The Boys Club (13 page)

Logan walked into the dining room
after spending the afternoon working on his backup plan for Sara. He hoped he
wouldn’t need it, but his gut told him otherwise. If there was a leak in their
organization, which seemed more and more likely, then things had been much too
quiet since kidnapping Sara. Someone would eventually come for her, and he
needed to be prepared.

Charlie came into the room with a plate full of corn on the
cob. “Just in time for dinner,” he said.

“I see that,” Logan said. “Can I help out with anything?”

“I have plenty of help. Just sit down and enjoy.”

“Hot, hot, hot!” Sara ran in behind Charlie, a round
casserole dish in her hands. Charlie jumped out of the way and she rushed to get
the glass dish onto the table.

“Why didn’t you use oven mitts?” Charlie asked.

“I couldn’t find any. I searched all the drawers—”

“They’re in a cupboard above the coffeemaker,” Logan said.
“We’ve never been too organized around here.”

Sara glanced up at him and smiled. “Good to know. Um,
Charlie said you didn’t like corn on the cob, so I heated up some green beans
for you. I hope they’re okay.”

Logan flinched. Sara had come a long way since their
confrontation last night. “I’m sure they’re great,” he said. “Thanks for
thinking of me.”

“Couldn’t let you go hungry,” she said, flashing a grin his
way.

Logan looked down at the spread on the table, mainly to stop
himself from staring at Sara. “You’ve made quite a feast tonight, Charlie.”

“Steaks, roasted potatoes, corn on the cob, green beans,
rolls. All with Sara’s help.”

“Don’t forget the pie,” Sara said.

“Did someone say pie?” Jack asked, as he came into the room
with Lester in tow.

“I didn’t know you baked, Charlie,” Lester said.

“I don’t,” Charlie said, gesturing to Sara.

“You made pie?” Jack asked.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Sara said. “There were some fresh
strawberries in the fridge and you had all the ingredients to make up a crust.
It’s a pie I used to make with my mom.”

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Logan said, as he pulled out
the chair at the head of the table.

Sara shrugged and sat in the chair adjacent to his. “Charlie
said this might be one of our last dinners here and I wanted to do something as
a thank you.” She glanced around the table at all the men, who were all now
sitting and passing around food. “It’s just a small thing, but I didn’t know
how else to say thank you for saving my life. I know I was a bit of a pain in
the beginning—”

“You weren’t a pain,” Charlie said, handing the bowl of
potatoes to Lester. “A little spirited, maybe, but definitely not a pain.”

Jack, who sat beside her, rested his hand on her forearm. “I
think I speak for all of us when I say you’ve brought a lot of light into our
world. Our jobs normally aren’t this interesting. It’s not every day someone we
kidnap makes us a pie.”

Sara laughed. “I really hope I’m the only one you’ve
kidnapped.”

“The first and last,” Lester said.

During the friendly exchange, Logan focused on his plate of
food and tuned everyone out. The light banter around him reminded him too much
of how well Karen fit in with his team. After dating her for several months, he
slowly introduced her to his work and those he worked with. All of the men took
to her and welcomed her into the fold. They embraced Sara much in the same way,
as if they still missed that connection with Karen as much as he did.

“Of course, I did some cage fighting back in the day,” Jack
said.

A laugh bellowed out of Lester. “You did not.”

Logan lifted his head at the new conversation. “I’ll vouch
for Jack. I saw a few of his matches when we were younger.”

“I still don’t believe it,” Lester said. “No cauliflower
ear, no cage fighting.”

“I do too have some cauliflower ear!” Jack said.

Sara stared at Jack’s left ear. “I don’t see any here.”

Jack pushed his chair out and turned his head. “It’s on the
right one.”

Logan shook his head and resumed eating his steak.

“Yeah,” Sara said. “Still don’t see it.”

Jack huffed and pulled his chair back up to the table. “It’s
there.”

“Did you win any matches?” Sara asked.

“My record was 8-0.”

“8-1,” Logan corrected.

