Chapter 23

“Women suck.” Griffin clinked his beer bottle against Logan’s. They both had elbows braced on the wide rail of their roof deck.

It felt good, right, to have a partner as he stared glumly through the treetops with church spires poking out in a rag-tag pattern. Locals joked there was an unwritten ordinance that every block in D.C. had to have either a church or a statue. Or, failing both, a spy.

“You took the words right out of my mouth, G-man. But I’ll say them again, anyway, because if you liked it once, you’ll love it twice.” Logan lifted his bottle high in the air. “Women suck.”

Knox joined them, but leaning backward on his elbows against the rail. “Women are glorious creatures. They smell good, they look great, and they taste like heaven. Just because you can’t seal the deal with yours doesn’t mean it’s okay to diss the entire gender, Griff.”

“Oh, I’ve sealed the deal. Chloe’s all mine. All that’s left is the formality. The ribbon on top of the present.”

“Then why are you trashing women in chorus with the sullen and sour Logan?”

“Because she’s driving me crazy. We’re in love. We both say it a dozen times a day. She’s happy, I tell you. Why won’t she propose?”

“Clearly that missing ribbon belongs in your hair. Does the G in G-man stand for girly now?” Riley elbowed Griff in the ribs as he ambled over, crunching on a taquito.

To cheer Logan up, Josh was going all out preparing a Mexican feast. If the round of apps with taquitos, empanadas, and tomatillo guac was anything to judge by, his roomie was turning this into an epic food night. Sometimes living with a chef really rocked. There were times, stuck out on a ravaged mountain gnawing on a dry corn tortilla that was a treat in those conditions, that Logan dreamed of Josh’s food. The man could cook anything. Especially if it had cheese in it.

“Your turn is coming, Ry. Just you wait,” Griffin foretold in a voice of gloom and doom. “One of these days you’ll fall for some sexy sweetheart in a skirt, and your carefully ordered existence will turn into a game of fifty-two-card pickup.”

“Fat chance. Precisely because I’m so careful with my life, nothing slips by me. Nothing messy entangles me. Nothing catches me unawares.”

Knox grabbed the stub end of the taquito and crammed it into his mouth. “Really? Nothing? The right woman can steal your heart as quick as I stole your snack.”

“Asswipe.”

“Tight-ass.”

God, Logan loved being back. “Hey, we could go round in circles on which one of you is the bigger ass all night. And we may, just for shits and giggles. But first, can I get a round of hell, yes about how right I was?”

Knox quirked an eyebrow. “About what now?”

“Which one of us died and made you right all of a sudden? You’re never right.” Riley crossed to the big circular table to grab a handful of chips. “For God’s sake, you actually put money on the Cubs to sweep the series three years ago.”

“They won the division championship. It should’ve been enough to break the curse and let them go all the way,” he insisted stubbornly. Even though his bank account showed a definite dip from that October, which proved him wrong.

“You’re a tireless worker. A strategic thinker. You can drive a soccer ball down the field better than any of us. But you’re rarely right about random shit.”

“I am this time. I was right for walking out on Brooke. For leaving her.”

The damned cicadas rasped at him from the underside of every leaf within sight. But his friends were nothing but silent.

Fine. Logan had plenty of ammunition left to hammer his point home. “I can’t turn my whole life upside down just because she throws down an ultimatum.”

“True,” Riley said.

Knox moved to sit in one of the cushioned chairs at the table. “Ultimatums suck. They turn the power balance upside down. They’re a short-term solution that usually becomes a long-term problem.”

See? That was classic Knox Davies. Having his back. And also showing off a few of the smarts that kept him playing the field so widely until just a few months ago. “Thank you.”

“On the other hand,” Knox continued, “if you walked just because she was brave enough to ask you to stay and love her, that was kind of a dick move.”

“I can’t believe you’re gonna straddle the fence like that.”

“I’m not. I agree that she can’t force your hand. But…you like Brooke. We all like Brooke. You were tight with her in a weirdly platonic way back in high school. And now you’re tight with her in a very nonplatonic way. So if you like her, and if you walked just because she backed you into a corner, that’s cutting off your nose to spite your ugly mug.”

They didn’t get it. His closest friends, his brothers in blood, and they didn’t get it. Well, Logan would fucking clue them in, words rushing out of him in a torrent. “I left because she wanted a future. With me. And she deserves so much more than that. Than being saddled with a boyfriend who’s going to spend the next year with as much field time as humanly possible. Being away from her for a year. And then when I come back, I’ll be a miserable son of a bitch, stuck in a job I hate. I won’t burden her with all that.”

