Chapter 7 Rose
He’s being weird. Polite. Standoffish. Not that he’s lost any of his natural arrogance, he’s still cocky as hell. But Logan Wells is being a total weirdo.
He came out of the shower dressed down in a way I have never seen before.
Dark jeans, a plain white t-shirt, no ugly, expensive watch.
Casual looks really good on him. His hair is wet, curling slightly behind his ears, darker than usual.
He runs a hand through it, and apparently that’s all that’s needed, because it’s drying in a way that is effortless and infuriating, and I want to grab hold and mess it up again, but maybe with his head between my thighs.
Oh, shit, redirect. He’s looking at me now, probably because I’ve been staring at him for the past twenty minutes.
“I’m hungry,” I tell him. I’m not actually; we just had lunch a couple of hours ago, but it’s too early to be trapped in this room for the night. “There was a bar next door.” I point past the pool outside the motel.
The storm is still raging. But the bar is right next door, and technically this isn’t even a hurricane yet. That’s tomorrow, when we drive straight into it like two complete idiots.
Logan puts his phone away. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”
He agrees too easily, but he must not like being cooped up in this room with me any more than I do.
I slip on my shoes, grab my purse, which I’d already pulled out of my backpack, and wait for him by the door.
There’s something seriously disarming about casual Logan.
He tucks his wallet into his back pocket, then gestures his arm out as if to say, lead the way.
I brace uselessly against the rain and scurry across the lot, head down, the wind cutting sideways so that the rain hits the side of my face no matter which way I turn.
The music is blaring so loud I can hear it over the wind, and when I grab the door and pull, the storm grabs back, nearly bowling me over.
Logan’s hand closes over mine on the handle and swings it open, his other hand finding the small of my back and pressing me in ahead of him.
I move inside, and when his hand drops, I try not to overthink the way the warmth of him lingers.
The bar is packed wall to wall, every barstool taken, people crowded three deep.
I doubt all these people are from the motel, they must be locals.
Nobody in here seems particularly worried about the storm, either.
There’s a jukebox in the corner, country music bleeding into the noise of the crowd. Pool tables line the far wall, neon beer signs casting everything in yellow, red, and green. The floor pulls at my shoes, sticky with every step. It smells like stale beer and lost inhibitions. It’s perfect.
I sidle up to the bar, waiting shoulder to shoulder until there’s an opening.
Logan presses in beside me, close enough that I catch his cologne over the stale beer—warm and faintly spicy, and entirely too easy to lean into.
I look up at him and feel suddenly, inexplicably out of sorts.
This is vacation Rose and Logan, and vacation Rose and Logan are just two people in a bar, riding out a storm.
The thought does diabolical things to my body, and I have to shake my head clear of them. I loathe this man, I have to remind myself.
I order a cider and, shocker, Logan orders a bourbon, neat.
He pays, even as I argue, then takes my hand and pulls me away from the bar, further from the jukebox.
The crowd thins as we go deeper into the building, opening up into a back room I hadn’t expected—low ceilings, round tables packed with people leaning into each other over their drinks, a small empty stage at the far end.
A handful of people dance in the open space in front of it.
Logan steers me past them to a small table at the edge of the room.
We sit, and my mind quiets. The jukebox has switched to something slower, and the neon bleeds across the table between us.
I wrap my hand around the cold bottle and take a long sip.
My wet hair from the rain sticks to my cheek.
The humidity makes my shirt feel tight and damp.
Despite all the chaos over the last two days, I feel more settled in this moment than I have in months.
Logan watches me.
“What?” I finally ask. His eyes drop to my lips when I tilt the bottle back.
He shakes his head. “This is nice.”
I cough so hard I nearly choke on the cider. He tilts his head, the corner of his mouth pulling up. “Need some water?”
“No,” I laugh, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “No. Sorry.” I set the bottle down, narrowing my eyes on him suspiciously. “This is nice.”
His eyes stay fixed on me until a ruckus breaks out at the far edge of the room.
