Chapter 12 Grounded
TWELVE
Grounded
AOIFE
No words were spoken as we took the elevator to the floor where Logan had offices.
MadDox Security. The boy I’d once known, the softest of all the Maddox brothers, ran a security firm.
My mind was blown. A part of me thought he was a successful programmer of some sort.
It never occurred to me that he would branch out so far away from his original goals.
He wanted to design video games that brought joy to people, instead he ran a business based on people’s need to be protected.
The twinge in my heart made me a bit sad for the boy who hoped to put a smile on people’s faces and instead ended up seeing them in their time of greatest need.
“What exactly do you do here?” I asked.
“We’ll get to that. Let’s head to the conference room. It’s a secure space where we don’t have to worry about anything we say being overheard or surveilled.”
“Is that really a concern for you in your own building?” It was hard to believe that the Maddox brothers would have to worry about their own privacy and security considering it was like Fort Knox and getting into the building took several levels of biometrics from them.
“You’d be surprised what people try to slip past our security features and I’m not egotistical enough to assume that someone out there isn’t smarter than me.”
Wow. That did not sound like the Logan I’d once known.
The boy I knew had a huge ego and didn’t think anything in life could ever stop him.
I’d read about the fallout surrounding the woman who tore us apart before, so I knew he had his faith in people tested.
It never occurred to me just how something like that might change him.
Granted, I hadn’t been able to keep up with him after that, so I didn’t know if there were other reasons.
“I need to know how you disappeared so effectively. Honestly, at some point your father and fiancé managed to find you when I couldn’t, so I want to trace your entire timeline from the moment Miles dropped you off at your dorm until now.”
“Don’t you think all that can wait? It’s been twelve years.”
“I know it’s been twelve years!” Logan yelled as he turned on his heel and walked away from me. “Christ, Aoife, I never stopped searching for you.”
“Yeah? When did you even start? Was it before or after you realized you’d been betrayed by that bitch?
” He flinched and that gave me all the answers I needed.
“That’s what I thought. You didn’t care if I made it home safely or what happened to me after that.
You threw me and our friendship away for her and you’re yelling at me like it was all my fault. ”
“You disappeared,” he argued.
“I had to.” Our eyes connected and I could feel the frustration rolling off him in waves but I shook my head to dismiss that because my anger and resentment bubbled up, too.
“I came to you first and the awful woman you chose over me made damn sure that I couldn’t get help from you.
You made choices that day and I reacted in the best way I could.
The only option I had was to disappear.”
“You could have gone to my brothers until we were able to get things straightened out between us.”
“You turned your back on me, why on earth would I think to go to your family for help when you refused to be there for me?”
“I didn’t refuse…” He started to say and then stopped and growled out his frustration. “It wasn’t like that. I was working with the information I had at the moment.”
“No, you were working with her word against mine even when other people tried to tell you the truth. You shut it down and took her back while you left me swinging in the wind. Now, you want to blame me for finding my own way to keep myself safe?”
“No.” Logan stomped over and pulled me into his arms. “I’m so fucking sorry for that night. You’ll never know just how sorry I am for that. There’s no way for me to properly convey it.”
I sighed in response and took a step back. Logan released me and then reached down for my hand to guide me over to the couch along the back wall. We took a seat sitting side-by-side while twisting to face one another.
“I don’t mean to harp on that night. I do know what she did to you.
It’s about all I know about your life after you left.
It wasn’t safe to look into you. I was always paranoid that I’d be one search away from being discovered.
Worse, I worried that I’d run back and put you in danger if something popped up that I couldn’t ignore. ”
“You were okay with ignoring the fact that I got thrown out of MIT?” I knew by his tone that he was half-assed teasing me. Still, I chose to answer.
“No, but I was also too angry with you and quite frankly heartbroken at the time. Everything was fresh and it hurt. Part of me felt like it was your karmic justice, even if it also felt awful to know that you were probably going through hell.”
“I know I don’t deserve for you to hear me out about all that, but I hope you give me the chance one day. Right now, we need to figure out when and how they found you.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters because I couldn’t find you and if for some reason we need to hide you temporarily while we take care of the problem, I need to know that you won’t be compromised again.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your engagement picture on social media.”
“Shaina.” I groaned. “I could have killed her when I realized what she’d done. I took it down almost immediately.”
“It wasn’t quick enough. You were already with Andrew Connolly. How did you end up meeting him?”
I rolled my eyes as I thought about it. “I met him through Shaina. She lived two doors down from me. That’s how we met. I would have ignored her forever, but it was weird…” My voice trailed off then.
“What was weird?”
