Logan jolted awake to “Carry On Wayward Son.” The book he’d been reading fell to the floor with a thud, and his border collies rose from their spots on the rug at his feet to give a pair of short, sharp barks, as if to say “We’re ready, Dad.”
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he grabbed for the phone skittering across the table and thumbed the screen to accept the call. “Hello?”
“Logan.”
The sound of Athena’s voice on the other end of the line had him straightening in the chair. “Hey.” He wasn’t about to tell her he’d been sleeping at—he checked his watch—nine-thirty. She’d probably saved him from a kink in his back.
“I nnneed a faaaavor.” Her words were slurred, and he could hear the faint sound of voices and indistinct music in the background. Was she drunk dialing him?
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Need a ride.”
He bit back the myriad of questions he wanted to ask and zeroed in on the most important. “Where are you?”
“The Right Attitude.”
He went brows up. That place was pretty rough. What the hell was she doing there? “Don’t go anywhere. I’m on my way.”
He left the dogs home, much to their disappointment. By the time he got to the bar, he’d considered and rejected a dozen scenarios for what was going on. She’d either tell him or she wouldn’t. His best guess was this either had something to do with her family or she didn’t want them to know about whatever it was she’d decided to drown in alcohol. Why else would she call him?
He didn’t see a car he recognized, but then he had no idea what she drove. Either way, that was a problem for tomorrow. Inside, he spotted her almost at once. She sat at the bar, a semi-circle of space around her as the other patrons gave her a wide berth. Her hair was down, curtaining her face, and she swayed a bit on her stool. As he neared and caught sight of the mostly empty fifth of whiskey, he understood why.
Knowing she was a woman who struck first and asked questions later, he didn’t touch her, instead leaning into her field of vision. The moment he caught sight of the unfettered grief on her face he wanted to gather her into his arms.
Oh baby, what happened?
But he kept his hands to himself. “Athena.”
At the sound of his voice, she turned toward him and her expression of misery faded. “Llllogan. You came.”
“Said I would. You ready?”
She glanced down at the last inch of alcohol in the bottle and frowned. “I’m not finished.”
“I’m thinking you’re gonna regret tomorrow enough without finishing that off. How ’bout you come with me?”
She squinted at him. “Are we going swimming? You were fun to swim with.”
A blast of arousal shot through him at the suggestion. Under other circumstances, he’d have given damned near anything to go back to Opal Springs and get naked with her. But she was three sheets to the wind and hurting. “I think it’s still a mite cold for swimming.”
“Too bad.” She finished off the whiskey in her glass and groped for the bottle.
He nudged it out of her reach. “I still think we ought to get out of here.”
“I told you that last summer.” Her lips curved, as if at the memory.
“Yeah, you did. It was a great idea.”
“It really was. You look really good naked.”
He couldn’t stop the grin. “You look pretty amazing naked yourself.”
“We should get naked again.”
Yes, please.
“What about your boyfriend?”
Her face shut down with a scowl. “I kicked that cheating bastard to the…hiccup…curb.”
So she was single again. Good to know. Not that he’d be doing anything about that tonight. “Good for you. Why don’t you come with me? You can tell me about how you castrated him.”
“Okay.” She slid off the stool and would’ve kept on going until she hit the ground if he hadn’t caught her.
“Whoa there. I’ve gotcha.” Sliding an arm more firmly around her, he tried not to notice how good it felt to have her body plastered against his. A feat made harder by the fact that she rubbed her cheek against his chest like a cat.
The bartender eyed him up and down.
“She called me for a ride,” Logan explained. “Is her tab settled?”
“Paaaaid up front,” she slurred.
The bartender nodded confirmation.
“All right, then. Let’s get you out of here.” He scooped up the purse hanging on the back of her stool and headed for the door.
She took two, stumbling steps and sagged into him, giggling. “Shhh, don’t tell Pru.”
“Nope. We won’t tell Pru.” He’d take her home with him first and see about getting her sobered up some before driving her back to the inn.
As soon as he had her buckled into the passenger seat, he dashed a text off to Flynn, letting him know Athena was safe. Remembering what she’d said, he sent a follow up text asking him not to tell Pru. He didn’t feel great asking the guy to lie to his wife, even by omission, but something about this whole thing pricked his therapist’s need for discretion. Circling around, he slipped into the driver’s seat.
She drooped against the door, pressing her cheek to the glass. “Shitty, shitty night. Shitty, shitty week.”
He hoped like hell she didn’t get sick in his truck. “Why’s it shitty?”
“Fucking asshole was fucking my backstabbing sous chef.”
He winced. “Ouch. That is shitty.”
“That’s not all. I blew it up.”
“Blew what up?” He was reasonably sure she didn’t mean a literal bomb.
