Magic Kiss (Hope Falls Book 11) (31 page)

“All right.” Logan smiled. “Thanks, man. I’ll let you know.”

Logan walked back towards the grass area where he’d left Emma and didn’t see her. But he found her sitting at the table with Shelby, Lily, and Kyle Austen Reed, who was a little too close to Emma and smiling a little too wide for Logan’s comfort.

He crossed the grass with purposeful strides, and when he took an empty seat at the table, Kyle asked Emma, “So tell me about yourself, pretty lady. Something I don’t know.”

“I’m a writer.”

“Ah, yes. I played a writer once, in
Ink is Thicker than Water
. Well, a journalist. I also played a novelist in
Mightier than the Sword
.”

“I saw them both.” Emma smiled.

Logan was happy to note that it was a friendly smile and not a flirty one.

“Of course,” Kyle Austen Reed replied smoothly, as if that hadn’t even been a question. “I learned that writing is a lonely life. In order to prepare for
Mightier
, I wrote a novel. A thriller. It spent a few weeks at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list.”

“I read it. It was quite good, actually.” Emma looked across the table, and when she saw Logan, a different smile crossed her face. A private smile.

“Well, yes,” Kyle Austen Reed replied, again unsurprised by her assessment.

Even though Logan had no rights to Emma, he still didn’t like this situation. And when he didn’t like something, he changed it. He didn’t want to spend the night with Emma being hit on by Kyle Austen Reed.

So he stood and inclined his head towards the dance floor, which was now filling with people. “Can I have this dance?”

She nodded, and as she stood, she glanced at Kyle. “It was nice meeting you.”

He took her hand and kissed the back of it. “You too,
mon cheri
.”

Logan’s jaw tensed at the sight.

As they walked away, Logan placed his hand on Emma’s back. When they reached the dance floor, he pulled her into his arms. He wanted so badly to kiss her, to show Kyle and every other man there that Emma was his, but he couldn’t do that.

“Is everything okay?” she asked tentatively, her blue eyes shining up at him.

“With what?” he snapped. It wasn’t until he’d heard himself speak that he realized how much Kyle Austen Reed had gotten under his skin.

Her eyes widened as her head tilted to one side. “With Eric? Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah. He just has a job offer for me,” Logan explained.

“A job offer?” she repeated.

“Yeah.” With each sway of their bodies, he felt the tension that had been building up all night then come to a head when he had seen Kyle hitting on her draining from his body.

“Are you thinking about taking it?”

He was, actually, but before he had the chance to answer, Drew ran up to Emma and Logan, interrupting their conversation. He was already four “moms” into his speech before he had reached her.

“Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom! Mom!”

“Yeah, bud. What’s up?”

They stopped moving, and Emma looked down at her son.

“Can I spend the night with Noah? Ryan just gave him his Xbox One? Please? Please please please?”

“Is it okay with Noah’s dad?” she asked just as Rick Barnes walked up.

“Hi, Emma. I’m Rick. It’s nice to meet you.” Rick shook Emma’s hand. “Hey, Logan. How you doing?”

Logan nodded. “Good.”

“It’s fine with me if the boys have a sleepover. I can take them both to Mountain Ridge in the morning.”

“Okay. If you’re sure. Does Amanda have your number?” Emma asked.

“Yes, but I’ll have Drew text it to you too.”

“Great, and just if you could watch—”

“The junk food?” Rick finished, smiling a parent-to-parent smile. “Done.”

Noah ran up, clearly as excited as Drew was over the console. “Dad, can we go? I put the Xbox in the car!”

“Yep,” Rick answered, and then the trio navigated through the crowd as they exited the dance floor.

“Be good,” Emma instructed as she and Logan waved at Noah, Drew, and Rick. “I love you.”

Drew looked over his shoulder and waved. “Love you too, Mom.”

Then Emma gazed up at Logan and grinned a grin only for him. “Looks like we have the evening to ourselves. I know we’re boring, but what do you feel like doing?”

Actually, Logan knew exactly what he wanted to do.

“Do you trust me?” he asked her.

Smiling a smile that he felt in his soul, she answered, “Yes.”

“Are you ready to get out of here?”

“Yes,” she exclaimed, her eyes lighting up with excitement.

He knew she might’ve been excited because she hated social situations, but he also hoped that she was excited at the prospect of uninterrupted adult time being anything but boring. He sure as hell was.

‡

“W
hen you asked me if I trusted you, this wasn’t what I had in mind.” Emma stared up at him with genuine fear in her eyes.

Part of Logan wanted to let her off the hook. If she had boots on, she would literally be shaking in them. But another part of him wanted to push her past her comfort zone. Only because, with him, she’d be safe. And, in his opinion, she needed to let go. To be free. To, for a little bit of time, not feel the weight of the responsibilities she carried. Even if the thought of it terrified her.

Truly believing that this was the best thing for her, he tried to reason with her. “Look, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I know that you never wanted to—”

“How do you know that?” she snapped, crossing her arms.

Logan lifted his arms in mock surrender. “The Christmas that Lucky and I spent with you guys, right after Drew was born, Lucky was talking about how much he loved riding and you said that you were terrified to get on a bike. You said that, when you were growing up, your parents had drilled into you that they were death machines.”

“How did you remember that?” Her mouth was gaping. It would’ve hit the floor if it were humanly possible to do so.