“It was like we kept bumping into one another everywhere,” I mumbled. “I’d bet anything that she was planted there. It wasn’t random. She knew Andrew all along and kept hinting at him being this super important man.”
“Okay, what changed for you just before you met her?” Logan took my hand in his. “There had to be something that tipped them off.”
The tips of my ears burned with humiliation for what I was about to have to reveal. “I changed my legal name.”
“You changed your legal name in California?”
I nodded. “There were court hearings about it and I had a lawyer argue the legal requirements of placing an ad in the paper because my safety was at stake. We ended up having that requirement waived, but they must have tracked the information anyway.” I thought about it and wondered why Logan wouldn’t have seen the information pop up and my father or the men affiliated with him did.
“I need to know your new name, Aoife.” My face went up in flames, or at least it felt as if it did. “Now, I’m even more curious.”
“This is so embarrassing,” I huffed. He grinned at me. “Maddox,” I whispered.
“What was that?”
I glanced up until our eyes locked and I ripped the damn bandaid off. “Aoife Elaine Maddox is my legal name now.”
The silence that followed my admission was deafening. We both sat still, me drowning in the intense embarrassment that threatened to boil me alive inside my own skin. Logan in a state of jaw-dropped shock.
“You took my last name?” he finally questioned.
I gave the barest nod of my head in response before my childhood best friend leaned forward and slid his hand behind my head a second before his lips collided with my own.
With zero hesitation, he slid his tongue across the seam of my mouth and when I opened, he plunged in and kissed me so hard my toes curled, nerve endings tingled, and my heart stopped beating.
Maybe time stood still. All I knew was that once it restarted, Logan’s hands framed my face and his eyes shined with moisture that hadn’t been there before.
“You took my last name.” It wasn’t a question that time. It was a statement.
“You just kissed me,” I whispered as my fingers traced the lingering warmth on my lips.
“It was long overdue.” He leaned in and gave me another quick peck before pulling back. “Why did you use my name?”
“I’ve always used it for work,” I admitted without thinking. “I just wanted to make it official.”
“For work?” Logan asked.
“Shit,” I hissed.
“Nope,” he insisted. “You have to tell me the rest now. What exactly do you do for work, Aoife?”
“I write romance books.”
“How long?”
“What do you mean by ‘how long?’”
“How long has that been your job?”
I really didn’t want to answer him, but I supposed it was something I couldn’t avoid. “Since I started high school, but I was picked up by an agent and publisher during freshman year of college.”
Hurt bled through his features. “You never told me.”
“I would have, but I wanted to wait for the right time. It was hard enough to hide it when no one else knew. It was the only way I could squirrel enough money away for us in case we needed to run and hide together.”
“Because we were supposed to get married so your dad couldn’t force you to marry a man of his choosing.” Logan appeared to get lost in his thoughts then.
“Yes, but it ended up not mattering.”
“Because I was an idiot,” he admitted. There was nothing I could say to contradict him. It was true. If he hadn’t believed Grace over me, we may have been married for the past twelve years rather than missing one another.
“Did your dad know about the writing?”
“I don’t see how he would have.”
Logan gave a quick nod of his head as his eyes glazed over.
“So, he’s been checking for the possibility that you’d take my name at some point.
That is the one thing we never checked for.
I didn’t think you’d have anything to do with me or my last name after what happened with Grace.
It never occurred to me to run a combination of our names through the searches. ”
“I should have known better than to change it to what I did, I guess.”
“I’m glad you did it.”
“You are?”
“Of fucking course I am. First, it’s less paperwork for you to do later. Second, it means you’re back finally after twelve long fucking years. I’ve missed the hell out of you.”
“What do you mean less paperwork?”
“We’re getting married. You already have my name, so it’s one less thing to worry about.”
“We can’t get married!” I all but shrieked at Logan.
“We can. We will. First, I need to get some sleep because I’ve been flying all day to try to get to you.”
“Logan, I’m serious. We can’t get married.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know each other anymore.”
“We could never be strangers, Aoife. You have always been here.” He tapped the spot overtop of his heart. “There are some things we need to catch up on, but nothing you could say could change the way I feel about you. The way I’ve always felt about you.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not fucking lying to you.”
“If you loved me so much, Grace never would have come between us.”
“I made a mistake, Aoife. One that I never plan to make again.”
I wasn’t sure if that was something I could put my faith in.
Judging by the way my heart ticked up several beats per minute, my doubts didn’t matter.
I would test the theory. It was impossible not to.
Logan had been my person since we were six years old and if it hadn’t been for the threat of my dad’s plans hanging over my head, I’d have stuck around twelve years ago and Logan and I would have worked things out.
Whether we stayed friends or became something more is beside the point.
Our lives would have remained intertwined.