‘WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Logan?’
Leaning one arm on the doorjamb to Kat’s apartment, he cocked his head to one side and there was little use her pretending that the whole world wasn’t tipping, shifting in his presence.
‘Is that any way to greet Santa Claus?’ he demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’
‘First, you aren’t dressed as Santa any more,’ she pointed out, with no idea how she kept her voice even. ‘And second, no.’
But she didn’t close the door in his face, which she knew revealed to him a lot more than her words had. She wasn’t surprised when he eyed her curiously.
‘Are you mad because you didn’t want me to answer Jamie, or are you mad because you did?’
Kat narrowed her eyes at him and tried to stand taller. To exude a confidence that she didn’t really feel.
‘I’m not mad,’ and she wasn’t entirely lying. ‘If anything, I’m...confused about why you gave a four-year-old boy false hope.’
And not only Jamie. He’d given her false hope, too. Perhaps that was the part about which she was maddest.
‘Is it?’
She blinked, not following his question.
‘Is it what?’
‘False hope?’ He took a step forward and she backed up into her apartment.
Logan promptly followed her inside, as though he thought that was the closest thing he was going to get to an invitation. As though he didn’t realise how close she stood to the edge. Or how that edge was crumbling with every second she spent in his company. All because she wanted him.
She’d never stopped wanting him.
‘Of course it’s false hope.’ She dragged her mind desperately back to the conversation. ‘We agreed this was just no-commitment fun.’
‘It was.’ He shrugged. ‘Until it changed.’
‘It didn’t change for me.’ She shook her head.
‘Liar.’ He chuckled, and that threw her as he’d known it would. ‘I saw your face yesterday. I know you feel something more.’
‘You’re wrong.’ The denial tipped out, only to fall—hollow and leaden—to the floor.
His eyes gleamed. Hot and hungry, and rolling through her like the most beautiful storm.
‘Am I really wrong, Kat?’ he asked softly.
And when she didn’t answer him—when she couldn’t answer him—his voice became even softer again.
‘Why don’t we put it to the test?’
She swayed. She didn’t mean to but she felt herself doing it all the same. She shifted her gaze around the room, from one thing to another as though she couldn’t find something to focus on, to keep herself upright.
‘I don’t need to put it to the test,’ she answered at last in a thin, reedy voice. ‘I don’t want to commit to someone. I don’t think I ever will.’
‘But how will you ever know, if you never let anyone close enough to find out?’
She could feel the moment things turned. The moment she went from cold disengagement to allowing her emotions to show. Or perhaps it was less about allowing her emotions out and more about no longer being able to contain them.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she threw at him, wanting to bite back every word but unable to do so. ‘I did let someone close. Once. And they walked away from me.’
Yet even as she said it, it occurred to Kat that she was comparing Logan to Kirk, when really there was no question which was the man and which had merely been a boy pretending to be a man.
Still, it shocked her when Logan’s face twisted into a look of disdain.
‘You hang everything on a four-year-old girl. But she didn’t walk away from you. She didn’t even have a choice in the matter.’
He thought this was about Carrie?
But, then, of course he would, because he didn’t know any different.
Kat shook her head. Inside it felt as though she was breaking. Shattering into a million tiny fragments. And every single one of them shredded her like a million tiny paper cuts as they went.
‘Do you really think I’m that shallow?’
‘No,’ he answered simply. ‘I don’t think that’s who you are at all. Not deep down. But it’s what you’ve told me.’
Sorrow scraped inside her, paring away at her. Keeping away from him had been the right thing to do because now, face to face with him, she could feel her resolve crumbling away. As if it was no more substantial than a badly baked gingerbread man—like the kind Jamie had said Logan had made.
She should ask him to leave. But she couldn’t.
‘It’s part of what I’ve told you, Logan,’ she confessed. ‘But it isn’t everything.’
‘Then what is?’
‘What does it matter?’ she cried. Frustration and grief worked their way up, as though they could suddenly see an outlet and refused to be contained any longer. ‘We agreed to fun, nothing more. But now Jamie is caught up in the middle of things, and we can’t offer him what he wants. More than that, what he wants is impossible.’
‘No one can predict the future,’ he said scornfully, and she couldn’t tell if he was angry or just unimpressed.
She reminded herself that she didn’t care. And then Logan spoke again.
