Homecoming: The Billionaire Brothers (15 page)

Jessica tilted her head to rest her cheek over his heart again, and Logan crunched up to get a look at her face.

He loved the freshly kissed plumpness of her mouth, the hectic pink still fading from her cheeks. But it was the gleam of moisture in her extraordinarily green eyes that sent his heart racing.

Of the many things he appreciated about Jessica Bell, the one that was simultaneously useful and problematic was her perceptiveness. She’d made it her business to learn all the ins and outs of Logan’s occasionally twisted psyche. She knew him better than anyone left alive on the planet.

Which meant that Jessica, of all people, was liable to be able to hear and interpret the vague sadness that left a lump in his throat and a rasp in his voice.

“Sounds lonely,” she murmured gently, and he dropped his head back onto the arm of the sofa with a thunk.

“Don’t read too much into this stuff, Tink.” Logan stared up at the loft where he’d gotten his first good night’s sleep in months. “I’m not complaining. I’ve had more opportunities than most people can dream of.”

“But it required sacrifices, didn’t it? Being born into such a powerful family, and having the intelligence to make the business stronger,” Jessica argued.

“Never felt that way to me. I preferred to spend time in the labs working on my own projects. And hey, I was on the swim team.”

Swimming, one of the few team sports in which athletes competed individually. Logan had enjoyed the aspect of competing essentially against himself, trying to top his own best time.

“Of course!” Jessica’s face lit up. “Your membership at the Chelsea Piers gym makes so much more sense now. I always wondered if you only went there to pick up women, or if you were studying the trajectory of golf balls on their driving range or something.”

“Nope. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I head over there and swim laps until my arms are too tired to pull me out of the pool.”

“Does it help?”

Logan considered. “The whole place is deserted in the middle of the night. I like the privacy, the quiet. Swimming is one of the few things that can get my brain to shut down for minutes at a time.” Running a hand down the length of her spine to make her shiver, Logan grinned. “That’s another way. But if you’re asking whether the swimming helps me get to sleep afterward, the answer is no.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jessica said with a slightly breathless undertone to her usual brisk, businesslike voice. “I’ve been researching insomnia, and one of the things doctors agree on is that exercise is good—but early in the day. Exercising at night throws off the body’s rhythms, and it can actually wake you up instead of tiring you out.”

“Hmm.” Logan hitched his legs apart so that Jessica’s hips settled more securely against the part of him that was becoming aware that the most gorgeous woman Logan knew was still pressed naked and yielding along the length of him. “So you’re saying that since it’s getting late, we definitely shouldn’t have sex again?”

“Not if you want to sleep through the night.” Jessica gasped, her thighs falling open almost unconsciously as she arched her back.

“Sleep is overrated.”

Damn it. That made Jessica freeze up in his arms, her eyes narrowing to emerald slits.

“No,” she said firmly, pressing up on her hands to hover over him. “It really isn’t. You’re sleeping another full night tonight, Logan. If that means we sleep separately to avoid temptation, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Unacceptable.”

Logan paused, startled. Jessica stared down at him, equally surprised.

“But … you don’t sleep with other people,” she said slowly. “I mean, you sleep with women—nobody knows that better than I do, but when you’re done, you usually wander back down to your lab and nap at your desk.”

“Or go back to work.” Logan raised his brows. “Not to correct you, as the foremost expert on my mating habits. Should I be flattered that you paid such close attention?”

“It’s my job to pay attention to you,” she reminded him repressively. “You don’t like to have strangers in your personal space.”

“I bring women to my apartment all the time,” he protested.

Jessica gave him the slightly pitying glance she used when he was being particularly oblivious. “Sweetie. Your apartment is where you store your clothes and other stuff. The lab is where you live.”

Sucking in air to keep arguing, Logan stopped with his mouth open. He didn’t actually have an argument to make. Jessica was right, on a fundamental level. “Hmm. That doesn’t seem healthy.”

“You think?” She quirked her brows. “So … maybe I had a point about this sojourn to Sanctuary Island?”

