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  Natalie tried one more time to find his jealousy nerve. “Maybe I already am sleeping with them.”

  “Will I be able to figure out who he is by a hickey or a scratch?” Logan made one more attempt at levity.

  “You know what, Logan? Sometimes you’re a real jerk-off.” She drew back the sheet, wrapped it loosely around herself toga-style, and rose. Angrily, she began the hunt around the room to gather her discarded clothing. Logan propped himself up on a bent elbow, resting his head on his hand, and watched her—the fact that she had taken the time to cover up, even in the nearly dark room, did not go unnoticed.

  “Come on, Nat,” he finally said softly, patting the spot she had vacated moments before with his free hand. “You don’t have to leave. It’s late. I don’t want you to go. Come back to bed. I’ll drive you to the airport tomorrow.”

  She stopped her search, turned on the light, and stared at him lying nude and stretched out before her. He was so striking it almost hurt to look at him. He sounded so sincere and she wanted to believe him. But his last sentence was the giveaway; he knew he would be rid of her in the morning. He probably already knew that a car supplied by her agency would be picking her up. There was no way he would put off his morning clients to drive her to the airport. He’d just made the offer so he wouldn’t look like the bad guy. Logan was never the bad guy; he was just the nostrings-attached guy. She could forget about any heartfelt declaration of feelings. She knew there would not be one forthcoming.

  His coaxing broke her reverie. “Look at you, standing there all wrapped up and pissed off. Like I don’t know just how hot the body under that sheet is. Your hair’s all tousled, making you look sexy as hell. Come back here and let me show you just how much you turn me on.”

  “When are you going to tell me my wish came true and I can stop opening condoms?” she asked point-blank, suddenly willing to force his hand and deal with the consequences.

  “Back to that again, are we?” He fell back onto the bed muttering, all traces of playfulness and affection fully evaporated.

  Natalie resumed the search for her clothing, now stomping across the room to recover her camisole and positively seething. “You sound like I’m asking you to make some sort of outrageous sacrifice. I realize having a whore at your disposal must be terribly convenient, but for me it’s getting kind of old.”

  “I never treated you like a whore.” He sighed at the ceiling. “If for no other reason than I never paid you.”

  “I wish you had paid me,” she hissed back. “At least then I would’ve had a clear understanding of where I stood and not wasted my time considering you an option.”

  This was the last time Logan intended to have this particular exchange. It had grown tiresome, maneuvering through this verbal minefield just for the sake of some hot sex. Sex certainly wasn’t something Logan had to worry about. He could get it anytime, and with very little effort. What eluded him was the answer to why he stayed on this mental merry-go-round with Natalie. He wasn’t particularly interested in owning anybody, and he certainly wasn’t into being owned.

  Logan rose off the bed, not bothering to say anything more or cover up as he headed into the kitchen to pour a much-needed glass of water. Maybe Natalie would cool off, too.

  Left alone in the bedroom, thoroughly dismissed, Natalie quickly dressed. Intending to leave without so much as another glance at Logan, she walked briskly past him where he leaned against his kitchen counter and rushed toward the exit. Only his voice stopped her when she reached the living room.

  “Isn’t it enough that you have dozens of men at your disposal? Why are you pushing this so hard, Natalie? Why do you want to mess up a good thing?”

  “And committing to me would be messing up a good thing?” she asked incredulously, turning back to the voice coming from the next room, grateful she had a moment to steel herself against the exquisite beauty of its owner. She was determined not to be taken in.

  Logan was not about to let the conversation be reduced to a screaming match. He wasn’t the screaming kind to begin with, but he was well aware that she could be. He calmly emptied the contents of his glass, set it down, and came out of the kitchen to join her. “We’ve only been seeing each other a couple of months,” he replied evenly.

  “Not a couple. Four. Four months. Almost five,” she said, correcting him, the hurt evident in her voice and on her face.

  “Half of them spent with you running all over the country,” he replied gently.

