Grace for Drowning

"So you two have never...?"

She laughed like I'd said something ridiculous. "No. I've thought about it — to be honest I'd be suspicious of any girl that hadn't — but he's a bit too brooding for my tastes. Besides, I have a rule about getting involved with co-workers." She grinned suggestively. "But that's not to say you can't take a shot. Maybe he's ready to end his sabbatical."

"There will be no shots here," I replied, a little too quickly. "Getting involved with anyone is the last thing on my mind right now."

Joy studied me with curiosity in her eyes for a few moments, but her expression quickly brightened once more. "Well, good. I'd hate to get to know you, only to have you quit a month later because some jackass ruined you."

Too late for that. I nearly said it out loud, but she seemed to get the message anyway. We cleaned in silence for the next few minutes.

Chapter Two

Grace

Over the coming days, I met the rest of the Charlie's team. Unsurprisingly, Logan wasn't the only guy on security. There were six men in total on the payroll. Louis was my favorite; a gigantic, dark-skinned Samoan man whose laugh was as big as his belly. Despite the extra meat on his bones, he somehow didn't come across as fat, just solid, like you could hit him with a car and just wind up with a dented fender. Unlike the others, he would talk your

ear off if you gave him an opportunity.

Then there was Rafi in the kitchen, who was polite but a little cold. I got the sense he didn't like me. Perhaps he felt threatened having another chef on staff. Charlie had made it perfectly clear that he was hiring me for the bar not the kitchen, but the occasional narrow-eyed glance from Rafi said that maybe he didn't believe that.

The rest of the bar staff were all friendly, in that gregarious, insubstantial way that bartenders tend to be. They were pleasant company, but nothing more than that, as though everything that happened now was transient and thus not really worth the effort. To be honest, I felt a little like that myself. This was a stopover for me, the first port in rebuilding my life. But there was one exception. Joy. That bubbliness I'd felt the first day we met wasn't an act. That was her, twenty-four-seven. At first, I thought it would be annoying, but there was a charming relentlessness about her that just wore you down until you couldn't help but see things through the rose-colored glasses that she did. It was almost impossible not to like her. I could see us being friends for a long time.

Logan, on the other hand, was still a mystery. There were long periods of each shift where he was nowhere in sight, but every so often, I'd look over and he'd be resting casually against the wall, surveilling the room. Apparently there were at least two guys on security at any time, one outside checking IDs and the others inside.

"Logan normally takes outside," Joy said, nudging me suggestively. "I can't remember him ever coming in quite this much."

I didn't catch him staring again, and he made no effort to talk to me, but somehow just his proximity made me acutely aware of him, like a splinter in my mind that I couldn't quite dig free. I never saw him during the day though, and soon enough I learned why.

The Sunday after my first night, I was working the afternoon shift when Charlie called me into his office. I arrived to find him talking urgently into his phone.

"You know we can't guarantee— hold on a sec." He glanced over at me. "Hey, Grace. I need you to do me a favor. There's some food bagged up in the kitchen. I need you to take it over to Logan. He's a couple of doors down at Parker's Gym."

My brow furrowed. "I didn't realize we did delivery."

"We don't, but Logan's a special case. He prepays his meals a week in advance and gives us a little extra to run them down to him. Saves him having to shower and change and all that. I normally do the runs myself, but I've kind of got my hands full here."

A nervous energy flared in my chest at the thought of talking to Logan again. I didn't know why he had that effect on me. Sure, I was willing to admit that there was something attractive about him, in a wild, feral kind of way. But after what I'd been through, the thought of anything even remotely romantic made everything inside me knot up.

"Sure," I said, throwing up a smile. "I'd be happy to."

"Thanks." He returned to his phone call.

I nabbed the bag from Rafi and wandered out into the Vegas heat. Parker's was just a few buildings away on the corner, but even those thirty seconds outside left my throat parched and my skin sticky.

The gym wasn't what I was expecting. I'd walked past it before but never been inside. I assumed when Charlie said "gym" he meant treadmills and barbells and roided-up frat boys whose vocabulary mostly consisted of the word "bro." But Parker's wasn't like that at all. It had a few cardio machines nestled in the corner, but most of the room was open, with big blue mats spread out across the floor and punching bags dangling from the ceiling.

And then I spotted Logan.

He was working one of the big punching bags at the far end of the room, and he was wearing nothing except a light pair of shorts. It was as though all of the moisture in my body evaporated in an instant. It had been obvious from day one that he was built, but imagination and reality are two very different things. There wasn't an ounce of fat on him. Every muscle, every tendon, was perfectly accentuated, rippling and flexing beneath his skin as though trying to escape. He looked like a poster, like a piece of perfectly manipulated advertising material. Even the slick sheen of sweat that coated him seemed somehow Photoshopped on. I had no idea how someone could appear so powerful and yet so lean, but he embodied both of those words perfectly.

Then there were the tattoos. I say tattoos, plural, but it was hard to pinpoint exactly where one ended and the next began. His entire upper body was a vicious splash of color that burst out from his chest and ran down his arms. I caught snatches of imagery between the eruptions of violence; a skull, a flower, a clenched fist grasping a handful of dog tags. I'd never seen anyone with so much ink before in person. He was a work of art, in more ways than one. The scars I'd seen earlier weren't confined to his arms either. Several more marred the skin on his torso, including a particularly ragged slash across his right side, but even that didn't detract from his appeal. If anything, it made him seem rougher somehow. Fiercer.

There was another man holding the bag while Logan kicked it. He wasn't exactly small himself, and he had his knees bent in a brace position to absorb the impact, but nonetheless he was being driven steadily backward under the relentless assault. It was such a primal display of strength. The crack of the bag, the guttural grunts that spiked from Logan's throat, the blaze of his eyes, it strummed something deep inside me. Heat surged beneath my skin.

It was only when the other man yelled, "Take two," and dropped the bag that I realized I had just been standing and staring. Guilt rose in my stomach, and I looked away, closing my eyes momentarily. What the hell is wrong with you?

"Grace?" It was Logan's voice. I opened my eyes to find him just a few steps in front of me. He was panting, although there was a hint of a smile on his lips.

I swallowed heavily. "Hey. Charlie asked me to bring you this."