Chapter 17

Logan tightened his grip on Brooke’s thighs and gave her a little boost higher on his back. She wasn’t big at all, but she was a full-grown adult, so carrying her for four blocks didn’t have him going at a sprint or anything. On the other hand, keeping his hands wrapped around her silky, bare legs didn’t suck by a long shot.

“I thought you were in a hurry? To get back to all the sex?”

“I am.” Her breath swirled against his neck, mixing with the sticky August air. “Especially since you’re keeping me pretty darned aroused with every step.”

Pride swelled Logan’s chest. Rubbing up against him was all it took? That was some serious chemistry between them. And his righteously ripped abs probably helped. “No fair. I’m doing the heavy lifting, and I don’t even get a boner out of it. This is a crap plan.”

“It’s an excellent plan.” Brooke’s palms spread wide across his chest in a slow swirl. Yeah, maybe he’d get a boner out of it after all. “The bars don’t close for another hour, so it’d be impossible to find a parking spot by the closest drugstore. We’ll be there in one more block. We can get the condoms we so desperately need, and then we’ll be back in your bed in no time.”

“With me carrying you the whole way back, too?” Because a cab was a solid adjustment to the original plan. Logan wanted to be at peak stamina once they had a full box of condoms to work through.

“If you’re willing. For the record, when I complained about being sore from helping out at cheer practice today, I never expected you to carry me.” She dropped a soft kiss on his cheek.

Logan couldn’t bear the thought of knowingly letting Brooke endure even a moment of pain. How much of jackass would he be if he let her walk? “Escarlata, I’m more than willing. Forget the drugstore. I’d carry you all seven miles back to your apartment if you asked. I just reserve the right to yank your chain about it.”

“Duly noted. Also noted is how tremendously sweet you’re being about a couple of tight hamstrings. It’s not like I’m wrapped in ace bandages and dry-swallowing ibuprofen.”

What sort of lowlife losers had Brooke dated before him that she expected so little? Logan stuck to one hard-and-fast rule—he never promised the women he dated any sort of a future. But while he was with them? He sure as shit treated them well. Picked up the check. Held open doors. Occasionally sat through chick flicks, as long as he drank enough beer first. And yeah, that included the basic human kindness of helping out with an injury.

“Life can be hard. Anything I can do to make it easier for you, I will. Simple as that.”

Brooke’s breath caught, and then she exhaled in a slow whoosh. “It isn’t always that simple, trust me. But I appreciate you saying it. I appreciate you, Logan.”

“Will you appreciate your way to shower sex? It’s the closest I can come to re-creating our waterfall without chartering a plane back to Dominica.”

“Deal. I can’t wait to get wet with you. Wet from you.”

“You can say that, but you can’t say damn. You crack me up, woman.”

A tall, skinny man in a suit stepped right into Logan’s path, forcing him to a halt. “Brooke?”

Brooke’s nails dug into Logan’s chest. “Hi, Toby.” Then her thighs tightened against Logan’s flank. Whoever this guy was, she sure wasn’t happy to see him. Damn. Logan knew they should’ve driven. Too bad she’d teased him into making a literal condom run.

“You’re up late. What happened to your famous rants about getting to bed early because you were so worn out?”

Bed, huh? Must be an ex-boyfriend. Which meant that Logan knew he shouldn’t get involved. Dealing with exes was messier than fixing a clogged latrine. With Brooke staying in D.C., she’d undoubtedly run into this guy again, which meant figuring out how to handle him. That fell under the future, the thing Logan stayed hands-off from. But this guy, in his power suit, and with a Rolex peeking out from beneath the French cuffs, reeked of pretention worse than a stinky cheese wrapped in foie gras. Logan straightened up to his full height, to show Toby just what he’d be up against if he stepped over the line.

“It’s summer break,” Brooke answered breezily. “I’m trying a different approach.”

“I see that.” He gave Logan—with Brooke on his back—a slow, judging once-over. “I’m surprised to see you. I thought you moved away.”