Two guys, big as Easton, are going at it over a game of darts.
Not the kind of argument that ends in blood, but there’s a lot of gesturing and finger-jabbing.
One of them shouts, “My bro, you cheated!” and I start giggling.
Logan smirks. “I can’t remember the last time I did this.”
“Watched two grown men cry over darts?”
He laughs, his finger slowly tracing the rim of his glass. “No. Relaxed, I mean. Had a drink at a bar.” He glances around the room, pausing on the couple swaying near the empty stage.
I think about that. “You’re pretty busy, I guess. With your job. Your career,” I emphasize, putting a little weight on the word after all the shit he gave me yesterday about my lack of ambition.
He grimaces, sets the glass down. “Tell me about yours. Pearl said—”
“I don’t want to talk about Pearl.”
“Fair enough. Me either. I just… want to know more about you. I’m beginning to wonder…”
What’s true, and what’s false? He doesn’t finish the thought, but I feel it land, anyway. It isn’t enough, though. I wish he’d give me the benefit of the doubt and assume everything he thinks he knows about me is a lie.
The problem is, I don’t actually know what Pearl has told him.
Logan and I have never really talked, not like this.
I always knew she talked shit, but not to the degree I’m starting to suspect.
Avoiding topics she’s potentially poisoned against me makes conversation complicated, because I don’t want to spend the night weeding out the rot.
I’m enjoying myself, and this is too nice to ruin with the real world.
I aim for something neutral. “Have you really ever been to that topless diner near the hospital?”
He barks out a laugh and shakes his head. “No. I haven’t.” He tilts his glass, watching me over the rim. “I’d go if you worked there, though.”
Something ignites low in my belly at his words, making my core clench. The easy look on his face tells me he’s either joking or just picking up where we left off last night, before our fight. I hold his gaze a beat longer than I should before I look away.
“You’d have to pay me a lot more than waffles to see my tits.”
His eyes blaze, dark and dangerous. “A five-thousand dollar room wasn’t enough?”
“Oh, come on. You own a private jet. That’s nothing.”
“If that’s nothing, then how come every time I pay for your sandwich or coffee, you mentally tally everything and keep reminding me you’ll pay me back.
It’s peanuts, I don’t care about the money.
You don’t have to pay me back a dime.” He pauses, the mood between us suddenly shifting.
“In fact, I wish you wouldn’t. But what’s the difference? ”
“Seriously? What’s the difference between you paying for everything for me, and the rooms for all those people in need?”
He adjusts in his seat, and something in his expression closes off. His arms flex in his t-shirt, forearms thick and corded where they rest on the table. I knew surgeons had to be in really good shape to withstand long surgeries, but this is just gratuitous.
I lick my lips and drag my eyes back up before remembering he said something stupid. “I’m not a charity case. I can afford my own coffee and lunch.” Mostly.
“I never said you couldn’t.”
“Then why do you keep insisting on paying for everything?” I argue back.
His lips purse. Then he says, “And that woman in the motel? She was charity?”
“No, she wasn’t charity either. You act like it’s some sort of contrition.”
“I do not,” he grunts, shifting back in his chair.
“You had the money to solve the problem—everyone’s problem—but we weren’t the ones who needed it most. That woman with the kids never asked for a thing, and she was the most in need in that room.
The available room should have been hers.
She just couldn’t throw a thousand dollars at it.
” I scratch at the label on the bottle. “That kind of money doesn’t even register to you.
But to her? It’s not peanuts. It’s life-changing. ”
Quieter, he says, “You always do this. You make me out to sound like such a piece of shit, just because I have money. I can’t help who I was born to, what I was raised with. What would make you happy? If I gave everything away?”
I remember him at Pearl’s charity gala last year, where I said jet-owning billionaires were the destruction of humankind and a blight on the earth. I also remember he and his father gave away one million dollars to the children’s foundation.
I shake my head slowly, feeling regret at my words, then and now.
