SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (138 page)

“You have to swallow some time,” Thea warned.

I gave her a smile that felt more like a grimace and shrugged. I could probably chew forever—especially if the alternative was talking to Logan. Or talking to Thea
about
Logan.

You know...looking back, maybe it would have been better to tell Thea the truth about her dad right from the beginning. About how he had had this nifty future with Snippy or Snuffy or whoever all laid out in front of him and how I had been doing the
noble
thing to never tell him about how he had a daughter.

But then, I’d have spent the last fifteen and a half years answering questions about him and maybe having to deal with him and Muffy or whoever and who needed that? Besides, Logan had had his life and we had had ours. By all rights, we never should have met up again.

While I chewed and tried to peel caramel strips off my back teeth with my tongue, I considered that for a second or two and decided this whole mess was
Logan’s
fault. If he’d just stayed married to his society bimbo, everybody would have been happy.

Instead...I looked past Thea and watched my past stroll out my front door to stand on my porch like he actually had a right to be there. And even wanting to run over him and then kick his battered body to the curb like road kill, I had to admit that he looked damn good.

Better even than he had the summer I met him and we all know how
that
turned out. Okay, probably best not to think about that.

His short black hair was styled to give it that effortless, I-never-worry-about-my-hair look. His blue eyes were fixed on me and didn’t look friendly. He wore a black sport jacket over a white tee shirt tucked into faded jeans. And as he brushed the edge of his jacket back, and jammed one fist on his hip, I noticed the gun hooked to his belt.

Gulp.

Nah. Just kidding. Logan wasn’t homicidal.

Probably.

Back when we were kids, he’d always talked about being a cop. Hopefully, he’d become one and that explained the gun. Otherwise, I was in more trouble than I’d thought I’d be.

“So, he didn’t save any orphans from a fire, huh?” Thea asked.

And so it begins, I thought and shifted my gaze-okay reluctantly-from Logan to my darling daughter. She looked not only pissed, but hurt. That’s when I really felt bad. But it wasn’t like I’d lied to her
only
to make it easier on me.

“Mom?”

“No. No fire.”

“And there was no flood.”

“Nope.”

“So you lied.”

“Sorta.”

Thea blew out a breath. “Good to know I can always count on mom to tell me the truth.”

Okay now, is it just me or did that seem a little harsh? Sure I hadn’t told her the truth, but I’d given her a hero father, hadn’t I? Hadn’t made something ugly up, like he’d had too much Wild Turkey one night, stumbled into a gutter and drowned.

Points for creativity, anyway.

“We can talk about this later, okay?” Welcome to my world. Never talk about now what you can put off until later.

“I don’t know if I’ll be speaking to you later,” Thea said and poor thing actually thought that was a threat. But I knew better. She might have her dad’s eyes, but she got her gift of gab straight from me. There was simply no way she’d be able to stop talking to me. It’d kill her.

Besides, how could she torture me if she didn’t speak?

“I’ll risk it,” I said and picked up the grocery bag. The chill from the frozen pizza seeped into me as I headed for the front porch, but in all honesty, that chill could have been the direct result of the ice forming on Logan’s face.

I tried to stall, slowing my steps down, but doing that only made me notice that the yard needed mowing and more of my flowers had died during the night. What can I say? Just call me the Grim Reaper of the nursery world. Every time I walked through the garden department at Wal-Mart, I actually
heard
the little flowers shrieking
Not me, not me! Don’t sell me to her!

“Good to see you Cassie,” Logan said through gritted teeth, which took all the charm out of that statement, big surprise.

“Right.” I waved a hand at the pistol at his waist. “That’s why you came armed?”

He sighed and flicked the edge of his coat over the weapon. “I’m a cop.”

Thought so.

“Used to work for LAPD,” he said. “Now I work for La Sombra.”

“So, you’re not just passing through?” I asked, feeling my last little bit of hope slide away.

“I told you on the phone I’d moved back.”

“Right.” I juggled the grocery bag in my arms and spoke up again, cutting through all the crap to get to the ooey gooey center, “Why are you here, Logan? Just stop by to ruin my day?”

He pushed away from the porch post and glared down at me. “Ruin
your
day? You know, I think I’m being pretty reasonable about this.”