Since Logan was asking her to step out of her comfort zone and trust him, he thought that it was only fair that he did the same thing. “When I was a kid and my mom passed away, the state made us see a shrink for the first year that Levi had custody of us. She diagnosed me with an eidetic memory. Then, when I enlisted, after the physical, they told me that I had a photographic memory. I’ve always been able to remember things. If I look at a piece of paper, I can see it in my head and read it. I can recite verbatim every conversation I’ve had or overheard since I was about three. I can recall facts for any situation I’m in, movie I’ve seen, or book I’ve read down to the minutest detail.”

Emma stared up at him in disbelief. “You can?”

“Yeah, I can.” Logan waited for her response.

Would she think he was lying and ask him to do a bunch of parlor tricks to prove it?

Would she think it was weird?

Would it freak her out?

“That’s awesome!” she exclaimed. “But does your brain get tired? I can’t imagine storing that much information.”

He loved that her first response to his condition was empathy. It was a first. No one had ever had that take on it. But no one was Emma.

“I guess I don’t really have anything to compare it to,” He said.

“Oh right.” she nodded in agreement. “I guess not, huh. That’s just your norm.”

“Yeah. It’s weird for me when people
don’t
remember things. Or they remember them wrong. I used to think people were just liars. The older I get, though, the more I see that people do tend to rewrite history and they truly believe that how they remember it is how it happened.”

“Man…” She shook her head as she looked up at him. “I guess that would be good for your job though, right? I mean, in undercover work, it seems like it would help you keep your story straight.”

“It does.” Again, Logan was blown away with her unique take on this. “I can remember faces, names, relationships.”

“I would love if I could do that! Half the time when I’m writing my characters, I don’t have a clue what color eyes they have or what their middle names are. I was just writing a scene today where I had to remember what Tina—my heroine—what her second-grade teacher’s name was—”

“Mrs. Garcia.”

“What? How did you know that?” She looked more surprised at that than anything else he’d said tonight. “Wait. You read one of my books?”

“I read all of them.” Logan had read two a day over the weekend, so he was caught up on all of the Spencers’ lives. “You’re an amazing writer.”

“You don’t have to say that.” She blushed as she dismissed his compliment.

“I know I don’t, and if you weren’t, I wouldn’t say that. But you are.”

She shook her head and looked back at the bike in the middle of his garage. He’d irritated her a little bit, but he didn’t care. She was an amazing woman, and if she didn’t see herself like that, he was going to do everything in his power to show her.

Getting back to the matter at hand, Logan continued his original thought. “Listen, I know that you never wanted to get on the back of one of these things, but I would never ask you to do anything that wasn’t safe. I took her out today, and she’s a smooth ride. There’s a private road just up the way that winds around the mountain. I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She looked at the bike, then back at Logan, and back to the bike again. She was biting the inside of her lip as the wheels in her head turned. He waited while she mentally debated with herself whether to go through with it or not.

Fisting her hands at her sides, she nodded. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it; she was just so damn cute.

“It’s not a root canal. You might like it. And if you don’t, we’ll turn around and come right home. Deal?” he asked, putting his hand out for them to shake on it.

She sliced her gaze briefly to him and then back to the bike as if she didn’t trust it and didn’t want to take her eyes off it.

“Deal,” she said, as she put her hand in his.

Instead of shaking on it, he pulled her so that she was facing him and cupped her face in his hands. Then he captured her lips with his. The moment their mouths touched, his body was consumed with fiery need. Tilting her head to the side, he deepened the kiss, his tongue sweeping between her full lips.

He could say that he was kissing her to distract her from her fear, but the truth was he was kissing her because he had to. All night, he’d been on edge from being so close to her and not allowing himself to touch her or hold her the way he wanted to, to show everyone at that wedding that she was his.

All of that pent-up frustration was being poured into his kiss. He wanted to claim her. To mark her. To possess her.

It wasn’t a feeling he was familiar with. He’d avoided any kind of romantic connection like the plague. It wasn’t difficult.

Before Emma, he’d never felt any conflict when it came to the opposite sex. His romantic life had been one word: uncomplicated. There were no mixed signals. He was always honest and up-front about what he wanted, which was to enjoy each other in the bedroom and have no relationship outside of it. The women he’d been with had known where they stood. Sure, some of them might’ve thought they could change his stance, but it wasn’t his fault they were delusional.

Emma was different. He’d had a relationship with her outside the bedroom long before he’d had one inside. Now that he had both, he didn’t want to give either of them up. But she deserved a hell of a lot better than him.

What if he had another incident?

Not to mention how badly he’d be betraying Andrew’s memory.

This entire situation was the polar opposite of uncomplicated.

His confusion and angst were being infused into their long, drugging kiss. He was absorbing her essence into his cells in an attempt to satisfy his need, want, and craving for her. But it wouldn’t be enough. He could never get enough of her, but damn if he wasn’t going to take what he could get.

Moaning softly, she slid her hands around his neck, and her fingers tangled in the hair at the base of his neck. She did that a lot during sex, and he liked it.
A lot
. Now, his own actions were sending mixed signals to his body, saying that it was go time.

Reluctantly, he broke their kiss. If he hadn’t, he would have dragged her into the house and the bike ride would be a moot point. But Emma made a small sound of disappointment. Resting his forehead on hers, he smiled. He couldn’t help but love the fact that she seemed to want him just as much as he wanted her.

“Go get changed; jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. I would go with you, but we’d never make it back out here.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” she asked hopefully.

“Yes.” He chuckled as he leaned back, letting his arms fall to his sides.

“Fine,” she sighed in resignation as she headed inside.

“Remember, it’s not a root canal,” he reiterated as he swatted her playfully on her butt.

Over her shoulder, she stuck her tongue out at him before she disappeared inside the house.

Damn, she was cute.

*