The Billionaire's Kiss(62)

“So what if I do?” Logan said. The wind swirled around them from all directions, but without the engine running it was too quiet on the water for him. “It’s really none of your concern anyway.” He leaned against the wheel and ran his hand through his hair. What the hell are you going to do now? he wondered.

“So this is what it takes? Apparently it isn’t enough for a woman to be rich and famous and beautiful. You need someone who’s lying to you, and using you?” Veronica asked. “So if I had just lied to you, things would have worked out between us?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I heard everything. Did you think stepping ten feet away would really keep me from hearing? You two were yelling. I’d be surprised if they didn’t hear you out on the street.”

“You don’t understand how things are between us,” Logan said. “Whatever reasons were for coming here, she and I have something real.”

“You and I had something real.”

“We had sex. Twice, while we were both drunk. You were looking for an excuse to break off your engagement, and I was willing to give it to you. That’s not something. That’s about as close to nothing as you can get.”

“You didn’t seem to mind at the time.”

“Well, things have changed, Nikki. I’ve changed.”

Veronica climbed up into the seat next to Logan. “Face it, you and me, we’re not like her. We’re not like ordinary people. We take what we want when we want it, and we don’t have to worry about the consequences. If you want the truth, she should probably be the one thanking me. God, imagine what would happen if she really fell for you, and a few months in, you decide that you’re bored. What would happen when the cutesy nicknames and the trips to Crate and Barrel, picking out fabric patterns finally got to you and you decided you needed some real fun. You’d come back to me, or someone just like me, and you’d break her heart. She’d be scarred for life, all because you thought you could be something you weren’t.”

Logan snorted a short, hard laugh. He reached down, turned the ignition and revved the engine back to life. “Thank you for saying that. It was exactly what I needed to hear.” He knew what he had to do. He pulled out his phone and searched for a signal. It was time to set things straight.





Sixteen

Callie had been pacing back and forth across the living room for hours with her mind racing and her fists clenched. When she had first gotten Logan’s text, she had wanted to throw her phone across the room. She must have read it a dozen more time to make sure she hadn’t missed something. “Meet me at the bar. We need to talk.” There was no apology, no anger, nothing, just a summons. Here she was, falling apart, and he couldn’t even call?

The rules were simple, when someone was trying to screw you over for their own personal gain, you didn’t take her hand and jet off on a goddamn speedboat with her. What the hell was he thinking? If anyone with a telephoto lens had seen him and Veronica walking together, it was all the background she needed to release her sex tape into the world. Logan was playing directly into her plan, and it seemed like he was doing it on purpose. Maybe Hank had been right. This could be Logan’s way of sabotaging everything because he didn’t get to have everything his way.

She needed to figure out the best course of action. Short of hopping on a plane and writing off any future business from the Harris family, she didn’t see anything she could do. The way things were going, she doubted that she’d be able to salvage anything from this mess. Amy and everyone else back in DC would be livid when they found out how Callie had let her personal attraction to Logan get in the way of her job.

She was angry at herself too. Helping to pass this bill was supposed to be one of the good assignments, one of the few that she could be proud of. She had let herself lose track of that because Logan looked good with his shirt off.

But there was so much more to him than that, and the thing that worried Callie the most, more than the threat of personal and professional humiliation was the idea of losing Logan. He was smart and funny, and, when she was with him, she felt alive in a way she hadn’t felt in years. Somehow she had jeopardized all of that because she was too much of a coward to tell him the truth from the beginning. “Logan, I was sent here to keep an eye on you, but the truth is, I fell for you.” It wouldn’t have been hard to say at any point. She could have prevented all of this if she had just been honest with him.