“Everything.”
“What’s everything?”
She didn’t answer, trailing a finger through the condensation of her breath against the window. Oh yeah, she was gonna be in hangover central tomorrow. And she’d be pissed if she thought he’d seen her vulnerable. So he lapsed into silence for the rest of the drive.
She was only semiconscious by the time they got back to the farm. Not trusting her to walk, he swung her up into his arms and carried her to the house. Her head lolled against his shoulder. He thought she’d passed out until her lips began to nibble their way up the column of his throat. The blood drained out of his head.
“Athena.”
“You taste good.”
With considerably less dexterity than he’d possessed a few minutes ago, he managed to get the door open and carried her inside. Water. Water and coffee and some preemptive painkillers. That was the plan.
As he came through the door, the dogs began to bark. Athena groaned at the noise, curling closer into him.
“Hush!” he ordered. They did as commanded, but still milled around his feet, sniffing at Athena as he crossed to the sofa. Very carefully, he lowered her.
She opened her eyes as he was trying to extricate his hands. “Logan.” The low, sleepy rasp stoked his nerves.
“I’m gonna make you some coffee.” If his words were choked, she wasn’t likely to remember.
“Don’t need coffee.” Fisting her hands in his shirt, she yanked.
Already unbalanced, he tumbled onto her. Her arms locked around him and her mouth found his like a heat-seeking missile. His brain emptied of everything but the taste of her—whiskey and heat and woman. Potent and delicious. That flavor had haunted him for nearly a year.
She was a fever beneath him, her hands skating over his shoulders, across his chest, touching and taking and driving him mad as her mouth devoured his. He wanted this. Needed this. Needed her. Not until her hands fumbled with his belt buckle did he manage to come back to himself.
She was drunk off her ass. They couldn’t do this.
With herculean effort, he managed to pull back, clamping his hands around her wrists to stop her from getting further than the half-unbuckled belt. “Stop.”
“Want you.”
“I want you, too. But not like this. You’re drunk, Athena.”
She pouted. It shouldn’t have been sexy. “I can still help you get it up.”
They both looked down at the erection straining his jeans. “I don’t think that’s in question. But you aren’t thinking straight, and I’m not going to take advantage.”
“Because you’re a fucking gentleman.”
“Yeah.”
“Dying breed,” she declared.
“Maybe so. I’m getting you water and making coffee.” He managed to slip free of her grip and hurried to grab some water and Advil in the kitchen.
She had a dog on either side of her when he came back. “I’m seeing double.”
“They’re littermates. That’s Bo and Peep.”
She snickered. “Where’s Little?”
“You’ll have to ask my sister, Laurel. She named them as a joke. Here, take these.”
She tossed back the painkillers and guzzled down the water. He waited a minute to see if it was going to stay down. When she didn’t immediately throw it back up, he went back to start the coffee. As he moved around the kitchen, he could hear the incoherent monologue she directed at the dogs.
His jaw cracked on a yawn. He was gonna regret this whole thing tomorrow when he had to be up before the sun. But not nearly as much as she was going to regret it. Nearly an entire fifth of whiskey by herself. He shook his head.
By the time the coffee beeped, he’d gotten his arousal under control. “Hey Athena, how do you take your coffee?”
Not hearing a response, he headed back to the living room.
She was passed out on the sofa, one arm draped over Peep, with Bo curled in the crook of her legs.
He sighed. There’d be no getting her home tonight. She could sleep it off in the guest room. Shooing the dogs, he scooped her up again and carried her upstairs to bed.
A scream dragged Athena from sleep and into a world of pain. Her head wasn’t attached to her body. That was the only possible explanation for why it hurt so damned bad. The scream came again, longer, louder this time, and she realized it wasn’t a scream at all. It was a rooster crowing the dawn. The sound shot jagged shards of ice through her brain and had her curling into herself on a moan. Dawn meant it was way the hell too early to be up, and if that thing didn’t shut up, she was going to wring its neck and turn it into a stew. She knew a thing or three about turning tough meat into something soft and succulent. Even if the idea of it made her stomach turn at the moment.
The cock crowed yet again and she wanted to rage at it, but that would require moving and making noise, neither of which she was capable of just now. And why was that? Struggling to swim through the ocean of throbbing in her skull, she tried to remember what had happened. Her mouth tasted as if something had crawled inside and built a nest, then died. But there was a faint undertone of something sweet and medicinal. Whiskey. She had dim memories of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Seemed like there’d been a lot of it, so maybe that had something to do with why she felt like death. But she was in the restaurant business. She knew how to hold her liquor. Except…no, she wasn’t in the restaurant business anymore.
A fresh wave of agony rolled over her as everything came flooding back. Olympus. The video.
