Page 94 of Winter’s Fire

“Seems as if I’ve been doing nothing but think. I thought walking away would be the best thing for all three of us. I thought you wanted her, and I didn’t want to make things awkward for you. But over the last day or so I’ve wondered if I was wrong, and I thought, even if I make a monumental fool of myself, at least I’d know for sure, so I was going to give it one more go.”

“One more go?”

“In this family, we don’t normally give up without a fight. I’d thought leaving you alone was the best thing to do, but then I had a heart-to-heart with Mum. And I realised that things didn’t add up.”

“In what way?”

“The man I thought you were wasn’t the man I saw with her. The only way I could be sure, though, was to ask you. I was going to tell everyone tonight that I planned to return to London in the morning.”

“To see me?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t going to make a scene—”

“I know that.”

His confidence and trust in her eased the tension tying her in knots. “All I needed was to know you wanted to be with her, and you’d be happy. If not…”

“What?”

Lucy looked him squarely in the face, touched her lips to his, and took a deep breath. “If not, I’d have taken that bitch down. I love you, too.”

Logan wanted nothing more than to spirit Lucy away, back to London and back to his bed, where he’d use every technique he knew to convince her they belonged together. She was his, he was hers, it was as simple as that… and as complicated. She might believe she loved him, but once she knew the whole truth—how he and Diana had got together in the first place—it would destroy everything. His past weighed on him like a gravestone… her gravestone. And until he told Lucy about Sophia, she and Diana would always come between him and Lucy. Better to face it now, before he ended up hurting his woman any more than he was going to right now.

“Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

“We’d be fine in here, but… maybe we could go for a walk?”

He helped Lucy into her jacket, and hand in hand, they headed for the farm track and the lane beyond.

Her hand felt so small in his, but Logan wasn’t so foolish as to ignore the strength in it. He could still hear the crack of that hand slamming into the bad guy’s nose the night they were taken. His courageous sprite. He’d loved Sophia, but that was a pale imitation of the fierce, gut-wrenching need he had for this woman. No wonder the terror of losing her was poised to rip him to pieces.

And lose her he would—he was almost certain of it. Whether he told her or not, the outcome would be the same. If he said nothing about Sophia, the prowling shadow of her death would hang over them, and his guilt would end up poisoning everything.

In spite of the early autumn sunshine, Logan shivered. Who would have guessed fear could carry with it the chill of the grave?

“Logan—Sir? Why don’t we go and sit down over there, and you can tell me what you’re so afraid of.”

He almost laughed. His woman had more courage in her little finger than he had in his entire body, and if they knew, his former colleagues in the Royal Marines would rip him a new one for it. Following her lead, he sat down on the patch of springy grass at the broad base of a tree and gathered his thoughts.

“I ended my relationship with Diana about eighteen months ago. Stating the bloody obvious, it wasn’t a mutual decision. I’d been seeing her for about three, maybe four, months before that, but the story really starts with Sophia—Diana’s sister.”

Logan forced himself to release Lucy’s hand. He didn’t deserve her strength or her support for this—it was his burden to carry, not hers, but when she slipped her hand back into his, he couldn’t find it in himself to break the contact again.

“Sophia was a submissive, and in character, the polar opposite of Diana. Shy, gentle… I was completely smitten. I met her while I was on leave. We spent just about every moment we could together. She waited for me while I was on deployment, away on training exercises, and when I came back, she’d be there. For the first time in my life, I started to think seriously about settling down.

“What I didn’t know—and what she never told me—was that she suffered from bouts of severe depression. Time passed, our relationship developed, and I still had no fucking idea.”

Pain blossomed in his chest, a manifestation of grief for the future Sophia should have had, regardless of whether that future would have been with him or not. Another contributing factor to his shit-ton burden of guilt.

“I was on deployment. I can’t tell you where, but it wasn’t in a good place. The mission was straightforward, or so we’d thought. Turned out our intel was wrong, and it all went to shit. I was a relatively brief, very unwilling guest of the enemy.”

“Wait a minute—you were captured? You never said anything.”

“It’s not something you bring up in casual conversation. Besides, it was a long time ago, and I didn’t stay captured for that long. But because Sophia wasn’t my wife, and we weren’t officially living together, no one thought to tell her what had happened. They think she had a bad depressive episode made worse by a lack of information about my delayed return, and when I finally made it back… if I’d been just twenty-four hours earlier, I might have been able to stop her.”

He didn’t deserve the way Lucy was holding onto his hand as if she’d never let him go. He didn’t deserve her strength, her support… her love. He deserved to rot in hell for eternity, for the young woman who’d taken her life because he hadn’t been there to protect her from herself.

“What happened? Tell me, Sir.”