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‘You’re helping me relate to him better, and I’m grateful for that. He’s starting to spend time at the crèche now, making new friends, and soon he’ll be starting school with plenty of female teachers to help be positive maternal-type figures in his life, additional to his Nana.’
It made sense. No need to balk at the idea of being so disposable.
‘What about...if there’s a repeat of what happened last night?’ she hazarded.
Logan stepped closer but stopped just short of contact. The heat rolled off him, and she could feel the toes of his boots just pressing against hers, a kind of electricity crackling from him... Yet he didn’t actually touch her. Like a kind of tantric foreplay. She could hear her breathing grow slightly ragged but was helpless to do anything about it.
‘There will be no if, Kat,’ he rasped. ‘There will be a repeat of last night. It’s inevitable.’
His words shook through her and all at once breathing became a complicated task. Last night had been a mere taster of what Logan could do to her, how he could turn her body inside out, and it had been incredible...right up until it hadn’t been.
Right up until he’d thrown her out in all but words.
She didn’t think her already broken sense of self-worth could take another battering like that.
‘Inevitable, Kat,’ he drawled, as though reading her mind. ‘That chemistry has been there since the first day we met and, like all decadent things, denying it has only made it all the more of a temptation. So why deny it? It’s just sex and we’re both adults.’
There was a note in Logan’s tone that licked its way deep within her. Just sex, he’d said. She doubted anything with this man would be just anything. Not if last night was anything to go by.
‘Our only parameters will be that anything intimate happens when Jamie is at his grandparents’. Never when he is home.’
She needed to tell him that he was wrong. Nothing was ever going to happen between them again.
‘Right.’ She swallowed, nodding before she could stop herself. Unable to—or not wanting to—do anything else.
Kat felt herself swaying slightly towards him as he leaded in a fraction closer. It shouldn’t have been possible to do so without touching her, and he didn’t. He was so damned close she could smell him, woodsy, and lemony, and utterly male. It was driving her crazy.
‘But for now we’re skating.’ He took a step back, as if realising they were in the danger zone. As if needing a buffer. ‘All right, champ, shall we go and hire some skates?’
As the pair headed off hand in hand, she stood there for a moment, still trying to catch her breath and regulate her slamming heart.
* * *
‘That was more fun than I remembered,’ Kat told him a couple of hours later as they sat together on a bench, watching Jamie clamber up the baby climbing wall and onto the slide in the playground.
He had enjoyed the skating, taking it in turns to be guided around the rink by Logan, and then her, and then Logan again. But, inevitably, he’d grown tired and bored, so they’d taken him for hot chocolate and a play in the park.
It real
ly was so easy between them. Both reading Jamie’s mood, and adapting quickly without even a word. Logan was a better father than he realised. He just needed to stop trying to bear the load of his ex-wife abandoning them. He couldn’t be both father and mother to the little boy, and he was doing a good job as he was.
Running her finger around the rim of her cup, Kat kept her eyes fixed on the kids, the unexpected urge to talk bubbling higher and higher inside her.
‘Do you remember the little girl I mentioned I used to look after?’
She felt, rather than saw, Logan swivel his head to look at her.
‘Carrie,’ he replied instantly, and she was touched he recalled.
‘She wasn’t just anyone, but I figure you’ve already worked that out for yourself.’ The words tumbled out one after the other. ‘Carrie was actually my foster child. I had her from around ten months, after legalities had been dealt with, and when she was three I began the process of adopting her.’
Kat glanced at him briefly, unable to hold eye contact for long. It hurt too much to see the empathy in his gaze. Somehow it was easier to stare out into nothing.
‘It was due to complete at the beginning of this year, just before her fourth birthday.’
‘This would have been your first real Christmas together,’ he noted softly, understanding immediately.
Her throat felt thick and clogged with emotion.
