He put the shit that needed to go into the fridge away. He left the other shit wherever he found a place for it on the counters.
Before he took his boots off, sitting on the ottoman to her big chair, he stared at the crate, wondering how she got it back and deciding he’d learn that after they waded through twenty years of colossal fuckups.
He was just glad it wasn’t gone.
He left his boots on the floor where he took them off.
He tossed his cut on her couch.
Then he walked back to her room, climbed under the covers with her, pulled her in his arms, and tangled himself up in Millie.
She felt so good sleeping woven up in him it was like he’d lost a limb and it had miraculously grown back.
He tipped his chin so his face was in the top of her hair.
I gave you up, walking through fire to do it but I did it. I did it in the end. I gave you everything.
He’d fucked up, the stunt he pulled at Wild Bill’s field and everything after, the penance he made her pay for a sin she never committed.
But he’d fix it.
Then it was his turn.
Finally, fucking finally.
It was his turn to give her everything.
Twenty years ago...
Logan stood in his and Millie’s bathroom, the little pink, flat, round case in his hand.
It was opened.
It was empty.
He knew her cycle so he knew that wasn’t right.
She was close to graduating.
His girl worked for it. She worked her ass off for it. She worked to get it, to give it to him, and she’d succeeded.
Three years and she was going to graduate.
And he knew by the empty pill case in his hand that she didn’t fuck around getting her degree, she wasn’t going to fuck around about other stuff that was even more important.
He grinned down at that pill case, remembering their conversation from a week before.
“You want it to be a surprise?” she’d asked.
“Want what to be a surprise?” he’d asked back.
She was on him, naked in their bed, and she pulled herself up so they were face to face.
“When I get pregnant,” she whispered, and he felt his gut get warm, so fucking warm it felt like mush at the thought of his Millie with his baby growing inside her. “Do you want to plan for it or do you want it to come as a surprise?”
He slid a hand up her back and into her hair. “What you want, beautiful?”
“A surprise,” she whispered.
“Then that’s what we’ll have.”
She grinned a happy, triumphant grin and he knew then what he knew standing in the bathroom a week later.
His Millie did not fuck around.
He flipped the case closed and tossed it back into the medicine cabinet.
Then Logan moved out of the bathroom in order to find his woman and aid her in her efforts of not fucking around.
But he intended to do it by fucking around a lot.
He was going to enjoy this. He knew it from a shit load of practice they’d already had.
He was also going to enjoy watching her grow heavy with his kid. He was going to enjoy helping her fill their home with babies. He was going to enjoy being at her side watching them grow up.
And she was going to be a fucking brilliant mom. She had a good one. Her sister was the shit. Her father was solid. She was the best woman a man could find.
She’d kick motherhood’s ass.
He found her in the kitchen cooking.
He fucked her on the floor.
Dinner was ruined.
Neither cared. They just hopped on his bike and went out for food.
Logan never mentioned he saw she’d dumped her pills.
Then, for six months, he watched her try to hide the slowly increasing changes in her manner, to shield him from the worry that he sometimes caught leaking into her eyes as all else remained the same.
Including them fucking like rabbits anytime they could and his girl never coming up pregnant.
He did it not knowing that he’d live for twenty years before he found out she fed him bullshit as to what all that meant.
He did it not knowing, through all that, he should have mentioned those fucking pills.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hole in My Soul
Millie
I OPENED MY eyes feeling disoriented and not knowing where I was.
But I smelled bacon.
I shoved up a bit and saw I was in my bedroom.
I’d come home.
Right, I’d come home.
But what was with the bacon?
Suddenly, it hit me like I was at the bottom of an avalanche, covering me, smothering me, and in a flurry, I threw back the covers and launched myself out of bed.
I stood there and looked down at myself.
I was in the clothes I’d worn to travel. No boots. No
jacket.
I looked around.
My room had been tidied.
However, the last thing I remembered, I was fading away in Logan’s arms in Logan’s bed at Chaos.
How did I get here?
On that thought I spied a beat-up black leather bag on my chaise, gaping open, clothes hanging out, some in puddles on the floor.
Cautiously, I moved to the bag.
I pawed through the clothes. Heathered gray thermal Henley. Faded black thermal Henley. Midnight blue thermal Henley. Two pairs of exceptionally faded jeans. A belt. Black socks. Black boxer briefs.
Slowly, I turned my head to look down the hall.
It was empty.
But the bacon smell was assailing me.
Without thought, my stocking feet took me in that direction, soundless against the wood floors.
I made it to the end of the hall and stopped, peeking around the corner.
And there I saw Logan moving around my kitchen, hair wet and slicked back, unshaven.
What on earth was he doing here?
No.
Unh-unh.
I didn’t care.