‘But what is it that’s so impossible, Kat? I can’t imagine how losing Carrie must have hurt. When I think about Jamie...it just doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘No.’ Sadness threatened to engulf her, and she was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to hold it at bay. ‘It doesn’t.’
‘But you can’t keep running away from every chance at a connection because of that one terrible experience.’
And at that moment she felt something else charge her. A little of her old fierceness. It occurred to her that Logan was deliberately provoking her. Trying to help her get past her own memories. But that didn’t make sense.
‘I do not run away,’ she bit out hotly.
‘You do. You veil it in self-sacrifice, but it’s still running away.’
‘My God, you’re so smug. You don’t know everything.’
‘Is that so? Then enlighten me.’
‘And say what?’ she demanded.
‘Tell me why you’re so frightened of opening up to anyone. What is it that makes keeps this barrier between you and anybody else? I know Carrie is a part of it, but what’s the rest of it?’
She was teetering. She could hear the words piling up in her head. Logan knew it, too. Perhaps he’d even understood it in her before she had. But that only made him all the more dangerous to her.
‘You have to trust someone, sometime, Kat. Why not me, and why not here?’
She wavered a moment longer, memories of Carrie and of Jamie interweaving. Images of Logan that she would probably hold onto for the rest of her life. And then other, less pleasant images of Kirk.
It was all building so fast that it was inevitable that when she broke, it all spilled out so fast that she could barely keep up.
‘I’ve always known that I couldn’t have children. At least, I couldn’t have biological children. I was twelve when I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma.’ She lifted one hand, almost subconsciously, to the top of her left arm, just by the shoulder.
He could barely stop himself from hauling her into his arms and holding her, as though that might somehow erase all that he instinctively knew she must have been through. But her delivery was robotic, and clipped—her way of protecting herself—so he made himself keep his distance.
‘Because it was caught early,’ she continued, her gaze still not quite meeting his, ‘I had a round of chemo, surgery to remove the affected portion of bone and a bone graft with a metal prosthetic and another round of chemo.’
‘Kat,’ he breathed.
‘By the time I was eighteen my body had gone through menopause. Back then, although they’d already begun working with cryopreservation, it wasn’t done as routinely as now. Now they can freeze a section of ovary from a baby barely a few months old, complete with all its eggs, and reimplant it during adulthood. But back then it wasn’t an option for me.’
‘I see,’ he mused, his mind searching for the right words. The words he knew Kat—his Kat—would want to hear. ‘So you think that I wouldn’t want to be with you if you couldn’t give me a child? A biological child?’
‘You said it yourself.’
She shrugged. But he could see how much it cost her to do so.
‘I want you. I want a family with you. And if we adopt, like you were going to adopt Carrie, that won’t make that child any less ours.’
‘Why would that be enough for you?’ she cried, her palms twisting around each other like she was trying to contain a decade and a half’s worth of emotions.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ he countered as evenly as he could.
‘Because...because...’ She pulled her hands to her chest then rubbed at her face, before staring at him with something approaching despair. ‘Because it can’t be.’
Logan didn’t answer straight away. Instead, he cupped her face and finally made her meet his gaze.
‘Why not, Kat?’
She stared at him for what felt like an eternity. Then she shook her head.
‘Please, Logan, just leave.’
A plea? Or a demand? He wasn’t sure even Kat knew.
‘What was his name?’ Logan demanded suddenly. ‘What did he do to you?’
She blinked once. Twice.
‘His name was Kirk,’ she managed slowly, and he got the impression she was testing every word before it came out. ‘He was my fiancé.’
Logan hated the guy already.
‘When?’
‘When did we split up, do you mean?’ Her lips pulled into a taut line. ‘Seven years ago.’
His brain whirred.
‘Before you started fostering?’
She nodded stiffly.
‘What happened?’
He waited a beat as the silence stretched out between them. Then another beat.
‘Logan, you don’t want to hear all this.’
‘I do,’ he gritted out.
And he saw her fight one last wave of emotion...and then capitulate.
‘We’d been together since we were fifteen,’ she began slowly, woodenly. ‘I met him in the hospital.’
There was a pounding in his chest. A roaring. A storm. But Logan held it back. He forced his voice to sound even, though he had no idea how he managed it.
‘You’d both had bone cancer?’
‘No.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘But we’d been through chemo together.’
So, of all people, this Kirk should have understood Kat’s circumstances. Down at his sides, out of her sight, Logan clenched his fists. How was it he had the sense that Kirk had been the one to let her down and destroy her trust? Her sense of self-worth?