Actually, he was. Hated to admit it, but if someone had kept Thea from
me
for sixteen years, I’d have been completely freaked.

“Great,” I said, stepping past him to get into the house where I could stick my head under a pillow and pretend everything was fabulous. Better living through oblivion. “Think you could be reasonable tomorrow? I’m just not up for this right now, Logan.”

I didn’t need to see it to know Thea was rolling her eyes. Heck, I could practically hear her.

“Not a chance, Cassie,” Logan said and his voice was so tight, it sounded like it was scraping the air. “We talk about this now.”

I kept walking. They were both right behind me, so I didn’t even slow down... would it be childish to head right out the back door and keep going? Probably.

Sugar leaped to her feet at the crinkle of a grocery bag. I didn’t fool myself. It wasn’t mommy love she was looking for. It was Snausages.

“Make yourself useful,” I muttered, “attack.”

She didn’t of course. Instead, she greeted Logan in the traditional manner of dogs everywhere and stuck her cold, wet nose into his crotch with so much eagerness it would have brought a lesser man to his knees.

“Ooof! What is this?” he demanded, shoving her big hairy head to one side in a belated attempt to protect his favorite body part. “A pony?”

I set the grocery bag down, glanced at a crestfallen Sugar, whose affection had been rebuffed, then shifted my gaze back to the current thorn in my figurative paw. My darling daughter stood just behind the thorn and the resemblance between them was amazing. There was just no way I could have denied their relationship even if I’d seen a chance at it. Which I didn’t.

“You should have told me,” Logan said.

“You should have told
me,
” Thea said.

“I need more chocolate,” I said and turned for the bag of kisses again.

“Damn it, Cassie,” Logan continued and his voice got a little louder as if I were deaf along with inconsiderate, rude, thoughtless and oh hell, you get the idea. “In fifteen years, you couldn’t tell me I had a daughter? What the hell were you thinking?”

I pointed to my mouth and made a really conspicuous chewing motion.

“Don’t you yell at my mother,” Thea said hotly, giving her newly discovered dear old dad a shot to the arm.

Sugar whimpered and tried to crawl into my lap. Not easy, since I was still standing, leaning against the kitchen counter. I tore open her treat bag, gave her a couple Snausages and turned my attention back to the daughter I was never more proud of.

“You don’t know anything,” Thea continued and her eyes flashed. “You haven’t been here. You don’t even
know
me. You can’t just walk in and start trying to take over or something. This is our house and you can’t yell at my mother in our house.”

Which cleared the way for him to yell at me anywhere else in La Sombra, but who was complaining?

“I’m not yelling,” Logan shouted, then stopped to take a deep breath. “Thea, I just want to talk to your mother. Alone.”

Glrrrkk...
Never panic when chewing. I tried to swallow the last of the kisses, but they got stuck in the middle of my throat. I so wasn’t in the mood to talk to Logan, alone or otherwise. But clearly, he wasn’t going to let this go with a shrug and a
Isn’t this nice, I have a nearly grown daughter
thing, so since I couldn’t put it off, might as well talk now as later.

I slapped my hand against my chest, hoping to help that chocolate go down, but only succeeding in drawing the attention of the other two people in the room. Finally, I managed to choke down the Kisses enough to say, “Thea, why don’t you go over to Zoe’s house to study or something.”

She scowled at me. “I finished my homework.”

Of course she had. “Well, do Zoe’s then. Go.”

“Fine.” She crossed her arms over a chest that hadn’t developed yet, much to her dismay, and gave her father a wary glance. “I’ll go. But I won’t be far.”

Logan lifted both hands as if in surrender, which ordinarily would have been pretty funny. Today? Not so much.

She turned and flounced through the living room, smacked the screen door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall of the house, then clomped down the front steps. My dainty little princess.

Logan glanced at me. “Who’s Zoe and where does she live?”

I really wished I could lift one eyebrow. I would have. He’d been a father for ten minutes and he was asking questions?

“Zoe Cohen. Best friend. Across the street.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I’m so relieved that it’s okay with you, Logan,” I muttered and grabbed another fistful of Kisses. A few minutes earlier I’d actually been feeling a little guilty. But irritation crowded that emotion out fast.

