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Talking about Hawk and Imperium was a minefield because talking about Hawk and Imperium inevitably brought her back to thoughts of Logan. Then, the past felt too close, crowding out the present until all she could think about was him.
His dark hair in her fingers and his minty breath against her lips and the look in his eyes when she told him she was leaving L.A. for school. The look in his eyes that told her he knew she wasn’t coming back even though she was too cowardly to say it.
She sighed, breathing through the tightness in her chest. She couldn’t afford to think about Logan, about the past. There was too much on the line in the present: the Vitsin case, Leo and his safety in the weeks before they went to trial.
The thought of it all should have terrified her, but somehow it was all less daunting than thinking about the man she’d left behind, the man she hadn’t been able to forget.
She grabbed her bag and headed for the open door of her office. It wasn’t true what people said: you couldn’t go home again.
The past was gone. One conversation with an old friend didn’t change a thing.
2
Logan stayed late to help Mauz take down the volleyball net while Mauz gave him shit about all the balls he’d missed during the game. Logan made a habit of never taking himself too seriously, but that was especially impossible to do when the person responsible for Logan’s missed balls was Mauz, who somehow managed to beat him across the net in every game in spite of his prosthetic leg.
Then again, comparing any man to Mauz was like comparing a mere mortal to Zeus himself. The man had served two tours in Afghanistan and would have served a third if not for the IED that had blown off his left leg and left a scar that bisected his right cheek.
His injuries would have been enough to level any man, but the true pain had come when he’d been abandoned by his fiancé on his return. Logan sometimes marveled that the man was still standing.
Once the volleyball net was down, Logan helped Joan, Imperium’s CFO and resident den mother, pack up the leftover food and haul it up the hill to the parking lot overlooking Malaga Cove. It was a public beach, but everyone left it to Imperium by some kind of unspoken agreement.
The fact that it was a long-ass walk from the end of the Strand — the strip of cement that ran along Southern California’s beaches — probably didn’t hurt either.
“Thanks,” Joan said, giving Logan a kiss on the cheek when he’d loaded the last of the ice chests in her trunk.
“No problem,” he said.
She got in her car and pulled out of the parking lot. Logan watched her go, then turned to face the edge of the cliff, the Pacific shimmering like an expertly cut sapphire in the waning daylight.
Everyone else was long gone. Laurel and Hawk had left with Hawk’s sister, Willow, to get their mom settled. Sarah McGregor enjoyed coming to Imperium’s beach parties, and Hawk and Willow worked hard to make sure she wasn’t left out because of her illness.
Everyone loved Sarah, and she clearly thrived in the social setting, but getting down the hill to the sand and back up again — not to mention a whole day of socializing — took a lot out of her.
Logan envied Hawk’s closeness with his family. Logan’s own parents were kind but distant. He’d bought them a little house in San Pedro once Imperium started taking off and they had dinner a couple times a month, but they didn’t confide in each other the way Hawk did with Sarah and Willow, and Logan didn’t have any siblings.
It was part of why he and Hawk had been so close as kids: Hawk had practically been born with a giant chip on his shoulder, a situation that hadn’t been improved by his father’s abandonment, and Logan had been alone in a neighborhood that targeted anyone without a pack.
So Logan and Hawk had formed their own pack with Ella, and the three of them had survived together.
Ella…
He tried not to think about her. Had been trying not to think about her for twenty years. It hadn’t worked. Not even for a day. She was always there, lingering in his heart like a scent he couldn’t forget.
He turned away from the view and headed for his car, a silver Tesla Model S he’d debated for six months before purchasing.
He didn’t need much, didn’t even want much, if the truth were told. He and Hawk were different that way — Hawk devouring everything in his path, always wanting more, like that would prove he was worth something when the little kid inside him still felt like trash his father had thrown away.
Until recently anyway. Laurel Bancroft had calmed him down, as much as someone like Hawk could be calmed down, and Logan was starting to see glimpses of the father Hawk would be when their baby arrived in a couple of months.
He wasn’t surprised to come to the conclusion that Hawk would be an amazing father. Hawk had been preparing for it his whole life, protecting Logan and Ella back in the old neighborhood, taking care of Willow and his mom, staffing Imperium with an assortment of lost misfits instead of the highly trained, highly qualified security experts who sent them resumes every day.
Hawk liked taking care of people. He always had. His knack for protecting people had just been hidden behind his naked ambition and the demeanor that made most people think he was a dick.
To be fair, he could actually be a dick. But he was also the most honest, generous person Logan had ever known.
The sun was beginning to set as Logan accelerated up the winding hills of the Palos Verdes peninsula. A hidden enclave at the southern tip of the South Bay, Palos Verdes was an unconventional place for a company to put down roots — especially a company like Imperium that catered to Hollywood’s A-list — but it had been the right choice.
He loved the quiet of it, the way the water glimmered beyond the rocky cliffs, the peacocks that roamed wild in the streets, introduced to the area in the early 1900s by a wealthy banker who received them as a gift.
