12. Logan
12
LOGAN
Waking up with Poppy’s mouth around my cock throws me back into every single fantasy I’ve ever had as a teenage boy. Except, the reality of her hands on my balls and her hair touching my body as she does everything and anything she wants to, is more than I’ve ever imagined.
“You fell asleep again.” She laughs against my dick, which is already straining and eager to have her.
My hands fist around her curls, and the smile on Poppy’s face when I pull her up my body sends a surge of possession through my veins.
“Mine,” I growl against her lips right before I let go of her hair and flip our bodies, careful not to be too jarring on her stomach.
“I had to get started without you.” She reaches up, resting her palm on my chest. “But I can’t seem to finish anything without you, either.”
She’s wearing my shirt again like she has almost every night for bed for the last month, except it is now stretched against her growing stomach. As I slide into her body, taking advantage of the fact that she’s ready for me, all I can think about is that I finally made it home.
Every thrust is just another reminder that she is everything I’ve ever wanted or needed in my entire life. All the happy, the crazy, the anger, and the regret. All of it is right there on the edge of my mind, and it makes the release I can feel on the horizon flash through my body even more intense.
“Hurry,” I grunt. “I need you to finish with me because there’s no chance I’m lasting.”
Poppy, already one step ahead of me, has her hand sliding through her juices. “Need more,” she whispers brokenly.
Ignoring the building sensation in my stomach and lower, I reach down and lift my shirt so that I can see her breasts, then lean forward, latching on to one of her nipples.
Poppy arches her back and moans, so I add a little bit of pressure, biting down as I keep moving.
Her scream echoes the uncontrolled way her orgasm tears through her body, from the tips of her toes clenching into my back where she’s wrapped her legs around my waist to her hands clawing at the back of my shoulders.
Finally.
I let go, the last thin cords of my control snapping as I slam into her body in uneven strokes.
“Perfect.” I gasp for air, pulling out of her body, and lie down next to her on the bed. “So fuckin’ perfect.”
Poppy moves her curls out of her face and smiles impishly at me. “I needed that. Good game. You should call in sick today, and we can do it all over again in ten.”
I kiss her before rolling away and walking toward the bathroom. “If I could, I’d stay in bed with you all day and ignore reality. But duty calls, and after our baby gets here, I’m gonna need all those vacation hours I’ve been hoarding.”
“Well.” Poppy appears in the bathroom doorway after I’ve turned on the shower. “I’m gonna sleep all day and enjoy my time off.” She stretches her arms over her head, and the shirt rises up, revealing her stomach.
Like I do every single morning before shift, I drop to my knee and bring both hands up to feel our child move.
“Any names yet?” I look up at the love of my life with a smile on my face. “Or are you still thinking of winging it when he’s born?”
Poppy shrugs. “I don’t want to jinx it. What if we find the perfect name and then someone steals it? Or it doesn’t fit him? I don’t want to name him something like Blaze or Robert, and then he comes out and he’s a Lincoln. I just want to get it right.”
That vulnerability, her inability to come up with the perfect name for our child, has me smiling. It’s either that or the fact that our boy shoves his entire ass against my hand at that moment. Or maybe it is his head. Either way, my entire day feels complete when I get to reassure myself that they are both fine. They’re both safe.
“Only a few more weeks to go.” I get up off the floor and brush my teeth while Poppy gets in the shower I’ve warmed up for her because she has to step into an inferno of water. “You ready for that?”
“Not even close,” Poppy admits with a laugh. “Our mothers are planning the baby shower, and they’re going beyond overboard when it comes to buying him things. But that’s to be expected, I guess. First grandbaby and all that.”
I finish my morning routine, thinking about shaving my beard, but dismissing the thought as soon as it enters my mind. Poppy? Well, she’s in the shower and doing all the things that I should be doing, like washing her body and caressing her skin.
“I gotta go.” I pull the shower curtain aside, waiting for Poppy to wash the shampoo off her face, and then kiss her until I’m just about ready to climb into that shower with her.
“Come home tonight.” That’s as close as she gets to telling me to be safe, and I love it. Poppy pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the heat of the shower. “And bring me tacos.”
I laugh. “Not pizza?”
“Both,” she orders as I walk out of the bathroom and slip into the clean uniform that she must have laid out when she got home from work, because I sure as shit didn’t. “Oh, and I pulled some shell casings out of the laundry. Remember to check your pockets after the range.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Chief Townsend is waiting for me when I pull into the PD parking lot ten minutes later. Standing in front of the building with his arms crossed over his chest and an indecipherable look on his face, I immediately start cataloguing what I could have done to piss him off. The list is long, and I give up after the tenth item.
“Sir,” I greet, grabbing my duffel bag from the back seat of my truck. “What’s up?”
“There’s a problem, and I wanted you to hear it from me before someone opened their mouth and caused a world of shit to crash down on you.” His eyes are hard, the same way they were when he stood and watched our unit come back from our first deployment. The same glint in them that was there since his son, and one of my best friends, told him that he’ll be going back overseas again and again.
“What’s going on?”
“Darren Ortega was released from prison yesterday.”
His words hit me like a wrecking ball, sucking all the oxygen from my lungs.
“Obviously, it’s not what anyone would have wanted, with what he did to Charlotte. But the parole board granted his last request, based on good behavior and whatever else his lawyer was able to drag up to pad his file. No doubt he offered up someone higher in the chain of shitbag drug dealers than him.”
“Stop.” I hold up a hand, needing silence. Needing to process what in the hell I’m going to do. What I’m going to tell Poppy about the shitstorm that’s about to come down on us. “I need a minute. And probably half a sick day or something to deal with this shit.”
This is so much worse than anything I could possibly have imagined. I was worried about it being something to do with me and work, but this? This is something that is going to destroy me.
