Page 53 of Whenever You Call

“What?” I frowned.

“I want you to stay. Even if you think you shouldn’t, which I can tell you do, I want you here. Just for a little while longer. I don’t want to be alone tonight, Logan.”

I inhaled through flared nostrils, releasing it slowly. “You want me to stay?”

“Is that a problem?”

“You tell me. This is your home, Hannah.”

“Which is why I’m asking you to enjoy it with me for a while.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“You tell me,” she countered, a small smirk growing right alongside the spark in her eyes.

I knew this was a mistake after what had happened in Bella’s bedroom, but I was no longer able to deny Hannah anything she needed if I had the power to deliver it. How could I possibly leave her after she told me she didn’t want to be alone tonight?

I couldn’t.

I was a slave at her mercy, willing to serve and provide whatever she demanded from me, and that shit should have scared me far more than it did.

“Okay,” I said, my own smile growing. “I can stay a while… if you insist.”

“Good, because I do.” She turned around and walked across the kitchen, bending down to another small glass-fronted fridge I hadn’t noticed before.

She pulled out a bottle of white wine and held it up to me.

“Glasses are in the big cupboard to your right. Grab two, will you?” Then she sauntered away, pushing back the glass patio doors until they opened up the kitchen to the outdoors fully, and she took a right to where the seating area waited underneath the canopy, keeping her—us—tucked away from the world.

I closed my eyes for ten seconds, giving myself some time to try and think of more reasons why I shouldn’t get too comfortable here or in her life, but two minutes later, I walked outside to meet her, anyway.

Two wineglasses in hand and not a single reason in mind strong enough to make me leave her life that night.

Chapter22

HANNAH

I’m not trying to replace him.

I couldn’t get those few words out of my head. I didn’t want him to replace Cole in Bella’s life, but I couldn’t help the way my heart had stuttered seeing him take care of my daughter and imagining having someone like Logan to do the small things with—the things that mattered the most.

Watching a strong, capable, sober man laying my daughter down with such tenderness and care had opened something in me I thought would never see the light of day again: the desire to have another guy in my home. One like Logan, who happened to be everything Cole hadn’t been. I didn’t have to spend years in his company to figure that out. Cole had been an unstoppable force from day one, tearing through life, taking what he wanted, when he wanted it, and everyone else obediently fell in line because that was the kind of power he held over them all… including me.

Especiallyme.

Logan, however, wasn’t an unstoppable force. He was the calm air a person soaked up in a stormy sea. He was the rock-solid hand needed when traversing the edge of a rocky cliff. He was the gentle truth not many of us wanted to hear… that people like him—good, strong, selfless people—were who we should focus on. Ones who stared into your soul, desperate to find what we tried so hard to hide from the rest of the world just so they could understand you better. So that when you spoke, they were sure to hear every word.

Logan heard every one of mine, even the ones I didn’t say aloud.

That didn’t stop him from acting a little awkwardly when he sat down opposite me. I poured him a glass of wine, which he barely touched, while I drained the first glass far too quickly, only to pour myself another.

“You’re not going to sit there and make me drink this all alone, are you?” I asked, looking up at him through eyes I hoped didn’t betray me by showing their attraction.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, reaching for his glass and taking a long sip, his eyes never leaving mine until he saw my satisfied smile come to life.

Eventually, once he began to relax in my company again, we talked about mundane things for a while before we moved on to more serious stuff, like his parents, and where he grew up. Originally from Nevada, his family moved to Michigan when he was ten years old to escape the men his father had run up a huge amount of gambling debt with. Logan told me how that gambling had affected his dad’s entire life until he’d passed away just a year before, leaving his mother back home with a sibling he had very little in common with. A younger sister who he said acted as though she knew everything, had seen everything, and quite enjoyed being the favorite of the family.

I was fascinated—enraptured, hanging off his every word, and only more determined to find out every single thing about him as long as he kept talking so openly this way. I wanted to dig deep. To find out if Logan had any bad inside of him at all, or if he really was made up of nothing but goodness and warmth, which were all he’d ever shown me so far.

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