“Thought about it. Didn’t.” Her words came out clipped and cold enough to practically ice up the sidewalk.

“Maybe you should think again.”

Brooke slid to the side. Logan took the hint and crouched so that she could stand. She shook out the long skirt of her blue dress. “Thanks for the advice, Toby, but no thanks. You lost voting privileges on how I live my life the day you dumped me.”

Looking left and right, as if checking for witnesses, Toby stepped closer. “Damn it, Brooke, this isn’t about you. You’re so self-centered.”

“Hey. Dial it back.” The command snapped out of Logan’s mouth instinctively. Having a history together didn’t give Toby the Turd the right to insult Brooke.

Sharp brown eyes swung his way. “Who are you?”

Logan hesitated a second…then maybe three more…to give Brooke the chance to explain him. Explain his status. Crap. Guess she expected him to do it. “Logan Marsh. Brooke’s, uh, boyfriend.” It felt weird. It sounded weirder. And yet—it also felt great. Living the dream from back in high school. Weird wasn’t bad. It just took some time to wrap his brain around.

“Clearly you don’t know her story, or you wouldn’t be with her.”

“Clearly you don’t really know Brooke,” Logan snapped back, “or you’d still be with her.”

With a sneer, the guy turned away from Logan—stupid—and focused on Brooke again. “Don’t you see how much it could hurt the kids if you stay?”

Logan opened his mouth, but before he could do anything, Brooke squared her shoulders. “I’d never knowingly hurt my students. And you know nothing about them. You avoided them, and any discussion of them, the whole time we dated. Don’t presume to opine now on a topic you know as little about as how to clean off the ring around the collar of your shirts.”

Nice. A good defense with an insult mixed in. His girl could stand her ground.

Red patches mottled Toby’s cheeks. “Your idea of leaving was the best thing for you, the school, and the kids. Everyone needed a clean break. If you stay, they’ll never trust you, never trust your judgment, ever again. And every time they see you, they’ll be reminded of Sarah’s suicide. Be reminded that you could’ve prevented it…but didn’t.”

Son of a bitch. This conversation was over. Logan used one hand to gently push Brooke behind him. “T-boy. We never finished doing introductions. Meet my fist.” Then he landed a clean uppercut to Toby the Turd’s jaw that sent the other man staggering backward before wobbling down to one knee.

“I’ll sue you for assault.”

Interesting. A threat to sue, rather than calling the police. What a pussy. Shaking out his fist, Logan asked, “Is this piece of trash a lawyer?”

Brooke nodded, eyes wide and one hand clamped over her mouth.

Logan bent in half to put his mouth at the level of Toby’s ear. “Then I’ll countersue you for defamation of character. While you’re preparing your legal briefs, you’ll be shitting your actual briefs in fear of the day I come and beat the crap out of you for hurting Brooke. Don’t come near her again.” He held out his hand, which Brooke latched onto like a lifeline, and they walked away without another word.

When they turned a block later to get to the pharmacy, Logan looked back. T-boy was still braced with one hand on the sidewalk. Yeah, that didn’t suck.

“That’s your ex?” He knew the answer, but needed it spelled out before they went any farther.

Brooke bit the edge of her bottom lip. “One of them.”

“You’ve got shitty taste in men.”

A dry laugh burst from her throat. “You have no idea.”

Obviously a little teasing was in order, before he got serious. Logan turned to walk backward, making an exaggerated face of surprise at her. “Are you throwing shade at me, Gallagher? After I knocked that cocksucker over without even breaking the skin on my knuckles?”

Brooke grabbed his hand and kissed the knuckles on each of his fingers slowly, in turn. It was sweet and sexy all at once. As confusing and awesome as the taste of sweet and sour shrimp. “Thank you for defending my honor.”

“I felt nothing but pleasure introducing that guy’s face to my fist.”

Brooke giggled. “You’ve got a certain style, Logan. I really like it.”

