The Bodyguard's Christmas Proposal

‘She left me.’ He shrugged. And, for the first time, he realised it no longer scraped inside him as it once had. She no longer mattered to him. ‘She realised I couldn’t give her the lifestyle she craved, so she found someone better suited.’

‘And Jamie?’

‘He was a means to an end for her.’ Logan screwed up his fists instinctively.

Sophia might no longer have any kind of hold over him but it still ate him up inside that Jamie would have to grow up without a mother who loved him.

‘Is that why you don’t, can’t—won’t—entertain a relationship with anyone else?’ she demanded. ‘Because Jamie has to be your sole focus?’

It was insane the way Kat seemed to read him so easily. Or perhaps that was the point, that it wasn’t insane at all. It was all too telling. He wanted to tell her, to open up to her. But how could he tell Kat anything when he was still working it all out for himself?

‘So you don’t wouldn’t want to meet someone? Get married?’

He opened his mouth to say no yet, startlingly, something stopped him.

A month ago he would have hesitated for a second, the idea of marriage having been locked behind a heavy-set door in some pitch-black, far-away corner of his mind. Oddly, he still couldn’t imagine marrying again and yet, at the same time, that door was visible again. Heavy-set and locked, but no longer in such a dark, remote place.

‘Maybe,’ he hazarded. ‘One day.’

‘Someone to settle down with in Seattle perhaps?’

With anyone other woman, he might have thought that she was fishing. Putting herself up for the role. But this was Kat—not Sophia. Still, he wasn’t sure how to answer that right now.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

And he actually meant it. Still, he was conscious that the more he answered, the more edgy and uneasy Kat was becoming. He couldn’t fathom it.

‘One day maybe you’ll have a sibling for Jamie.’

There was something too bright and too hectic in her eyes for Logan’s liking. Like he was saying all the wrong things to her. And yet he’d felt that connection when they’d been in bed together before. Why was she fighting it so hard?

‘It certainly isn’t something I’ve given much thought to,’ he answered after a moment. ‘But I guess one day, in the future, it’s possible. I was an only child and it was sometimes lonely. However, that certainly isn’t something I’m considering now.’

‘But, one day, it’s a possibility you would want that?’

And it suddenly occurred to him that when he looked at Kat he thought that perhaps one day, he actually would. There was that damned shifting sand again.

‘I won’t rule it out,’ was all he said.

But when she snagged his gaze, holding it and making some of the raw emotion simmer down, he thought he could read something in her expression that went deeper.

And as she snatched her eyes away and turned to look out of the window beside her, he suddenly wished he knew how to read this enigmatic woman.

* * *

Kat swallowed hard, relieved that she had disentangled her gaze from Logan’s, and admitted to herself, for the first time, that she was in way too deep.

It had been creeping on so slowly—right from the start—that she hadn’t noticed it. Or she had been able to pretend that she hadn’t noticed it. But she couldn’t keep lying to herself any longer.

Never mind the just sex agreement. She was beginning to fall for Logan Connors. And that absolutely couldn’t happen. She had to end things now. Before she couldn’t end them at all.

Misery wound itself through her.

He wanted a family. And children. Maybe not now, but someday. Yet, no matter how many days, weeks, months passed by, she could never, ever be the one to give that to him.

She needed to get out now.

He came over as she was staring out of the window, her arms pulled tight across her chest, staring into the darkness of the night.