Unwilling to concede that yet, Logan returned doggedly to the main issue. She might be right about this island, but when it came to the question of sleeping arrangements, she was dead wrong.

“I want you in my personal space,” he stated with rock-solid certainty. “In my bed. Even if all we do is sleep.”

Jessica tried to hide the smile that tugged at her full lips, but she wasn’t entirely successful. “I suppose I don’t really qualify as a stranger. No point running from me to avoid intimacy. I’ve picked up your dry cleaning and taken care of your personal grooming for the last three years. We’re already intimate.”

Relieved that she’d identified the variable that made this equation come out differently from every other time he’d had sex with a woman, Logan traced the tip of one finger down the center line of her face.

“I like sleeping beside you,” he mused, rummaging through his feelings to figure out why. “Maybe because I trust you to have my back, to wake me up if something happens.”

That adorable crinkle appeared between Jessica’s auburn brows. “What could happen? Logan?”

He realized she must be able to feel the way his heart suddenly kicked in his chest, and the way his body stiffened until it probably felt as if she were lying on a wooden plank. Making a conscious effort to relax, Logan twitched his shoulders against the sofa cushions and forced an analytical tone.

“There’s no big mystery about it. Sleep has been difficult for me since my parents died—I’m sure you figured out the connection there. But what you probably don’t know is that their accident…”

He paused, horrified at the break in his voice and the burning sting behind his eyes.

“Oh, Logan,” Jessica said, as if the weight of unspoken memory was crushing her, too, and to get both of them out from under it, he made himself keep going.

“They were on their way home from a charity benefit. It was late. Statistically, there shouldn’t have been anyone else on the road, they should have been fine—but the one other driver they encountered happened to be drunk. He ran a red light and plowed his SUV into their car. The drunk driver walked away without a scratch. My parents didn’t.”

In spite of the lingering rigidity of his limbs, Jessica melted around him. She tucked her face into the side of his neck. The smell of her hair was indescribably comforting.

“So one night, you went to sleep,” Jessica murmured, “and when you woke up, your whole world had changed.”

A faint smile tugged at Logan’s mouth. “Not exactly a mystery where my insomnia comes from, is it? Unfortunately, knowing the rational cause of the problem has not helped me to solve it. Until…”

Jessica raised her head, meeting his gaze. “Until?”

“Until you.” Logan struggled with the words for a moment, fighting the sensation of stripping himself bare. “The evidence doesn’t lie. I sleep better when you’re around. You make me feel like it’s safe to close my eyes. Because I know you’ll be there when I wake up.”

With a shuddery breath, Jessica surged up to press her mouth to his. Logan locked his arms around her shoulders and rolled her beneath him, needy hunger rising like fire in his blood.

Logan squeezed his eyes shut and lost himself in the warmth and closeness of her body’s soft, supple welcome—and tried to forget that Jessica had made no promises to stay with him forever.

Chapter Seven

Over the next week, Jessica only caught Logan trying to hack into her phone to check his e-mail once, and it seemed like more of a reflex than anything else. To her surprise, he mostly entered into the spirit of the island and did his best to relax. The frequent, athletic lovemaking probably helped with that.

Also, Logan asked Jessica a new question every day. From her first time—high school boyfriend after prom, sweet and fun, if not earth-shattering—to her dreams for the future. Apparently, he’d never quite understood what someone as smart, dedicated and ambitious as Jessica Bell was doing working as a personal assistant.

She was glad to be able to tell him his instincts weren’t wrong. When Miles hired her, he’d basically promised that if she put in her time learning the R&D division’s workings from the unique vantage point of Logan’s lab, she’d be on track to run the entire division one day.

“Not that I’m in a rush,” she’d told Logan on day five, breathless and still glowing from the aftereffects of yet another of his devastating assaults on her senses. “Working with you has been surprisingly rewarding.”

Looking smug, Logan stretched luxuriously until his vertebrae popped. “Of course it has. I told you we’d be explosive together.”

Jessica only smiled at him with what she knew was a ridiculous amount of fondness. She was tempted to take him down a peg about his sexual prowess, even if she’d be lying. But she didn’t want to risk putting any distance between them, even with playful teasing. She sensed that Logan was connecting with her more deeply than he had with anyone in a long time.

