Walk Through Fire

When he hit the living room, he felt slightly better seeing Dottie’s eyes come to him with a soft look of understanding and a definite communication that it was all going to be okay.

He felt a fuckuva lot better when Millie’s eyes came to him and she gave him a smile that said she was happy her house was filled with people she loved.

Then it was High who ended up frying the bacon.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gonna Be My Throat


Millie

“ALAN WILL COME around,” I whispered against Logan’s neck.

We were in my bed, Logan in his clothes, me in my pj’s, Logan on his back, me on top of him.

My sister and her family had left five minutes ago. The snowplow had gone down our street thirty minutes before that but it didn’t matter. Alan told us it was going to get near sixty degrees that day, so Denver was going to thaw.

When they’d left, I’d wanted to do the dishes.

Logan had firmly led me right where I was.

“I know, Millie,” he whispered back.

I lifted my head to look up at him. “How did Dot know about us?”

Conversation had not been heavy during our surprise visit with my family. We made waffles. We ate them. We talked about France. I gave out presents. The kids took most of the attention but that didn’t mean Dot didn’t go out of her way to communicate to her children and her husband that Logan was welcome and accepted. This meant she went out of her way to communicate the same to Logan.

Alan, on the other hand, resolutely refused to heed this communication and spent a lot of his time scowling at Logan and being very loving and familiar to me. He did this last bit by centering anything he said around things Logan couldn’t know or hadn’t been a part of, leaving him out.

Logan appeared not to give a shit about this.

But he was human and he was back with me. Family was all important to him.

He’d give a shit.

This was one concern.

The other concern was the fact that they’d come at all, not to see me after France, but obviously to check I was okay since they knew Logan was there.

“After you passed out in my bed in the Compound,” Logan began, “I went to her. We had words.”

I felt myself go tense as I felt my eyes go wide.

“Uh...?what?” I asked.

His arms were already around me, loose but warm.

At my question, he started stroking my back with one hand.

“Babe, she’s Dot,” he declared. “She was more worried about you than me showin’ up at her door pissed off she didn’t share with me back then. Then she showed her usual spunk, and side note, glad to see she hasn’t lost that, it can be irritatin’ as fuck, but just like you, mostly it’s cute. In the end, she asked me in for cocoa and welcomed me back.”

I felt better at his words.

I also felt amused at the cocoa bit.

“Did you have cocoa?” I asked.

“Fuck no. Had you back in my bed. Said what I had to say and got the fuck outta there.” His hand stroked up my spine and curled around the back of my neck. “And seein’ as I’m sharin’ this, even if you weren’t already pullin’ out of that Arizona thing, Dottie’s probably been manipulatin’ that since I was at her place so you would be pullin’ out of it, seein’ as I gave her that assignment and, like her little sister, when she’s in, she’s all in.”

That didn’t surprise me either. Dottie, like my parents, had loved Logan. They’d missed him. Dot had tried repeatedly (and failed miserably) to talk me out of ending things with him.

However, Logan going to get in her face wasn’t fair.

He didn’t know that.

But it wasn’t.

I bent closer to him and shared carefully, “You should know, she didn’t agree with what I did. She tried—”

He slid his hand to cup my cheek in his palm. “Babe, you don’t gotta say no more. She told me you were in a state. I told you I get the state you were in. We’ve talked that through. Let’s not go back there.”

I stared at him.

I knew I missed him. I lived with that pain every day.

But now I was remembering all the reasons why I missed him.

One of these being that he was understanding. He listened. He did it with focus. He heard what you were saying and if it meant something to you, he found a way to get it so it wasn’t an issue. Alternatively, if he didn’t get it, he eventually found a way to accept it. That didn’t mean there weren’t arguments or out and out fights, but that was usually about unimportant stuff.

The important stuff Logan treated as important.

Another of these things was the fact that once an issue was put to bed, it was done. Not only did Logan not dredge it up again, hold a grudge, use it as an example, reopen discussions, he also didn’t let me do it either.

If we found ourselves at a hurdle in life, once we cleared it, we kept going.

No turning back.

These thoughts were profound and made me an alarming mixture of happy, hopeful, and sad, thus they made me drop my head so I hit his collarbone with my forehead. I turned so my cheek was pressed to him and his fingers were forced to glide into my hair. To get more of him, I then slid my hand down his stomach and up so I could shove it his shirt, skin against skin, around to his back.

“What’s on your mind?” he rumbled.

“I never forgot why I loved you so much, missed you so much. But having you back, I find that I still forgot.”

“Baby,” he said softly.

“I’ll get over it,” I told him, hoping that was true and I didn’t live with new wounds, wounds reminding me of all I’d missed over the years.

“Yeah,” he murmured, gave me more soothing strokes, then moved us along. “Now we should take a shower. You got shit to sort bein’ back and we got shit just to sort and we should get on with that.”

I didn’t want to.

The day was sunny and warm. The snow was thawing. And this time we had together would be at an end.

Logan was intent we’d have more times together and no matter how bumpy that ride got, this time I was going to hold on tight along the way.

But now we had this moment. This final stretch of time in our reunion before we had to get on with life.

And I wanted more.

Kristen Ashley's books