“Good.” Confident that their status quo held, Logan moved on to what really bothered him. “Now tell me you don’t believe anything he said to you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Brooke.” He paused in front of one of the eight thousand bronze statues that you couldn’t sneeze without hitting. Must not be a Civil War or Revolutionary War general, ’cause then there’d be a horse underneath him. Maybe a politician. Somebody long dead who probably deserved to be honored as much as Brooke didn’t deserve to be insulted. “I thought we talked through this last week. You’re not to blame for that girl committing suicide. You’re not to blame for not being able to read her mind and realize she wanted to do it. You’re not responsible for her choices.”

“That’s the thing, though.” She pulled her braid over her shoulder and toyed with the ends of it, in a gesture he now recognized as both habitual and nerves. Not to mention adorable. “The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want to be. Responsible. Not for vulnerable young teens. Not anymore. It’s too heavy a burden.”

Logan wondered for about the millionth time in his life why women had to overthink everything. Because the solution was so damn simple. He sat on the steps of the memorial. “Then don’t teach.”

“It isn’t that simple,” she said in an unconscious echo of his thoughts. “I like teaching. It is also all that I’m trained to do.”

“Technically, you’re also trained to do the splits in midair and to know three things you can substitute for butter. So…that leaves you stripper and…well, uh, stripper as a new career options. Which I’d highly endorse.” Logan pulled her down to straddle his lap. “As long as it is to provide private lap dances solely for me.”

“I’m not doing anything without a good matching program for my 401k.” She shot him a disapproving glare—but did wriggle to center herself right over his dick. So, not a total loss. “Helping drill the squad today was so much fun. Then all my girls begged me to come back.”

He cocked his head to the side. “I thought the principal said he’d keep it under wraps for a while that you quit?”

“He did. But secrets are impossible to keep in a high school. Word got out somehow. Heck, I wouldn’t have put it past the principal to have leaked it himself, to get people to urge me to change my mind. Finding a replacement this late in the summer will be tough for him.”

If true, it was high-level puppet mastery on his part. Brooke’s students knowing was a two-edged sword. It was great that they cared so much about her. And yet it was a gigantic helping of guilt if she stuck with her original plan and didn’t return to lead them.

Logan traced the pale blue vein visible in her neck with the tip of his finger. God, her skin was delicate. Softer than anything he’d touched in months. Something he craved to touch every damn minute of the day. “Were you tempted to cave and say yes?”

“Of course. If for no other reason than it’d be a guaranteed paycheck. I can’t just skate along doing nothing. I’m petrified about being so up in the air. On paper, signing a contract for another year looks like the smart thing to do. You know, while I figure something else out. Explore my options. Except what if there’s another tragedy during this year? I don’t know how I’d be able to handle it.”

Logan totally got that. Brooke took responsibility for everyone she touched. He felt the same way. It just expressed itself in reverse in his case. That if he wasn’t at an accident site, and a single person didn’t get rescued in time, it’d be his fault. “I get it. The same thing applies to you as to that poor student who hung herself. At the end of the day, you have to answer to yourself for your choices. Nobody else.”

She scrunched up her tiny nose. “How does that solve my problem?”

Aside from occasional comments on the Naked Men blog, and the ACSs, nobody ever asked him for advice. Not about feelings. People came to him for answers about how long it would take to repair an irrigation system. Or how best to guard supplies from bandits, sure. But deep emotional advice wasn’t his wheelhouse. For Brooke’s sake, though, he’d dig deep and find a way to help guide her.

“Doing the smart thing for you doesn’t always mean doing what the rest of the world perceives as wise. Sometimes being selfish is the right decision.” Logan knew, without a doubt, that his family saw his constant rescue missions as selfish. Knew that his dad wanted him to drop anchor and run the Foundation. But right now—hell, for as long as he could get away with it—being selfish worked best for him. Because the alternative, knowing he could’ve saved someone and didn’t…Logan couldn’t live with that.

Even though it meant leaving Brooke behind when he did cut and run.

Huh. That didn’t feel selfish. Or right.

It just felt stupid.

“Selfishness as the right move?” Brooke sounded skeptical. But not dismissive.