“No more candy,” he said, striding across the kitchen to whip the bag of Kisses out of my reach. “You won’t talk if you’re eating.”

I made a futile grab for the candy, but his arms were longer and I came up empty. “For this kind of talk, I require chocolate.”

“For Chrissakes, Cassie, I just found out I have a daughter. What the hell do
you
have to be upset about?”

“The fact that you’re standing in my kitchen springs to mind.” Not to mention the fact that despite being royally pissed, I could feel that old flash of attraction flaring up again. Another empty grab. “And there’s the whole stealing my candy thing.”

He tossed the candy onto the table and Sugar followed its movement like she was at a tennis match.

Shaking his head, Logan grumbled, “I would have been here a lot sooner if I’d known.”

“I know that.”

“You should have told me.”

“I tried.”

“Really?” he snapped and fixed his gaze on me as if he was pinning me to a board to be examined later. “When was that? Cause I think I would have remembered.”

There was one stray Kiss on the counter and I went for it blindly. My fingers played with the foil covered candy and then tugged out the stupid little white paper that had absolutely no reason to exist. “I went to your college graduation, remember that?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, I was going to tell you right then until you introduced me to your ‘fiancée’, Spiffy or Sparky or whatever the hell her name was.”

“Misty,” he said, shoving both hands into his jeans pockets. “Her name was Misty.”

“Ah yes,” I nodded, but didn’t roll my eyes, and hey, good for me, “much classier name. Thanks for clearing that up.”

“You should have told me anyway,” he said and stalked around the perimeter of the kitchen.

My gaze followed him and so did Sugar. The big dog’s nails clicked happily on the floor while she played what she thought was a new game with her new best friend. Me? I stood still and wished he was in Nevada.

“Yeah, that would have gone over well,” I said and walked to the kitchen table to grab a handful of chocolate. “
Oh, so nice to meet you, Scrunchy. Logan, you’re a daddy. When’s the wedding?”

“Misty.”

“Whatever.”

While he paced, I unwrapped a piece of chocolate covered caramel, thanked whatever genius little candy maker had come up with
that
concept, and stared idly through the back door onto the mud porch. Now, my business is cleaning houses, so my house is always clean—almost always—and my windows are always shiny. Usually. Anyway, my point is, while I’m staring out at the upper—glass—half of the back door, I noticed something.

Even though the window pane was clean and non streaky, there was a long pattern of
extra
clean right across the middle of the glass. Frowning while Logan continued to fight his way past Sugar to pace, I thought about that for a long minute and then it dawned on me.

When crazy lady Jasmine was there earlier that morning, she’d made me shoot Leo in the head with that nasty looking stuff in the spray bottle. And some of the liquid had missed poor, smoking Leo and splattered on the glass.

Now, that glass wasn’t just clean, it was damn near gleaming.

What the hell was in that stuff, anyway?

“So you see my position.”

“Uh-huh.” I popped a Kiss into my mouth and studied that sliver of extra clean.

“So you agree.”

“Sure. What? Huh?” I swiveled my head to look at him and he looked way too pleased for my comfort level. “Agree to what?”

“To me seeing Thea on a regular basis.”

“I didn’t agree to that.”

“I could sue you for joint custody.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said and hoped I sounded way more confident than I was. He could really make things ugly for me. I mean, I owned my own business, but it wasn’t a Fortune 500 company. And he was a cop. Judges liked cops. Plus, I’d sort of hidden his daughter from him for well, her whole life. That wouldn’t look good.

“I want to know my daughter.”

“You just met her. Good start.”

“Cassie...”

“We’ll work something out,” I said and forced a smile that felt too tight and grimace like to be convincing, but he appeared to be okay with it.

“Good. Now how about dinner?”

“Huh?”

“You and me,” he said and walked across the kitchen, stepping over Sugar, who’d given up on pacing because it was way too much like exercise. He stopped right in front of me and I have to say, he smelled just as good as he looked.

Sixteen years since the last time he touched me and at the moment, all I could think of was,
I’m a lot hornier now than I was then.
And God help me, Logan was even better looking now than he had been then. Which was really saying something, believe me.