‘Oh, I didn’t...’ She paused, stilling in her actions. ‘I wasn’t saying...you know, stop. I just—’
‘We have to stop,’ he cut in before she could say anything more. ‘This is entirely inappropriate.’
Her eyes clouded over, a sort of shame flitting through them, and he hated that he made her feel that way, but he couldn’t do a thing about it. If he started to explain it to her, he feared he might give in to temptation. Give in to her.
He didn’t want to take her on the floor of his living room like they were a pair of sexed-up adolescents. And he certainly wasn’t about to take her to his bedroom and have her stay the night when his four-year-old son was in the apartment.
Or at all, a voice rang out belatedly.
But either way it was a loss of control.
He was a father, not a single man. His only responsibility was to his son, and not bringing back random women to their home.
Except that Kat wasn’t random. And Jamie adored her. But none of that was reason enough to let her stay the night and confuse Jamie when he woke up in the morning to find her there.
So, if he couldn’t seem to control himself around this woman, there seemed to be only one other solution.
As if she could read his expression, Kat licked her lips nervously.
‘You want me to go home?’
‘I think that would be for the best.’
He sounded like a jerk, but that was just too bad. He could still taste her, smell her. And she was driving him crazy with need.
If he softened towards here, even for a moment, he feared he might be too tempted to finish what he’d started.
‘I’ll call a cab for you.’
* * *
Kat could feel the hot prickling behind her eyes, and it was a battle to hold her head up. To square her shoulders.
She could not let Logan see how humiliated she felt, or how much his rejection stung.
How it played on insecurities she wished she could stuff down.
After all, how could Logan’s rejection compare to when Kirk had called off their engagement, throwing the one argument at her against which she could offer absolutely no possible recourse? Kirk had wanted kids of his own—real kids of his own, he’d said. He’d meant biological, and that had only driven his barbed little knife home all the deeper.
Of all people, she’d thought Kirk was the one person she could always rely on. They’d met as kids. Two fifteen-year-olds sitting on a ward, staring out of the window to the parkland beyond, watching normal kids do normal things whilst they were attached to a gamut of drips and needles.
They’d endured it all together. A team. Understanding things no normal, healthy kid could ever have appreciated.
He was the one person she had thought would always stand by her. Or, if he’d had to leave her, it would have been because they’d grown apart.
She would never have expected him, of all people, to have been so cold-hearted.
So cruel.
He’d made her feel worthless. Undesirable. Valueless. And she had let him, because he had been the one person who’d known exactly which buttons to press to hit every single one of her crippling insecurities. Every single fear they had ever talked about on those wards when life and death had been such everyday topics. When you walked into a room, scanned it, and worked out who wasn’t there any more.
Clenching her fists, Kat indulged a little in the sense of anger. Because it was either that or fall back into the sea of self-loathing that had almost drowned her for years, until she’d found a way to pull herself out by her fingernails.
She wasn’t about to let this man—a relative stranger, for goodness’ sake—see how his words sliced through her. She was stronger than that.
Even if she wasn’t, coming to Seattle was supposed to be her chance to reinvent herself.
Fake it until you make it—wasn’t that what she’d told herself?