He’d learned early on to turn inward, to retreat from the world and the expectations of the people around him, into his own head. He’d even retreated from his family. And now here she was spending every waking moment growing closer to him.

Since that first day on the island, they’d barely left the cottage. Jessica felt guilty about it—she ought to be encouraging Logan into the fresh air, playing on his love of swimming to get him down to the beach for some exercise. But every morning she woke to find Logan propped up on one arm, watching and waiting impatiently for the moment he could drag her out of the bed—at least she’d managed to stick to that rule—and pounce.

So it’s not like we aren’t getting any exercise at all
, Jessica consoled herself as she seeded bell peppers and chopped cucumbers for a salad on the evening of their seventh day on the island.

The rules she’d implemented to combat Logan’s insomnia actually seemed to be working. He slept less than she did, but he reported an unprecedented string of nights filled with uninterrupted sleep. She was cautiously optimistic about that, and every time she remembered Logan’s confession of how much better he slept when she was around, a warm glow filled her chest.

All in all, apart from the surprise addition of their shockingly good sexual relationship, this trip to Sanctuary was going exactly according to her original plan.

Except for one thing.

Perking up when she heard Logan pad barefoot into the kitchen behind her, Jessica kept her gaze on the steady motion of her knife over the cutting board. “Dylan came down to the cottage while you were in the shower.”

“Hmm,” Logan said, sliding his arms around her waist and hooking his chin over her left shoulder to press a hot, open-mouthed kiss to her jaw.

Jessica shuddered, her unruly body immediately pushing back into the circle of his embrace, desperate for more of what it had gotten so alarmingly accustomed to in only a few short days. Struggling to maintain her focus on both her objective and the sharp knife in her hand, Jessica stiffened her spine. “Yes. He invited us up to the big house for dessert.”

“I’ve got all the dessert I need right here.” With unerring accuracy, Logan nipped the soft, sensitive spot beneath her ear to make her jump, then soothed the sweet sting with his tongue. Jessica bit back a moan and laid the knife down before she cut off one of her fingers.

“I told him we’d be there,” she said, and immediately felt the way Logan tensed before dropping his arms. He moved casually to grab a glass from the cabinet beside the sink, and Jessica watched him go to the fridge and fill it from the jar of green, vegetable-laden protein smoothie he’d become hilariously addicted to.

“And if I don’t feel like socializing?” Logan finally faced her, kicking the refrigerator door shut behind him.

Logan never felt like socializing. At least, not with his brother or the nice new family Dylan appeared to have stumbled into.

“Dylan said he had something important to tell us,” Jessica pressed, determined not to let it go, or to let Logan sidetrack her, this time. “It’s only dessert. When was the last time you sat down with your brother—either of them—for long enough to catch up?”

“Catch up?” Logan sneered and sipped at his drink. “Are we in a race now?”

“Catch up on what’s happening in each other’s lives!” Jessica pressed her lips together, trying not to let her frustration show through in her tone. “We’re here. Dylan’s here, along with a woman and teenaged boy who have become very important to him. I don’t understand why you don’t want to spend time with Dylan. You seemed to get along fine the day we arrived, when you were giving him advice about how to go after the woman he loves.”

“It’s not that Dylan and I don’t get along…” Logan put his glass down without finishing it and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I prefer not to get in too deep with personal relationships. I’m better with theory, abstract problems and mechanical puzzles. You know that.”

Jessica kept her tone even with an effort. “So when you go to bars and pick up your one-night stands, that’s okay.”

Logan shrugged, a cynical twist to his mouth. “Sure. Nothing about that is especially deep. Or personal.”

“But it takes people skills. You can’t simply grunt while pointing at your groin, and expect women to follow you to your car.”

With a sardonic twist to his mouth, Logan drawled, “Not exactly, but if I grunt and point at the
car,
and the car is a chauffeured Bentley…”

“That is pathetic,” Jessica told him bluntly. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed for you, and for every empty-headed, shallow woman who slept with you for a ride in a limo.”