She whimpered.
The last thing she remembered was being somewhere around the halfway mark on that bottle of Jack. Where the hell was she?
Cracking her eyes, she squinted up at the ceiling. A motley assortment of glow-in-the-dark stars were scattered across it. She knew those stars, knew those faux constellations of The Waddler Penguin and Quackers the Duck. She’d stared at them every morning of her life from the time she was six until she turned twelve. Frowning, she turned her head—regretting it at once—and caught sight of the built-in bookcase along one wall. The wall wasn’t the right shade of pale purple but instead some warm neutral that glowed faintly with morning light. The furniture, including the bed she lay on, was different than she remembered. But this was her childhood bedroom. Which meant she was still dreaming. Of course she’d have a hangover in her actual dream. Because she couldn’t get the blessing of oblivion like a normal person. And if the headache was this bad while she was unconscious, what would it be like when she surfaced?
Fighting through the ache, she dragged herself upright, bracing for the unsteady pitch and roll of her stomach. When she thought she could manage it, she stumbled toward the window to look out at her farm, at the home she’d been forced to vacate so many years ago. Except this wasn’t her farm. Her farm had never looked all green and lush and gorgeous like this. But still, she recognized the barn, painted a cheery red, with crisp, white trim. Beyond it she could just see the first rows of the apple orchard where she’d spent hours climbing trees and reading. A wave of homesickness, stronger even than the hangover from hell, all but brought her to her knees. She didn’t know which was crueler…that her dreaming mind should have brought her back here at all or that it should have made the place look like paradise.
It all looked so real. As if she could reach out and touch it. And suddenly, she wanted to do that with a desperation she hadn’t felt since she’d been taken away from here as a child. She made her way downstairs, past the walls that should have held pictures documenting her childhood, and out the front door, into the breaking dawn. The air was still crisp and full of the scents of green, growing things and rich, freshly-turned earth. Birds twittered faintly and the rooster had finally shut up. Thank God. She clutched her elbows, hugging them close as she soaked up the sense of home. Not as she remembered, but as it should have been. It soothed some long raw wound in her soul.
From somewhere beyond the barn, a dog barked. Her heart leapt.
Sam?
But it wasn’t her mutt racing from around the corner. It was a pair of border collies she didn’t recognize. Neck and neck they raced toward her, sending up happy yips. It didn’t even occur to her to brace herself, so when the dog in the lead jumped up, it knocked her flat on her ass.
“Ow!”
Somewhere between the stinging palms and the enthusiastic tongue bath to her face, she realized she was very much awake. Which meant…she really was on the farm where she’d grown up. Except her father had never been able to coax this kind of abundance from the land. How the hell had she gotten here?
Shoving back the dogs, she dragged herself to her feet…and saw Logan’s truck far out in the north field. Memory came back in pieces. She’d called and asked him for a ride and he’d brought her here? He had no way of knowing this had been her childhood home. Which meant…it was his. The farm that had claimed so much of her family’s blood, sweat, and tears belonged to someone else. Someone who’d made of this place what her father never could. The idea of it sucker punched her already bruised heart. In her present state, she had no defenses, no walls, and this was more than she could take.
How could she face him after this? The truth was, she couldn’t. She’d break.
I have to get out of here.
Stumbling in her haste, she went back into the house. Now that she was looking, she saw change everywhere. New paint. Refinished floors. Different furniture and art. Her house, but not her home. A sob threatened to erupt from her throat. She scrambled up the stairs, finding the water and painkillers on the bedside table this time. Downing them both, she rounded up her purse and shoved her feet into the shoes lined up neatly by a rocking chair in the corner.
How the hell was she going to get home? Her car was still at the bar. She didn’t want to get into any of this shit with her sisters. Not yet. And she didn’t want to wait for Logan to finish whatever early morning farm chores he was on. Thumbing through her phone, she called the one other person she knew wouldn’t judge her right now.
“Porter, I need a favor.” Her foster brother could always be counted on in a crisis.
“Athena? Everything okay? It’s really damned early.”
“Did I wake you?”
“No. I was about to be leaving for the job site at the spa to check on progress. What’s the matter?”
“I need a ride to my car. I left it at the bar last night.”
Silence stretched out a beat too long. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Logan Maxwell’s farm.” She could practically hear Porter’s eyebrows hitting his hairline. “It’s not what you think.” Though even as she said it, she had dim memories of hauling him down to her on the sofa. She really hoped that was a dream. “I was too drunk to drive and I called him for a ride last night. I was apparently too drunk to go home, so I slept here. He’s already out in the fields, and I really need to get home.”
The words came out in a rush, and she could only hope he didn’t pick up on her desperation.
After another infinitely long pause, he said, “I’ll be by to get you shortly.”