, too. No hard feelings, okay?”
“No hard feelings,” she agreed. “Now that we’ve got that settled, I guess I’ll talk to you Friday night.”
“It’s a date,” he said with a chuckle, and hung up.
When the phone rang later that evening, Logan wasn’t surprised to hear his younger brother’s voice on the other end of the line. “Well, well,” Logan drawled. “How did I know you would call?”
“I’m just concerned,” Carter said defensively. “Patty and I got you into this. The least I can do is check and see how it went.” When Logan only snorted, he said, “Oh, c’mon, don’t be that way. How’d it go? I know you got a list of dates after you completed the psychological test, so what happened? Have you called anyone yet?”
Torn between amusement and irritation, Logan rolled his eyes. “It would serve you right if I didn’t tell you a damn thing. You know that, don’t you?”
“Hey, this was all Patty’s idea—”
“And you were totally against it, right? That’s why you put up half the money.”
“Okay,” he acknowledged, “so I let her talk me into it. I was just trying to help.”
“You should have told me.”
“We thought about it, but we knew you’d never agree.”
“Exactly!”
“Look on the bright side,” Carter said encouragingly. “There are a lot of nice women out there—you might actually meet a couple you like. And if you don’t, you can always do a story on dating services. So? Talk to me! What happened?”
“I have a date Friday night,” he retorted. “Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“With who? What’s her name? She must be nice if you asked her out already. Where are you going?”
“Geez, you sound worse than Mom!”
“Oh, God, I do!” his brother exclaimed, horrified. “Forget I said anything. Go out with your mystery date, have a good-time. I don’t need the details.”
When he told him good-night and hurriedly hung up, Logan laughed—truly laughed—for what felt like the first time since Faith had died. And it felt good…damn good. He’d have to thank Abby when he talked to her on Friday.
Logan had always been a morning person, but over the course of the last year he’d had little reason to get out of bed. He’d dragged himself to work and gone through the motions of doing the job he’d once loved, but he’d found no joy in investigative reporting, no joy in writing. He hadn’t needed to go to a doctor to know that he was suffering from depression. His days were gray and dull and stretched one into another with no end in sight.
He expected the following morning to be the same, but as he rolled out of bed and headed for the shower, he found himself thinking about his conversations with Abby and his brother, and a slow grin of anticipation stretched across his face. Maybe this dating thing wasn’t going to be so bad. He and Abby would talk on the phone, he’d put one over on his brother—who wasn’t easy to fool—and his family would never know the difference. He almost rubbed his hands together in glee at the thought. This was going to be fun.
Imagining his brother’s and sister’s faces when they discovered that he’d pulled a fast one on them, he arrived at work an hour later with a spring in his step. The smile on his face didn’t last long, however. He was just going over his notes for a story on fraud in the building industry when Nick Whitiker, his boss, buzzed him and announced, “We need to talk.”
Logan knew that terse tone well. Nick was ticked off about something. Had Logan missed a deadline? He didn’t think so, but he would be the first to admit that his work had suffered some during the last year. He and Nick had talked about it, and he’d done his best to be more focused. What had he missed? “I’ll be right there,” he promised.
Nick usually exchanged a few pleasantries with anyone he called to his office, but he didn’t this time. Instead, he nodded toward the chair angled in front of his desk. “Sit down,” he growled.
Logan preferred to stand and take whatever bad news Nick had for him, but he only had to glance at his boss’s stern face to know this wasn’t the time to push him. Without a word, he dropped into the chair. “If this is about the story on the poker games in the break room at the police department, I don’t care what Chief Hawkins said, I’ve got proof.”
Nick waved him off with a grimace. “If I thought you couldn’t back up your stories, you wouldn’t be on the crime beat. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
Leaning back in his chair, Nick looked at him over the top of his black-rimmed reading glasses. “I know the last year has been hard for you,” he said gruffly. “And to be perfectly honest, I don’t know if I’d have been able to hold myself together as well as you have if I’d lost Jackie the way you did Faith. Losing someone you love to cancer or some kind of health problem is one thing—you can understand it even though you can’t accept it. But a drunk driver who’s done this before? The jackass should have been shot!”
“I thought about it,” Logan admitted honestly, “but killing him wasn’t going to bring Faith back. Nothing will.”
“So you have to move on,” he said. “And that’s the problem. Oh, you’ve been showing up for work, hitting your deadlines, keeping track of your assignments, but we both know you’ve only been going through the motions. Don’t get me wrong,” he added quickly. “I sympathize with you and everything you’ve been through, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a paper to publish, and my number one reporter hasn’t been writing up to par for nearly a year.”
“You know I’ve been trying, Nick.”
“Yes, I do, but unfortunately, trying isn’t good enough. Sales are down, ad revenue has been dropping steadily for the last few months, and all departments have been ordered to tighten their belts and weed out the chafe.”
“You’re firing me?”
“No,
