Chapter Twenty-Two
I f he was honest with himself—and he tried to be—he’d admit he’d nearly panicked when he’d turned around and seen her standing there. He’d been lost in thought about the materials he’d need to do what Rylan wanted done. He hadn’t been prepared, as he was when they’d arranged to meet. He hadn’t been considering the possibility, as he did every time he went into town where it might be possible to run into her, as he had that day he’d made that comment that had somehow stuck in her mind. He hadn’t even been wondering if he might see her, as he did whenever he went to some place that had some historical significance.
No, for the first time in a while she hadn’t been in the forefront of his mind, as he focused on the task at hand. And now he was standing here dumbstruck, like some kind of idiot who couldn’t put two words together. Which had given her time to start looking around.
Now she was standing by his tool rack, looking at it as intently as if it held something that truly interested her. And as widespread as her interests appeared to be, he couldn’t swear that ordinary display didn’t.
She didn’t look around when he approached, just pointed to the short-bladed, curved tool that hung beside the hoof nippers. “What’s that one for? I recognize the ones you use to clip hooves—nippers, I think?—but not this.”
“Yes on the hoof nippers. The other is just a hoof knife, to trim the frog and sole if necessary.”
Her brow furrowed. “I get that the hoof is like a toenail, no nerves, but isn’t the frog sensitive?”
“Not pain wise, if that’s what you mean.” He could deal with this, questions about his work. He relaxed a little. “But I don’t mess with the frog, or the sole, unless there’s a problem, or a loose flap—they’re shed naturally over time—that could gather bacteria or tear. The horse needs that cushion, for a lot of reasons, including keeping the hooves the best shape.”
She asked more questions, and he could almost see her mentally filing away his answers. She truly did have a curious mind.
And she lulled him with her work-related questions, so much that he didn’t realize how far they’d progressed along the tool rack until she stopped dead, staring at the wall. Or rather, the framed photograph on the wall. One of the very few pictures of him that existed.
Him…and Bud.
Looking at the image of the older man, silver haired and with a neatly trimmed beard to match—he used to tease him that he looked like Santa Claus after he’d been on a diet for a couple of years—made his throat tighten up, as it always did. He had to close his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again Tris’s gaze was on him.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“Bud Dailey.”
“He’s important to you,” she said softly.
He swallowed tightly. “He was. He spent years teaching me everything I know about this work. He was the best man I’ve ever known.”
“He’s gone?”
He nodded. Cleared his throat. “A few years ago.”
“Your friend in the cemetery,” she said, putting the pieces together as she so often seemed to.
He nodded, then hesitated, but something about her and the fact that she knew exactly how he must feel compelled him to go on. “This was his place. When I was still a teenager he let me live in the back room here—” he gestured over his shoulder “—because I didn’t have any place else. I came back when I left the Air Force. And when he died, he didn’t have any family, so he left it to me.”
She gave him a rather odd smile and said, very softly, “Sounds to me like he did have family. It just wasn’t by blood.”
His breath stopped for a moment as he realized the odd tightness in that smile was emotion. “He…used to say things like that. Like your brother says about the family you build yourself. Bud said I was his son by choice, not blood.”
“Then I’m very glad you found each other. Even though it’s so very hard to lose someone you’re so close to.”
Yes, he had been close to Bud, the only adult who had ever shown any genuine feeling for him. He’d cared for the man who had taken him in more than he had for anyone else in his life. It was a kind of love, at least. Probably the only kind he was capable of. Although since he’d gotten to know Tris, he…what? Cared? Yes, he did. He could admit that much. But love, the kind she deserved, was something else again. Something he didn’t know much about.
He recognized that other kind of love, the meant-to-be-mates kind, like with Jackson and Nic, but he’d only ever seen it from the outside. And likely only ever would see it that way. A fact he had to work to remember when he was around Tris. Because for the first time since Gretchen he was pondering the risks, and wondering if it was worth it.
“So tell me, do you think it’s true, about loving and losing?” she asked.
He stared at her, only able to because she was looking at the photo again. And before he realized what he was doing, he was speaking the famous words. “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’? Maybe for Tennyson. Is it for you?”
She met his gaze then, and something in her eyes told him of the depth of that pain of loss. “Now, looking back, I can say yes. But only because the pain has changed.”
“Changed?”
“When it hits, it’s as deep and sharp and bloody as ever. But it no longer comes as often, or takes up residence for days on end. So I guess the previous line of that poem applies.”
He gave her a sideways look. “Quizzing me?”
She smiled. “No. I know you know, because I’ve heard about you and Slater Highwater trading quotes.”