He’d planted the seed. She’d come around soon enough. “Well, you have to balance it karmically with something like petting kittens at the Humane Society.”

“Absolutely.” In the orange glow from the streetlights, her eyes became semi-glazed over. Logan could see her filing it away to mull over later. Then she gave a brisk nod. “That’s enough about my job for one night. I don’t want to whine. I want to be distracted with all of the sex.”

“That’s a recurring theme with you, isn’t it? Using me for my body?”

“Whenever I can get away with it.” She slid her hand down between them to rake her nails across his abdomen. “But since we don’t have those all-important condoms yet, we can at least change the subject. How about your job?”

That question came like a pop fly to the head. Logan stiffened—and not in the good way. “What about it?”

“I don’t know. I know hardly anything, actually. Because you almost never mention it.”

He’d learned over the years that that was the best course of action. With everyone but the ACSs. “Most people don’t like to hear about death and destruction.”

Brooke dipped her head, a faint smile tugging at her lips. “Funny. I thought your whole mission was about saving lives and rebuilding.”

“At its core, yeah.” Logan loved the way her mind categorized his job. Not everybody saw it that way. A heck of a lot of people thought he wasted his expensive prep school and college education by spending his days with his hands wrapped around a shovel. “The reality? It involves unearthing and then burying way too many bodies. Finishing knocking down structures that Nature already decimated. Details like that don’t go over well on most dates.”

“Good thing I’m not like anyone you’ve ever dated before.”

“That’s the truth.” Brooke was right. And Logan knew, knew that she’d listen to him for as long as he wanted. Because she’d always listened to him. For tonight, that realization was enough. It comforted him. Settled him. Something he hadn’t felt about his job since his father dropped the bombshell on him of the promotion Logan intended to avoid. “Speaking of dating other people, I assume you ditched Toby because he’s a total douche bag?”

“Nope. He dumped me.”

Unbelievable. Brooke was gorgeous and sweet and caring and sexy and funny and all any man in the world could want. He dropped a kiss on the back of each of her hands. “So he’s an idiot and a douche bag.”

“Toby, in case you didn’t catch the gist of it tonight, feels strongly that I didn’t do my duty as a teacher. That if I’d been on the ball, I could’ve—and should’ve—prevented Sarah’s suicide. According to him, I was moping around feeling sorry for myself, and not sorry for the right reasons. Not sorry that I screwed up. He thought I should’ve quit immediately. He thought I reflected poorly on him with my actions, and might very well cost him a promotion to partner in his law firm. He thought—well, a lot of things that we disagreed on. Ultimately, only two weeks after Sarah’s death, he dumped me, right when I needed him the most.”

Logan seriously considered retracing their steps to go back and deck Toby again. Turn the other cheek for him. And then split it wide open. “He’s a shit. A stupid, uncaring piece of shit. No wonder you wanted to escape from everything when you went down to the island.”

His ass was going numb on the marble step. He lifted her off of his lap and they rejoined the steady stream of couples with their arms around each other, trios of girls with their arms around one another, and really drunk guys holding each other up.

Brooke snuggled her head in just below his collarbone, one hand tight at his hip. The closeness felt so right to Logan. Like she belonged. Like it was her special spot. “All true. But being dumped by Toby didn’t smart as much as I thought it would. It’s happened before.”

“No way.” He kissed the top of her head. “There aren’t even two men that dumb in all of D.C. who’d walk away from you.”

“I evidently attract a certain type. A type of man who leaves me because his life makes more sense without me. So you see, I’m intimately acquainted with selfishness being the right move.”

“Explain.” Because this sounded bad. It sounded like Brooke was taking the blame for men being idiots. And he didn’t want her to feel bad about herself for a second.

“My college boyfriend dumped me at the end of our senior year. I probably would’ve gone anywhere with him. I had to find a job, but I didn’t care where, necessarily. We were happy. We spent all our spare time together. Leaping into real life together seemed like the obvious next step.”

“But?”