  “I only have another year and a half on my contract.”

  He cut her off, shaking his head. “It’s not about your job. It’s about moving too fast. We’re in good places in our lives right now, doing good things. We knew going into this relationship that we were busy people with lots of commitments, to ourselves and to others. I just don’t feel like that’s changed. Yet.” Logan knew it sounded insensitive, though that wasn’t his intention. He tried to soften the sting with a backhanded compliment. “Besides, I think the only reason you even care is because I’m being the least bit hesitant. If it was me asking you to commit, you’d be avoiding me like the plague.”

  “Not true,” she said emphatically, no longer concerned about looking like the desperate, clingy one. “I knew there was something special about you the night we met. Didn’t you see it? For heaven’s sake, didn’t you feel it?”

  “What I felt was amazingly lucky that someone like you would go out of her way to spend some of her free time with me,” Logan replied earnestly, though he was unwilling to hurt her further by telling her he didn’t feel the same way. He had never felt something special about any woman, ever. It had never really dawned on him that he was supposed to. He wasn’t currently seeing anybody else, but he also was never convinced it was ever the right time to close the door on the wealth of possibilities. He didn’t usually date multiple women, but he recognized the fact that he couldn’t make a relationship last. They didn’t end badly most of the time—just fizzled. Women wandered in and out of his life after realizing he didn’t make sacrifices to accommodate them. He never led anyone on or stood anyone up, and he was always forthcoming about the fact that there just wasn’t much of his time to spare. He worked long hours, by choice. Then he had to fit in his own workouts. The only time left was his man-cave time and the other main perk of his profession: tickets to every single sporting event he could ever want to attend. He wasn’t ready to see man-cave time disappear yet, at least not on a permanent basis. And with Natalie, when push came to shove, he knew deep down he couldn’t put up with being the boy toy of an insecure, scratch-happy hellcat. He didn’t want to lose her, but he also wasn’t willing to lie to her, or himself, to make her stay.

  Logan hesitantly reached out, and when she made no move to recoil, he gently took her by her shoulders. “Besides, seriously, Nat, I don’t think either one of us is ready to take it to that level. Having to talk every day and tell each other our whereabouts twenty-four/seven. So wrapped up in each other that we have to feel funny if we spend any time at all with someone else of the opposite sex, when we’re apart for weeks at a time. Wasn’t it you that wanted to keep things from getting too serious, something about a ‘sassy single’ image you wanted to maintain?”

  How convenient for him, she miserably thought. She remembered making those very same statements on their first date, because she made them often. It was the sort of mindless chatter most people threw out before they knew whether or not there was any chemistry. Maybe not about having a public persona to take into consideration, but about not wanting to seem too eager. Logan never had to say it; she had done it for him. She’d never considered that it could be so easily and readily used against her. And she never believed she could be the kind of person who would resort to deliberate biting and lurking and waiting with bated breath for the phone to ring. Natalie closed her eyes against the warmth of his touch, wishing he would pull her back into his embrace instead of keeping her at arm’s length. His unconscious action spoke volumes,
and she was finally listening.

  “Image? Just whose image are you interested in, seriously?” She opened her eyes and settled them on his perfect face, praying for some sort of sign that he cared she was getting ready to walk out the door.

  “I don’t have an image,” he responded, running a hand through her hair and giving an affectionate tug on her earlobe. “I’m just a guy who owns a couple of gyms.”

  “Gyms whose clientele are the rich and famous,” she retorted weakly, tired of the tricks, his as well as her own. “It makes you one of them by association. Please stop acting like I’m the one with everything to lose and you are so gallantly trying to protect my interests. It only makes me feel more of a fool.”

  “You’re not a fool, kitten.” The corners of his mouth turned up in what she could only construe as a sardonic smile. “But sometimes you really do act foolish.”