“He did give me a reading list,” he said wryly. The Last Stand Saloon owner was notorious in town for such things, which was what made him the perfect match for Joey the librarian.
“‘I feel it when I sorrow most,’ then?”
“Yes. Strange, isn’t it, that when we’re in the most pain, we feel it’s better to be in that pain than not?”
He looked back at the photo on the wall. He’d been nearly twenty when it was taken, two years out of the system, and had been working with Bud and living here for nearly that long. It was just before he’d left for his military service, and he’d been uneasy about leaving. But Bud had assured him he would still have a place here when he came back, and asked a friend to take the photo for both of them.
He wasn’t sure he could comprehend the depth of her kind of pain, but the passing of the man smiling at him in that picture had been the worst thing he’d ever felt. But the only way to avoid it would have been not to stay when Bud had offered that back room. And if he’d walked away, he would not have the life he had now. It had all been given to him by this man, who indeed had treated him like no one ever had before. Like he imagined it must feel to have actual family.
“It’s worth the price,” he murmured, focused on the kind, warm brown eyes of the man who had never lost patience with him, even in his most edgy moments. “I’d probably be dead by now if he hadn’t come along.”
“Then I’m very, very glad he did.”
His gaze shot back to her face. There was no mistaking the sincerity he saw there. She was glad he was alive. He didn’t know how to interpret that, but he couldn’t deny the truth of it.
“And,” she added, in that same undeniably sincere tone, “I’m certain he would be very proud of you today.”
“I…I’d like to believe that.”
“Believe it,” she said, almost insistently. “You’re an important part of Last Stand, Logan.”
He had a place here, yes. He didn’t think much beyond that, because it was already more than he’d ever expected or hoped for. Tris tilted her head slightly, in that way that he knew meant curiosity. He sensed a question coming. But then, in the instant before it did, she gave a shake of her head and stopped.
“What?” he asked.
“None of my business,” she said.
“Don’t I get to decide that?” He acknowledged a bit of wonder that he was pushing her to ask him a question when he usually dodged such things.
“But the question itself might be…distressing.”
“I think I can deal,” he said dryly. “Snowflakes don’t generally last long in Texas.”
She laughed. Then, still smiling, she went ahead. “I was just wondering about your name. Is it Logan Fox? Mrs. Baylor said you were very young when they…found you.”
He went still. Wondered at the juxtaposition of the question now, when they’d been talking about the only other person he’d ever explained this to. When he didn’t speak, she did.
“Told you it was none of my business.”
She sounded almost sad that she’d asked, and for some reason that made him answer. “I was somewhere between a year and a year and a half old, they told me.” He grimaced. “If I knew my name, if I even had one, I couldn’t say it. So, I got named by circumstances.”
“Circumstances?”
He braced himself, then went on with what he had no doubt would end her curiosity for good.
“I was found because someone stopped to look at a fox who was digging in a dumpster from a company named Logan Refuse.”
He grimaced again. It still stung, as ridiculous as it was, after all this time. She was staring at him. No doubt trying to think of a way to get away from him now that she knew the truth.
But then she was smiling. And then it was nothing short of a grin. “Someone,” she said, “was both observant and clever.”
He blinked.
“It’s a great name,” she added. “Strong. They must have seen even then what a man you would become. I can’t picture you as anything else.”
“My mother,” he said carefully, “threw me away. Not just because I was a baby she didn’t want, or she would have done it when I was first born. But she kept me for a year and a half, then threw me away. I wasn’t just a baby she didn’t know or want, I was the kid she kept until she realized—”
He cut himself off from finishing with the too painfully familiar “she hated me,” when he realized his volume was growing.
“Until she realized she wasn’t good enough for you?” she suggested. “Now that I can believe. And the loss is definitely hers.”
Logan stared at her, sure he was probably gaping but unable to stop. He’d known it his entire life, that he wasn’t just a baby his mother hadn’t wanted, but that she had kept him long enough to grow to hate him and want to be rid of him enough to throw him in a dumpster on her way out of town. When he was a kid, he used to dream that she hadn’t even stopped the car, but had just rolled down a window and tossed.
Until she realized she wasn’t good enough for you…
Such an idea had never, ever occurred to him. “I don’t think,” he said, his voice coming out colder than he’d intended, “you throw something away because you’re not good enough.”
She went very still, and her chin came up. Something hot and fierce flashed in those eyes. “And I think spending any time at all thinking about the kind of people who would do what she did, to an amazing human being like you, is an absolute waste. But I’ll leave you to it, if you must.”
And then she was gone, leaving Logan staring after her in more than a little bit of shock. Not at her departure, but at her words. …an amazing human being like you.
At her words, and the simple fact that she had so clearly meant them.