I was furious with Pearl that night. She never wanted me near her social circle, so when she called and said she needed me at the gala, I knew she wanted something.
Sure enough, the owner of Easton’s football team would be there, and she needed me to bring Easton as my date so she could get an introduction.
I went anyway because the cause was real, even if her motives weren’t.
She showed up at my apartment with a dress—vintage Chanel, she made sure to mention, with a pointed look at my hips, telling me I better not rip the dress with my fat ass.
She added I was to keep my mouth shut, stay away from the donors and not embarrass her.
Just to piss her off, I got a little tipsy on champagne, which was easier to do than usual because things had actually been going well for me.
I’d just secured funding to match my initial investment for my wellness practice, and things were looking up.
So when I opened my mouth, I said some things I shouldn’t have, painting Logan and everyone in Pearl’s orbit with the same brush, as if her cruelty was on all of them.
I look over at Logan. His jaw is tight, the muscle ticking as he waits for me to speak.
“I’m sorry. I’m an ass.”
I think I’ve shocked him. His lips part, but nothing comes out.
“What I was trying to say is—you keep paying for things all day, even after I said I had it covered. Lunch, coffee, drinks. I don’t need that.
But if you’re going to throw money around anyway, that woman with the kids needed that room a lot more than I needed you to buy me a sandwich.
Since, according to you, the cost of a sandwich and shelling out five-grand for a seventy-five dollar room is basically the same to you. ”
“The woman with the kids, the dad and son on a fishing trip, I get. What about the three stoners on a road trip?”
“Oh, that time I was just fucking with you.”
He laughs, then tips back his bourbon. When he lowers the glass, his eyes find mine and stay there—dark, unhurried. “For the record, you actually don’t seem like you can afford coffee and a sandwich.”
I snort and throw my drink coaster at him. “Rude!” He’s smirking. I know he’s joking, except he doesn’t know how right he is. “But yes, I am totally fucking broke.”
“So is that why you live with Easton? To save money?”
“He doesn’t charge me rent, the old softie. Though I clean the house in exchange.”
“You clean?”
“Oh, don’t tell me my darling sister never mentioned that my mother was her housekeeper. She loves to tell people that.”
“She did,” he nods carefully. “I just meant…” He waves a hand toward me.
“What?”
“You don’t seem like the type who knows how to clean.”
I burst out laughing, thinking of my bag splayed open back at the motel, the wrappers he kept quietly collecting off the floor of the Audi every time we stopped for gas.
“Okay, fair enough. Let’s just get all the insults out of the way,” I make a come-hither move with my fingers.
“You’re too easy a target, Rose,” he says, almost playfully, but that one lands differently. He catches my expression and leans forward. “Hey—sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, it’s fine. I am an easy target. I’m kind of a dumpster fire.”
He doesn’t try to fill the silence, just lets it sit there, waiting. Yesterday I would have let it stay empty. But we’ve regained traction somehow, the way it was briefly before we both managed to fuck it up.
“I was living with my boyfriend until a few months ago. I had a… bad day at work, came home early. He was fucking our neighbor in our bed.”
Logan goes still.
“Want to hear something funny? He proposed to me. Right then. After she left, of course, but he’d barely stuffed his dick back in his pants before he was on his knees with a ring. Stupid right?”
Logan doesn’t laugh, which, even though I said it lightly, I appreciate.
“He sounds monumentally stupid,” he says gruffly.
“He was always really intense about me—wanted to know where I was, what I was doing. But I never would have cheated on him. He says I scared him. That’s why he did it, apparently.”
“You probably did scare him.” Logan says, eyes boring into me. “Weak men do stupid things. I’m sorry it happened, but I’m glad you’re rid of him.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
He doesn’t smile. He looks away, jaw working, and finishes his bourbon in one quick sip, setting the glass down with a quiet click.
“Anyway,” I say, lighter than I feel. “That’s why I moved in with Easton.”
Logan pushes back his chair and stands, and when he extends his hand toward me, his eyes are steady on mine. “Dance with me.”