“You can’t go near him,” Chief says quietly. “I’m telling you now, we’ve got guys on him, making sure that if he steps out of line or there’s even the slightest chance that he’s dealing again, he’ll go down. But you’re too close.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not too close. Not anymore. I was too close to Lettie. You know, my fucking sister. The one he got so high on heroin that she overdosed because she’d never fucking done drugs before. And then, instead of taking her to the hospital where she might have gotten help and survived, he left her on our front porch without even ringing the goddamn doorbell. Barely breathing. She was only sixteen years old, Chief. So, no. I’m not too close to that asshole. Not anymore.” But even as I stand there, trying to keep my heart from lurching out of my chest, I know I’m lying.
The first thing I’ll be doing is driving by his old haunt. I’ll have to work fast, before he gets his hooks back into the game. But I need to make sure that anyone who might be willing to help him knows what the consequence is.
Namely, me. I’m the consequence. And I’m not a puny little eighteen-year-old anymore who doesn’t know his ass from shit.
“I mean it, Pierce. Stay the fuck away from him, and let the other detectives do their jobs.” Chief walks away without saying anything else, and I finally collapse against the side of my truck like I’ve wanted to do since he said Ortega’s name. Then I let the memories wash over me and almost throw up.
“Lettie, where the hell are you? Mom and Dad are pissed, and you’re missing your own birthday party.” I snapped the phone shut, ending the voicemail, grimacing when I heard something crack.
“She’ll be here,” Mom said with a sad smile. “I’m sure she will be.”
“Don’t worry, Mama P.” Poppy squeezed my shoulder and then let go to help her finish setting out all the food. “She’ll be here. I thought she said that she was going to have coffee with that guy, Darren, after school. He asked her out for her birthday.”
“If she’s not here in ten, I’ll go out after her.” I promised my mom. Poppy might not be able to see the tension in her face, but I could. The tight way her smile didn’t meet her eyes or the slight tremble in her fingers while she put the last bit of icing on Lettie’s favorite type of cake.
What Poppy didn’t know was that Lettie fought with Mom before school. She screamed and railed and told our parents that she didn’t want to live with them anymore. All because they didn’t want her to go out with some random guy on her birthday.
Not for her sweet sixteen.
“Hey.” Emily had her face pressed against the window, and Finn was right next to her.
“There’s a car outside.” Finn finished her thought. “There’s a guy.”
We were already moving to the door.
“Oh, Mom.” Emily gasped loudly. “He just dropped Lettie on the ground and left.”
I opened the front door to find Lettie there, on the grass, unconscious.
“Lettie?” My mom pushed me out of the way, and my dad was right behind her.
There were already tears in her eyes when she dropped to her knees and looked back at me.
“Call 9-1-1, Lo.” Dad felt Lettie’s neck for a pulse.
“Lo?” Poppy pulled my phone out of my hand, and I couldn’t do anything but stare at my sister’s face. She wasn’t breathing. I could already tell. Her chest wasn’t moving.
Mom was crying, and her hands started to press into Lettie’s chest, doing the same compressions that we just learned in the CPR class.
Next to me, Poppy was on the line with emergency services.
Behind us, I heard my little brothers and sister freaking out, wanting to come outside to help Lettie.
“No.” I turned, trying to keep the devastation off my face and out of my voice. “No, we’re going to stay right here and let Mom and Dad do what they have to.” I grabbed Finn’s shirt when he tried to run by me. “No,” I repeated myself. “No, Finn. You gotta stay here.”
A heartbreaking sob escaped his lungs, and he threw himself into my arms. Emily wrapped herself around Finn and pressed into my side. Even Bax, only eight years old, seemed to understand something terrible was happening. He got up off the couch and joined us, wrapping one small hand tightly around my wrist.
“What’s wrong, Lo?” His innocent eyes staring up at me, combined with Emily and Finn’s tears, broke me.
Sinking to my knees, I wrapped my arms around my siblings, ignoring the sirens in the distance. Holding on to them was the most important thing in the entire world.
Because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Lettie wouldn’t be okay. Her skin was blue. And her eyes… They were open. Staring lifelessly up at the sky while our parents did everything they could to save her life.
The man in the car hadn’t brought her home. He wasn’t trying to help her. He was disposing of the body. And the needle still sticking out of Lettie’s arm, the one that he hadn’t bothered to remove, was the only explanation I needed of what happened.
“Lo.” Poppy wrapped herself around my back, pressing her face into my hair. “Lo. Please tell me you didn’t see the same thing I did.”
“Shh.” I sobbed, not bothering to keep it back. “We’ll talk about it later. Right now.” I choked on air. “Right now… They need us to be strong. They need me to be strong.”
“Right now, they need me to be strong,” I whisper the words, bringing my pain and reality from the past back to the present.
Lettie died.
And two weeks later, I almost lost Poppy too.
“Fuck.” I slam my hand into the side of my truck, wincing at the pain.
Then, before I do anything stupid like run away from the woman that I love, I pull out my phone.
“It’s important,” I tell Ian as soon as he answers. “Can you fit me in?” Before he can ask if it’s Poppy, I clear that shit right up. “It’s not a Poppy situation.” We both know that things with Poppy are better than they’ve ever been. But there’s still a lot of shit going on that could send me over the edge.
Thankfully, this isn’t one of those times.
“Eight a.m. is a hell of a lot better than four a.m.” He laughs bitterly. “I’m in the office, and my next appointment isn’t until ten thirty. Get here soon.”
I laugh, ending the call. Then I turn and walk across the parking lot to the building that houses Ian’s office.
He is waiting in the doorway, talking to Chloe when I walk in. As soon as he sees my face, he backs into his office without saying a word to his wife.
Once I shut the door behind me, I get right down to business. “I need you to keep me from murdering someone.”