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“She’s a strong woman, that’s for damn sure,” Ernie said.
“She was afraid of me up there.”
“No, she was afraid of your reaction to the photos. If she was afraid of you, I wouldn’t be here right now. She wouldn’t have stood up to you and brought me in here to help you if you frightened her. She stood up to you and all your bluster to get you the help you need.”
Logan laughed. “My bluster?”
Ernie smiled and reached out an arm. “Yeah. You’ve got a lot of it. Now help me up. We need to go see what Sam found on those guys and put an end to this. You have a life to get to and it doesn’t involve running off to some island by yourself somewhere.”
Logan grunted, but he felt like he had when his mom found him hiding under the dining room table when he’d “run away” as a kid.
“I was going to the mountains,” he grumbled as they made their way up the stairs with Billy between them.
Ernie snorted. “At least if you’re going to run away, go tropical, dude.”
“Did you really just call me dude?”
Chapter 20
Sam came down from the third floor just as Ernie and Logan made their way back up from the basement. She had showered and changed and now looked at Logan’s face, as if searching.
He went to her and pulled her into his arms, wrapping her up and holding onto her with a need that floored him. He almost lost her. What would he have done if that had happened?
“I’m sorry, Sam,” he whispered.
Sam tilted her head and met his eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“No. I’ll get there. Someday. It just might take a while.”
She looked up at him. “I have time.”
He nodded, having trouble speaking past the lump in his throat.
When she spoke, her voice was light. “Plus, I like your new dog. He’s super cool. I emailed Jack. Since he’s a service dog, he gets to come to work with you!”
She practically vibrated with excitement and Logan laughed as he looked down at the dog by his leg. “I have a feeling Billy wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Sam smiled up at him and his heart melted. How the hell had he thought he’d be able to pull away from her? He didn’t have it in him. He might be a strong man when it came to a lot of things, but putting up walls where this woman was concerned wasn’t one of them. He shook his head and rubbed her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs as his hands cradled her head.
“You didn’t need to release those pictures for me, Sam. God, I wouldn’t have you relive those moments, that fear, for anything in the world. Sure as hell not for me.”
He wanted to be the one protecting her, not the other way around.
As if reading his mind, she placed her hands on his wrists and squeezed. “Hey, you were there for me. You stopped those men during the scariest thing I’ve ever had to live through. I won’t have you paying for it now. Not if there’s anything I can do about it.”
Her eyes were fierce and strong as she looked at him and he knew if he had any little ruins of the walls left around his heart, she’d just knocked them all down. He might not deserve her and he might not be good enough for her, but somehow he’d been blessed to find her. He couldn’t walk away now.
“Come on,” he said, slipping his hand in hers, aware there were three sets of eyes on them as he pulled her toward the kitchen. “Show me what you found out while I had my head up my ass.”
Chapter 21
Lazarus Alonzo was frighteningly easy to lure out of the woodwork. In only three days, Diya, Yoshi, and Peter had not only traveled to Connecticut themselves, they’d set up a meeting with Lazarus.
He responded as planned to the code words planted in online chat rooms and reached out to one of her father’s old email accounts.
Diya sat in a bare office leased solely for the purpose of setting Lazarus up, and watched as Yoshi opened the door to let the man in.