“But when he lined up a job in Miami, Christian didn’t ask me to go with him. In fact, he asked me specifically to not go with him. He thought I’d be a distraction. He wanted to throw himself into launching his career.”

This was simple to fix. Brooke was beating herself up over nothing. Logan waited for three police cars to streak by, sirens blasting. “A ton of people break up by graduation. It sucks, but you can’t take it personally. It’s a big transition, starting the rest of your life. Sometimes it takes a fresh start.”

“Mmm-hmm. That’s what my friends all said. Which might’ve been true. But look at Toby.”

“I’d like to go back and look at Toby whining when I put my foot up his ass.”

“Stop that.” With a laugh, she pressed a kiss over his heart. “I appreciate you coming to my defense earlier, but he’s a good man, or I wouldn’t have dated him in the first place.”

Logan tugged on her braid. “That big heart of yours sure gives everyone but you the benefit of the doubt.”

“I have to be fair. Toby left me because his career would advance better without me. Which, you know, would be selfish for me to argue with—I don’t want him to not succeed. I don’t want to knowingly hold him back. Everyone has to choose his own road, right?”

Logan felt like his answer was critical. Except he didn’t know the right answer. At least not the one that was right for Brooke, right now. To buy himself time, he squeezed her hand instead of answering.

“I’m aware that I can’t knowingly tank someone’s career, because I thought about it a lot the other time it happened, two years ago. John left me for his career.”

Uh-oh. “Another lawyer? Politician? Big cat tamer at the circus?”

“John works for Doctors Without Borders now. When I met him, he’d just finished his pediatric residency. He was happy to be on a slightly more normal schedule. Joked about how finally having time to date was the best thing that could’ve happened. We got serious. We were talking about moving in together. And then I threw a party for the Academy Awards.”

“I can see how champagne and being forced to dress up in a tux would send a man running.” Logan pulled them over, dug in his shorts for cash, and tucked a couple of tens into the top bag of a loaded grocery cart next to a sleeping homeless man. Yeah, it might go to drugs or booze—but it might help him, too. Logan saw too many people in foreign countries living without a roof, so he damn well couldn’t resist every chance to help those in his hometown, too.

“Very funny. John got into the spirit of the whole thing, and even went to watch the only nominated documentary still showing. He wanted us to be able to say we’d seen at least one film in every category, to make it more fun. It was a documentary about the earthquake in Haiti. Not the immediate tragedy, but the aftermath. The children dying from tainted water. How vaccines weren’t being distributed.”

Logan nodded. “That’s a common scenario. Dangerous—often deadly—but common.”

He saw it happen all the time after a disaster. The focus sharpened to surviving each day, and planning for the future got turned into a dream rather than a priority. He lived his life the same way. The immediate mattered. The long term? Well, that just wasn’t his concern. Because Logan didn’t have one. He hopped planes and hopscotched countries and thought about the future exactly one day a year—when he put everything on hold to come home and have the annual New Year’s Eve Poker & Pig Roast with the ACSs.

Sometimes thinking about New Year’s Eve was all that got him through a night. Listening to the wails of the injured outside his tent and wondering if the next aftershock might bury him alive, too.

“Well, John described the movie as a one-two punch to his gut and his heart. He put in his application for Doctors Without Borders the very next day. He left me, left the future we were starting to shape together, to go save lives. To do something that made him feel whole. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t even ask him to reconsider. John did what was right for him. So did Toby.”

“That’s pretty bighearted of you.”

She wrinkled her cute little nose. “It isn’t, really. Because deep down? I do want to be selfish. I want to find a man who prioritizes me. Who chooses me over his career. I don’t want him to give it up or anything like that. I just want him to want me enough to find a way to make it work.”

Ouch. Logan knew that arrow hadn’t been notched, aimed, and shot at him on purpose. Brooke didn’t play games like that. Not to mention that he’d been one hundred percent up-front about his need to leave.

His inability to commit, given his career and his lifestyle.

His own refusal to stay put.

But Logan felt the impact of her words as a direct strike to his heart nonetheless. And he didn’t have a single clue what to do about it.