  So that was it. One more veiled insult neatly wrapped up and packaged to look like a term of endearment. Maybe it was time she stopped chasing him and let them see what, if anything, they really meant to each other.

  She twisted out of his grasp, retrieved her bag from his coffee table and her jacket from the floor, and made her way to the door. She opened it and, with all the righteous indignation she could muster, took one more heartbroken look at him, standing before her in all his naked glory.

  “Fuck you,” she told him dejectedly, and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

  Logan casually followed in her wake to lock the door and turn out the lights before heading back to bed. Catching himself with a quick glance in an oval-shaped mirror mounted in the hallway, he stopped short. He moved nearer to his reflection, looked closely, and let loose a sigh of annoyance. He looked back to the front door and announced to his empty home:

  “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

  Chapter Three

  Holly was sitting on the couch in her living room. In one hand she held the television remote. In the other, a liter bottle of Coke. A bag of Funyuns sat wedged between her legs. She surfed the channels aimlessly from one program to another.

  It should have been just another night, when the only thing to come alive was her television. On a normal night, she could hide within the countless sitcoms depicting the hapless antics of mismatched couples falling in love despite their foibles. She could uncover murder plots along with glamorous women who looked like they’d stepped out of magazines, not grubby police stations. They busted thugs with the help of unbelievably attractive male partners who found them irresistible, despite the danger and the call of duty. Holly could be picking apart reality TV, snickering at the fools who willingly set their dignity aside for the sake of being in front of a camera. But this wasn’t just another night. It was the night before her first training session. She felt anxious. In less than twenty-four hours, she would be the one looking like a fool. Holly needed a diversion. She wished she could find the infomercial of Tony Little pushing his Gazelle. Even when Bruce was rapidly deteriorating, Tony Little was a good for a much-needed laugh as she watched his long Fabio hair trying to keep up with his frenzied pseudo-leaping as he shouted inspirational mumbo jumbo.

  Holly stopped on a show about hoarders. The people featured looked more like her but were living neck-deep in garbage and broken keepsakes. She watched in horrified fascination as teams of well-meaning, hazmat-suited cleaners came to the hoarders’ rescue. They scooped the trash up off the floors while doctors asked the hoarders how they felt about discovering a twenty-five-year-old blanket full of holes and covered in rodent droppings, or a petrified fruitcake they got from a neighbor back in 1996. Within the hour, their homes were set right and their problems solved. She knew it wasn’t that easy.

  The show was interspersed with endless commercials of what a person could take or use to make themselves better. This lotion will give you skin that shimmers and begs to be touched. That shampoo will make you a man magnet. Drug companies hawked pharmaceuticals with lists of side effects that sounded worse than the diseases themselves. Sure, you may become suicidal, but at least you can say you quit smoking. And then there was the never-ending parade of diet ads. Celebrities who’d had, in Holly’s opinion, perfectly acceptable figures to begin with were transformed into skin and bones, and now they were living the life they always dreamed of. What the hell was wrong with their lives to begin with? Holly grimaced through one more commercial, her favorite. The one about the pill that sheds the pounds magically and in record time but should only be taken by those who “seriously need to lose body fat.” Even the way the spokeswoman said the word “fat” was a comical overpronouncement of the three letters, stretching them out for full effect, emphasizing the gravity of the situation. Holly pointed the remote at the television and turned it off.

  She could see her reflection in the now-dark plasma screen, a distorted mirror image of Holly sitting on the couch. She stared into it. The image on the screen was an amorphous blob. Flesh stacked upon more flesh oozing all over the couch. The neon yellow and green from the top of the Funyuns bag between her legs was reflected with unsettling clarity. She squeezed her thighs together tightly and heard the crunching sound of the Funyuns being pulverized. Holly leaned her head back on the couch and sighed. Tomorrow, all this will change, she told herself. Tomorrow she would become the disciple of Logan Montgomery, the tallest, darkest, handsomest stranger she’d ever met. A man who was not only convinced she needed saving but was confident he could save her. She took a deep breath, trying to quell the mounting panic that accompanied the thought. What if he wasn’t as nice as he seemed that day on the plane and was really Attila the Trainer? What if he was all looks and no knowledge and ended up snapping something she needed, like her spine? What if she farted while trying to do a sit-up?