‘Go on,’ his voice rumbled, low and commanding.
He couldn’t stop himself.
‘Kirk knew about the menopause, and that I couldn’t have children naturally. We talked about fostering together. Even adopting.’
It was all he could to nod encouragingly. But he didn’t speak. He didn’t trust himself.
‘When we got engaged, we started the fostering procedure. Then, about three months before we were due to get married, Kirk told me that he couldn’t handle us never having biological kids together. He said that he might not have been ready for kids at that moment, but that he would be in the future. And when he did, he would need to have a child that was a real part of himself.’
‘He left you?’
For the longest time she didn’t react. And then she gave the vaguest hint of shrug.
It was enough.
Logan seethed on Kat’s behalf. If he could have laid the guy out right now, in front of her, he would have. Though he doubted she would appreciate such a gesture.
It occurred to Logan that the depth of emotion he felt for Kat went far beyond anything he’d felt for anyone—bar Jamie—before. Certainly not Sophia. Even when she’d left him for her wealthy new lover, he hadn’t felt a fraction of the contempt he felt for this Kirk guy.
It only served to confirm that he would walk over searing coals for Kat Steel. He just needed to make her realise it, too.
‘The guy was a prize jerk, Kat.’ He barely recognised his own voice. Or the man behind it. ‘You have to see that?’
She pulled her mouth into a thin line but said nothing.
‘He wasn’t worth your love. He wasn’t worth you, for God’s sake.’
‘I know.’ It was the barest scrap of a voice. It certainly didn’t convince Logan.
‘Don’t lie to me, Kat. Telling me what you think I want to hear. I need to know that you truly believe it. That you really know you deserve better than a guy like that.’
She opened her mouth to answer, but something stopped her. As though she’d been about to lie to him again but had decided better of it.
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ she managed slowly, though he could see every word sliced her. Wounded her. ‘I think you even believe it. But the fact is that he was entitled to want a family—a biological family—of his own. It’s a basic human desire.’
‘You can’t seriously be defending him.’
She shrugged.
‘I can’t blame him for wanting something I couldn’t give him. A child. A family. One that can’t be taken away from you after years of being the only parent they’d ever known—’ sadness and bitterness interweaved through her tone ‘—just because you didn’t give birth to them.’
‘You’re talking about Carrie, and I can’t begin to understand what you went through when you lost her. But I can tell you that just because a person gives birth to a child it doesn’t make them a parent,’ Logan growled, as anger seared him, white hot and so vivid it was almost blinding.
He didn’t expect the sharpness in Kat’s expression.
‘Yes. And yet, if she came back now and wanted to play a part in Jamie’s life, she could.’
‘I’d like to see her try.’
‘You say that now because you’re angry. But take emotion out of the equation and think. You might fight it initially, and you might hate the very idea, but ultimately, once you were as satisfied as you could be that she wasn’t intending to hurt Jamie again, you would let her into your lives, Logan.’
‘No—’
‘Yes,’ she countered softly. ‘Because that’s the kind of man you are. And because, at the end of it all, no matter what has happened in the past, she is Jamie’s mum, and she always will be. I can never have that, and so I can never give it to whoever I’m with either.’
Logan opened his mouth to argue yet suddenly, abruptly, he stopped.
As much as he hated to admit it, he could concede that Kat had a point. If Sophia came back into Jamie’s life he would move heaven and earth to fight her until he was unequivocally sure that she wouldn’t hurt their son again. But if she was sincere, would he really have any right to block her from Jamie’s life?
Logan felt unexpectedly powerless. It was an alien sensation, and he didn’t much care for it.
He might not entirely agree with everything Kat had said, but now he was forced to concede that there was a kernel of truth in her words.
Kirk and then her experience with Carrie had left her battered. Bruised. Battle-scarred. Pushing her now would only force her to close those wounds over before they’d had time to fully heal.
Telling her he cared about her, that he wanted her in his life—and in Jamie’s life—was one thing. But if he truly cared for her, he should back off and let her have the space she needed so that she could heal in her own time.
It was what a good man should do. And if anyone deserved a good man, it was Kat. Without another word, Logan dipped his head and dropped a lingering kiss on Kat’s cheek before straightening up. And then he simply walked away.
As if it wasn’t the hardest thing he thought he’d ever had to do in his entire life.