This time, the cicadas weren’t the only thing breaking the long-stretching silence. Footsteps coming up the stairs to the roof deck gave them all something to focus on, to turn and watch for instead of the shocked open maws they’d been pointing at Logan.

“Oh, come on, new bro. You’re a catch.” Madison beelined right from the door to sit on Knox’s lap. She flicked her thick blond hair over her shoulder to get it out of Knox’s face. “Not like my suave stud over here, but any woman besides me would probably be lucky to have you.”

“I, uh, appreciate the weird compliment.” It was nice that she’d accepted him so fully as her brother after so little time together. “You don’t really know me, though. Not yet.”

“I know that these guys all miss you like they’re missing a leg when you’re gone. Knox only stops talking about you when I do this.” She planted a long, wet one on Knox that had Logan slapping his palm across his eyes.

“Dude. Seriously. Did you not tell your girlfriend the rules about you not being allowed to mack all over my sister while I’m watching?”

“Seeing as how my fiancée and your sister are one and the same, no, I didn’t bother to pass on your ridiculous rule. You’re going to have to get used to seeing us like this. Because we kiss a lot. All the time. Almost more time than we spend breathing.”

“All right already. Geez.”

Knox ran a hand up and down Madison’s thigh. Maybe it was habit, or maybe it was just to taunt the shit out of Logan. “It’s what people in love do, Logan. It’s what you and Brooke were doing just a few days ago.”

“Yeah, but—”

Madison cut him off with an upraised hand. “Hang on. Did you just all but admit that you’re in love with her?”

“No.” He didn’t think so. He hadn’t meant to. How did women do that? See right into shadowy bits of his heart? “Damn it, how am I supposed to admit to you that I’m falling in love with Brooke when I haven’t even told her that yet?”

Riley gaped at him. “Dude, you love her?”

His friends were idiots. “I kind of…no, I’m pretty sure that…Yeah. Why else do you think I walked out on her?”

Knox shook his head. “Nothing about that sentence makes sense.”

Griff jumped into the fray, too. “If you love her, why the hell wouldn’t you stay with her?”

It made sense. It made perfect sense. Why couldn’t they see it? Logan held up his right hand to tick points off on his fingers. “Brooke wants me to stay to see if—if—we could build a future together. Dad wants me to stay to take over the Foundation.” He ruffled Madison’s long blond hair as he walked past her, ’cause wasn’t that what big brothers were supposed to do? “Madison here wants me to stay so we can get to know each other.”

“Yes, please,” she piped up.

He paced a slow circle around the table, too worked up to sit down. “Everyone is pulling at me to stay. What you’re all missing is that you’re pulling at me to do the selfish thing.”

Knox batted away that idea with an exaggerated swipe of his arm. It made Madison squeal and hug him even tighter around the neck. “Falling in love isn’t selfish. It’s what makes the world go ’round.”

“I think that quote’s actually about money, not love,” Riley pointed out, a stickler, as always.

“Well, I’ve got craploads of both, and I’m happy. Point made,” Knox said.

Sure. Knox was happy. He got to keep the smoking hot blonde on his lap. Whereas Logan had to give his beautiful redhead up, in order to be the good guy. The guy doing the right thing. The honorable thing.

“I’ve devoted my entire adulthood to putting my own life on hold to rescue other people. If I’d decided to stay back another day with the beautiful signorita, you guys would’ve turned into Popsicles in the Alps.”

Griff crossed his arms over the front of his USCG tee. Gave him the look that undoubtedly made everyone in his squadron straighten up and fly right. Literally. “Is that what this is about? Rescuing us?”

The words came out slowly. Haltingly. “A little. It’s what got me started.”

Logan hated that Griff made him say this stuff out loud. It was so much easier to admit how he felt in the faceless Naked Men blog. Which reminded him they wanted to stick a camera in his face during the podcast, and that’d probably be ten times more painful than even this moment. Shit.

He flopped onto an Adirondack chair in the corner with arms wide enough to balance a beer bottle. Too bad he’d drained his at some point in the midst of this emotional diarrhea. “It showed me my calling in life. It showed me that giving up isn’t an option. Giving it my all? It’s the only option.” Because he might as well get everything out at once, Logan shook his head and continued with the most painful truth of the night. “I don’t want anyone in the world to go through what I did when I thought you guys were—”

“Corpsicles?” Knox interrupted.

“Nice.” Ry high-fived across the table. Madison snorted.