*
Tris felt awful by the time she got home. She didn’t know why she’d gone off on him like that. It just hurt so much to see him blame himself, as if a tiny child could be responsible for being abandoned in such a harsh, cruel way. Couldn’t he see that what he’d done, the life he’d built—thank you, Bud Dailey, I wish I could have known you—negated all that? That he had proved his parents—if his father had even known he was a father—so very, very wrong?
She shook her head sharply as she got out of the car and headed inside. Even her thoughts were jumbled, full of starts and stops and side trips. Maybe she needed to sit down and think about herself a little, and why she reacted to him this way. It just hurt to see how hard he was on himself, when he was—she’d been right about this—such an amazing human being.
Logan Fox.
A wild animal and a dumpster.
How could she possibly know how that history would make her feel, if it was hers? She’d grown up with loving parents, and a protective big brother. She’d found a deep, precious love with David. Logan had had none of that. He’d grown up knowing he’d been tossed away like so much garbage. Grown up in a system that, for all its good intentions, so often failed.
And she realized with a sad, sinking feeling that it wasn’t only that he wasn’t used to feeling welcomed, as she had thought after talking to Lark, it was that he knew nothing about being loved.
She closed the door from the garage and leaned against it, staring unseeingly at her kitchen, suddenly breathless.
He knew nothing about being loved. She had meant only that familial kind of love she’d been lucky enough to have in her life, but she couldn’t stop her mind from jumping to the other kind, that once-in-a-lifetime connection to someone that made you understand all the meanings of the word mate .
But was it once in a lifetime? She’d always thought so, in that romantic way David had teased her about. She’d always laughed at his teasing, admitting that, for a grounded, practical woman like her the flights of fancy were a bit of an aberration. One time she’d tried to point out to him how much of history, both good and bad, was driven by the kind of love she was talking about. But he had just shaken his head over her fascination with history. Historical buildings, that he could understand, and the history of the people who had built them, but the great love stories of history? Nope, not interested.
At first, she had felt stung, but then David had added, “Why would I be, when I’m living my own great love story?”
It had been impossible to stay mad at him after that.
But then, she had always found it impossible to stay mad at him. Death, yes, she could stay mad at that, for taking him. But he’d been so sick, so lost, in so much pain, so not David anymore by the end, she couldn’t beg him to keep fighting any longer.
She’d had to let go. She’d had to accept that the huge hole he’d left in her life was permanent. Nothing could ever fill that empty place. No matter what he’d said in that letter.
She hadn’t thought about that, the letter she’d only found after he’d died, in a long time. She’d only read it once anyway—or tried to, through the constant veil of tears—but once had been enough.
She slammed a mental door on the memory, and for good measure locked it. She tried to busy herself, doing housework that didn’t need doing, going over lesson plans for the tutoring sessions coming up that she’d already been over, and over. She grabbed the book she’d been reading, a historical novel that she’d related to since it featured a widow who had had to build her own life alone. But tonight it couldn’t hold her.
It couldn’t hold her because she kept thinking about Logan and his tragic story, as sad as anything she’d ever read. And yet he was who he was, a man with work he loved, a talent rare and special, and the capability to laugh now and then despite the life he’d had. It made her life seem soft and cushy by comparison. And David’s, too. Not that they hadn’t worked hard, they had…but they’d had a strong, sturdy foundation to build on. Logan hadn’t. Until he’d met his mentor, he’d had nothing.
And yet here he was, the man he was, and that did nothing less than amaze her.
She dropped the book on the end table beside her. An image formed in her mind, of the wide-open space of his home, the books piled on the coffee table in front of the couch, remembered when, in passing, he’d rather sheepishly admitted he often fell asleep reading on that couch. She could just picture him, his long, lean form stretched out, probably with his boots kicked off, propped up with the pillows she’d noticed piled at one end next to a serious-looking reading lamp.
The strangest sensation flooded her as she imagined herself sitting there too, reading as he was, in the quiet peace of that remote location, with the sweep of the galaxy over their heads, utterly at peace on this tiny speck in that infinite space.
It took her a moment to realize that the feeling that had overtaken her at that scene in her imagination was also peace, of a kind she hadn’t known in years.
And…yearning.
It had been so long she hadn’t even recognized the feeling. She’d felt the ache, the restlessness for some time now, but hadn’t been able to name it. Until now. Until she finally admitted that she more than liked Logan.
She wanted him.
She wanted that scene in her imagination to end in the only way it could, with them, together, showing those stars above just how carnal two hungry human beings could be.
A ripple of heat went through her, a kind of heat she’d thought long dead and buried. And suddenly peace was the last thing she wanted.
Especially from Logan.