  The phone rang and Holly reeled in her fright. She threw the Funyuns on the table in front of her and took a quick sip from the Coke. She reached across to the other side of the couch to pull the handset from its cradle.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” the cheery voice said. “How you holding up?”

  Tina Abbott had known Holly longer than anyone. Tina was a hometown girl who’d married her high school sweetheart and became Mrs. Tommy Blake. They had three kids and never left Fairview, Oregon, but the friendship between Tina and Holly had remained through the years and across the miles. Tina had the bubbly, energetic personality Holly had always longed for and an overactive metabolism to match. While in junior high, she and Holly acquired the nicknames Stick and Stone because they were always together. Tina was Stick—tall and thin and dark. Holly was Stone—short and round. Holly never found the name particularly flattering but tried to embrace it anyway. She found it amusingly ironic since there were times she was sure Tommy would have liked to skip her across a lake. She had been a third wheel way too often for Tommy’s liking and she could tell he was relieved when Holly left for college. Tina was pregnant before Holly’s first semester was over.

  Holly greeted her childhood friend. “Hi, Tina. Hanging in there. How’s tricks?”

  “Same as it ever was. I meant to call you earlier, but the baby has a cold. The cough is horrendous. And you should see the stuff that’s coming out of her nose. She’s like some sort of snot machine.” Tina laughed.

  “Sounds appetizing,” Holly quipped, ignoring the pang of sadness that always came with the word “baby.” She and Bruce had talked about it, but he was diagnosed before they really started trying. After that, it was just a downward spiral. Holly told herself it wasn’t meant to be. She could never decide if in the end it was a good or bad thing. She couldn’t imagine being a single parent with the added burden of seeing a child through the sort of grief she’d endured.

  Tina continued. “Since Monday all she’s done is cling to me, the poor thing. I feel like I haven’t slept in days. How did it go in Toronto?”

  “Pretty much like I expected. They worked me over, trying to tell me I didn’t have the proxy, but in the end they sold at the original price. I jus
t kept saying, ‘I don’t understand,’ a lot, looking horribly perplexed and showing them the letter they originally sent. I did say, ‘Maybe I should call a lawyer?’ a bunch of times, too. After a while I think they just wanted to get rid of me.”

  “Bruce would’ve been proud of you,” Tina told her. “What are you going to do with your newfound wealth?”

  “It’s really not all that much,” Holly replied, not bothering to tell her friend that the money meant nothing to her. It didn’t seem appropriate. Tina and Tommy were struggling and money was always tight. Tina stayed at home raising the children while Tommy worked his job at a lumberyard. They were too proud to take money from Holly when she offered it, so Holly settled for sending expensive Visa gift cards for every occasion. “I did have a weird experience on the plane home though.”

  “Oh no.” Holly could hear the concern in Tina’s voice. “You didn’t freak out on the plane, did you? Did you take the Xanax like I told you?”

  “No, I didn’t take Xanax,” Holly said, regretting having told Tina about the prescription she got after Bruce’s funeral. “I didn’t freak out either. I met a guy.”

  “You did?” Holly could picture Tina sitting down on a chair and tucking her feet under her, getting ready to interrogate her. “Do tell!”

  Holly was quick to clarify. “Not that much to tell. Although he is awfully easy on the eyes. He’s a personal trainer. I’m going to start working with him. My first session is tomorrow.”

  “Holy shit!” Tina squealed with delight. “Is he coming to the house? Like in Desperate Housewives?”

  Holly thought about the business card still in her wallet. “No. He gave me a card with an address on it. He probably works out of Planet Fitness or Crunch. They’re both in that area.”