Huh. Guess his new sister had a sort of morbid sense of humor. Good to know. Maybe she’d come to the horror-movie festival with him. If he was here. Or when he came back. God, this was hard.

“That pain was brutal and frightening. I don’t ever want to feel it again. So if I can prevent it from happening to even one person, then I’m doing my part.”

Madison got up, waving her arms wildly, as though trying to stop a car crash. “Hang on. I’ve got it now. You don’t want to love Brooke. You don’t want to love her because you’re scared of the pain of losing her if you do fall for her.”

“I’m not wild about how that makes me sound like a coward.”

“Please.” Knox grabbed a beer out of the ice-filled stainless-steel tub, opened it, and passed it to Logan. “You’re too stubborn to be a coward. You’ve outskied the leading edge of an avalanche. And there was that time you stared down some weird Eastern European version of a cougar who came near a group of sleeping children at a site. You’re plenty brave, Marsh. Hell, you taught me to stick up for myself and be brave.”

“You’re not a coward, Logan. You’re just human.” Madison crouched in front of him and put her hands on his knees. “I know we just met, but let me get a jump start on being your sister, by hitting you with a big truth. We’re all scared of losing someone we love. But the real loss is if you don’t let yourself be happy. If you don’t let yourself experience true love.”

Yeah, her words struck a chord. As did the honesty shining in her eyes. Both of which made Logan as itchy as wearing four-day-old underwear. “Is that a direct quote from the last chick flick you saw? It should come with a sound track and the background noise of fifty sniffling women eating popcorn.”

She pinched him sharply on his calf. Damn. She didn’t need to catch up on all the little sister stuff. “Make Brooke happy. Make your dad happy. Make all of us happy. Stay.”

Of course he wanted to. To stay all the time with all the people he loved. To not sleep on the ground. To not literally shit in the jungle, always looking up to watch for spiders falling out of the trees.

But if he didn’t do it, somebody might not survive. How was he supposed to live with that guilt?

Logan pushed out what was basically the mission statement he’d tried to live since graduating from college. “Giving my all to save entire populations in need is more important than making one or two people happy in my own life.”

“That depends on who those people are,” Riley said.

God, they kept pushing at him. It was a miracle Josh was still down making magic in the kitchen and hadn’t come up to poke at him. Logan pounded his armrest with his fist. Leaned forward to spit the words out like nails from a gun. “Don’t you see? I can’t live with myself knowing there might be a difference I could make.”

“Don’t you see?” Madison shot back. “What if making that difference here at home is what’s best? Why does it always have to be a faceless stranger?”

Logan fell back against the wooden slats of the chair, stunned.

She was right.

She’d done a one-eighty on everything he said and thought. And her way made sense. It made a hell of a lot of sense.

What if he could stay home without feeling guilty?

Without feeling punished? Without feeling useless?

Without feeling constantly alone anymore?

He’d missed so much. He’d missed Knox’s concussion and the chance to beat the shit out of the asshole who gave it to him. He’d missed the start of their podcast, which was huge. The ACSs did things as a single unit, and he’d missed out on taking this enormous leap with them. Logan didn’t want to do the same thing if and when they started taping in front of cameras. He’d missed…well, Madison’s entire fucking life up till now. He sure as hell didn’t want to miss any more of it. Or whatever time was left with his father—that couldn’t be wasted.

Unintentionally, he’d built this life that pushed him away—halfway around the globe away—from the very people he most cared about. Kept himself closed off to avoid the pain of losing anyone. But he had lost already. He’d lost so much damn time. Lost the chance to build memories, to have fun, to share his life instead of just walling up and giving himself away to strangers. And maybe his stupidity had caused him to lose Brooke, too.

No more.

With a heave, he pulled Madison up as he stood. Then Logan hugged her for a long time. The deep, long hug that she’d made clear she wanted the first time they met. A real hug that bridged all the years they’d missed out on together. One that cemented them as siblings who loved each other no matter what.

Because, yeah, he’d been pissed that her discovery of him led to his ditching a rescue site early. And Madison was a living representation of his dad’s epic fuckup, not to mention a decades-old lie he’d perpetrated. She was also probably a hell of a lot of the reason Logan’s mom had been unhappy for as long as he could remember.

But most importantly, she was the best gift he’d ever received.

When Logan finally let his arms drop, Madison’s cheeks bore trails of a single tear on each. They were paired with a smile brighter than the sun glinting off the Potomac.

“You know what? I’m grateful as hell that I’ve had the ACSs as brothers my whole life. Now, though, I’ve realized how lucky I am to have a sister, too.”