Page 66 of The Player Next Door
Clare nestled closer to him and ran her fingers through the soft hair at the nape of his neck. “Sure.” She fell silent, wondering how to phrase her next question. “I honestly don’t mean to sound judgy, but is there a reason for all the sex? I mean, you’ve had enough that aclientthinks you sleep around too much.”
A laugh rumbled in his chest. “You’re not the first woman to ask, but you are the first woman I’ll give an honest answer to.” He shifted, rolling to his back and pulling her with him. “I know a lot of women think that I sleep around because there’s something broken or tragic about me. I’ve had a couple think that they could fix me, but the real answer is I just like sex. I’m good at getting women to want to sleep with me, I like flirting, and I like everything that comes after. That’s it, really.”
Clare absorbed his answer, her heart tripping over the idea that she was the only person he’d told that to, even if it was hardly a life-changing secret. “What have you told the other women?”
“That my past was too painful to talk about,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Usually gets me another round.”
Clare snorted into his chest, her smile so wide it made her cheeks ache. “You’re incorrigible,” she said.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he said, smiling against the top of her head.
Chapter Thirty-two
Logan couldn’t stop smiling. It was a disease, really, and it was drawing attention at work. It wasn’t that he was normally in a bad mood when he was at work—on the contrary, he spent a lot of time, probably too much time, goofing around with the Aidens—but even he had to admit, this mood was different.
Logan felt light and airy, and even the terror he felt when he considered the fact that he had, officially, let someone into his heart, couldn’t outweigh his grin. Vince noticed first, commenting on his unusually good mood when they were in the break room waiting for the coffee maker to finish brewing Vince’s cup of hazelnut and vanilla flavored coffee.
“What’s gotten into you?” Vince asked, leaning his shoulder against the wall.
“Nothing,” Logan shrugged. “I, uh, had a productive call with a client earlier.”
That wasn’t a complete lie, as he had finally connected with Bill Jefferson, an older client who Logan had suspected was wavering on remaining with him. It wasn’t for certain, but it did seem more likely than not that Jefferson was going to stick with him for the foreseeable future, which should go a long way toward improving his metrics. The Schneider dinner was officially scheduled, and that would be his last major hurdle.
“Yeah, you’ve definitely got ‘client grin’ on, and not—” Vince broke off and narrowed his eyes, studying him. “Dare I say . . . ‘met someone grin’?”
Logan shrugged and looked down. He hoped Vince wouldn’t notice that his ears were burning, or if he did, that he wouldn’t comment on it. “I’ve started seeing someone, yeah,” he said.
“Really seeing? Or—your usual?”
“Really seeing,” Logan said. He tossed a look toward the Aidens, who were spinning in their chairs and talking loudly about their last pick-up game. “But, uh, I think I want to keep it quiet, you know? Just for now.”
Vince gave him a kind smile. “I get it. Secret’s safe with me, but between the two of us? This looks good on you,” he said with a friendly pat on the shoulder.
Logan watched his friend leave and loaded the coffee pod into the coffee maker. If he really was dating Clare, he was entering completely uncharted territory.
The thought was honestly terrifying, but he was still going to try.
Logan flopped down on his childhood bed, arm flung over his face. He didn’t come home as often as he should, although he was doing it more so now that he was with Clare. He wasn’t exactly sure why she made him feel like he should be a better son, but she did.
His dad was downstairs, puttering around like usual, and had sent Logan up toclean out that closet of yours. Logan wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with a ten-year-old varsity letter jacket or if the thrift store would even want it, but he dutifully placed it in a large cardboard box markeddonations. His phone buzzed with a text; a warning from Sam that a rant was incoming. Three seconds later the rant began, mostly around the rumors that the Wolves were going to fire their coach at the end of the season and her strongly held opinion that the women’s Gopher’s coach was the perfect replacement but would never be given proper consideration due to her gender.
Logan agreed with her, but sometimes Sam just needed to vent without any response from him at all. He let her continue, phone buzzing every thirty seconds as he pulled half a dozen old hoodies and T-shirts out of his closet, tossing them into the pile for donations. His high school backpack—covered in white-out hearts courtesy of the girl who sat next to him in study hall, and still full of his notebooks and one very outdated science textbook—went straight into the black trash bag Burt had given him on the way upstairs.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and glanced at his phone, where Sam was still texting in all caps about the NBA’s idiocy and misogyny. There was a soft knock on his door and Burt stepped through, surveying his minimal progress. Logan’s phone buzzed three times in a row, and Burt lifted his eyebrows. “Sam angry with you?”
“Just angry in general today.”
“She usually is,” Burt agreed. “She’s a hellcat, that girl.”
Logan nodded, unsure of what to say, since his dad rarely followed him up to his room. But rather than ask a question, Burt pulled his backpack out of the trash and unzipped it, thumbing through the notebook. It was probably his history notebook, judging by the few random dates scribbled between doodles.
Well, they were more than doodles. Drawings; sketches maybe. Some were of things he could see from his desk in US history, like the oak tree in the courtyard that was crawling with squabbling, fat squirrels, or the pile of messy papers on the teacher’s desk. Others were more imaginative, like the wing of a dragon curling protectively around a hatching egg, or a human stuck in an alien zoo.
Burt studied the sketches closely. “You really didn’t pay attention in school, did you?” he said wryly.
Logan grinned reluctantly. “If I answer honestly, are you going to ground me?”
“I would if I could,” Burt said, chuckling. “You’re still spending a lot of time with that Clare girl, right?”