“Everyone knows that last fight didn’t count,” Jack said.

“Not this again,” Charlie said, as he munched on a corn cob.
“Every time he talks about his cage fighting stint, it’s always that the last
match doesn’t count.”

“I’m still trying to come to grips with Jack cage fighting,”
Lester said.

Jack glared at him. “Let’s go out back and I’ll show you a
takedown or two.”

“After which I’ll ground and pound you into early retirement,”
Lester said.

Sara and Charlie joined in with Lester’s laughter, while
Jack muttered under his breath.

“Did you ever cage fight?”

Logan looked up at Sara. Her raised eyebrows and curious
smile warmed his heart, but he didn’t show any emotion on his face. “I didn’t,”
he said. “That was Jack’s thing.”

“He knew I could beat him,” Jack said. “He was too scared to
face me in the cage.”

Sara shifted her gaze between the two men. “Sorry, Jack. My
money’s on Logan.”

Charlie and Lester exclaimed with surprise at the same time,
while Logan smiled on the inside.

Jack shook his head. “And just when I was getting to like
you,” he said, nudging Sara’s arm.

“You still like me,” she said with a teasing tone.

“Maybe.” He winked at her and grinned. “Of course, there’s
plenty of time for you to win me over.”

Sara’s cheeks flushed and she looked down at her food.

Though Logan knew Jack’s flirting was harmless, he couldn’t
help a small twinge of jealousy from hitting him. Before Karen died, Logan had
no problems with women. Her death had zapped out all need to have fun with
chasing a woman he found attractive, not that he bothered to ever initiate that
chase with any woman.

Allie had been the only woman in his life in any capacity
since Karen, and even then he had fallen into their casual relationship without
much thought. She had approached him, hinted at wanting something more, and
actively pursued him. The only part he had in it all was kissing her first, and
that was only after she told him she wanted him to do it.

Women no longer came naturally to him, not that he needed
one in his life anyway, at least not for anything more than what he had with
Allie. That was not a path he wanted to go down again and risk hurting someone
else if they decided they wanted more. He also didn’t want to get involved with
someone on a deeper level, especially not a woman who would disappear into
WITSEC in a few days. It was far better for Jack to flirt with Sara and for
Logan to ignore his own attraction to Sara. It wasn’t like anything could come
out of it anyway, even if he did decide to pursue her.

Sara swallowed the last bite of
strawberry pie and pushed her plate away. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten that
much.”

“This is pretty standard for us,” Jack said. “Well, maybe
not the delicious pie. Charlie will have to learn to bake now.”

“I
loathe
baking,”
Charlie said.

“We could just take Sara with us on all our jobs,” Lester
said. “Make her our official pie chef.”

Sara laughed. “Tell you what. I’ll give Charlie the recipe
before we leave. Then he can decide if he wants to use it.”

“Oh, I’ll make him use it,” Lester said.

Sara’s stomach felt like it would burst open at any moment
and all she could think about was walking off the meal. “I’d love to take a
walk before bed,” she said. When no one responded immediately, she looked at
Logan. “If that’s okay with you.”

He pushed his chair out from the table and stood up. “Of
course it’s okay. I’ll go with you.”

“You guys go ahead,” Charlie said. “Les and I are on dish
duty tonight.”

“A walk sounds like a good idea,” Jack said.

Logan held up his hand. “Sara and I should be fine by
ourselves. Right, Sara?”

She read the meaning of his words in his tone. “Maybe we can
go running again tomorrow morning, Jack.”

Jack smiled. “It’s a date.”

Sara said her goodnights to the other men, thanked Charlie
again for dinner, and followed Logan out of the dining room. Stepping onto the
back porch, she took in a deep breath of the cool night air. Chirping crickets
greeted them, and she relaxed with their pleasant song.

“Did you enjoy dinner?”

She looked up at Logan and smiled. “It was wonderful. I
liked getting to know everyone. Thank you for letting me spend time out of the
room today.”

“I had no intention of making you stay in there for long. I
just didn’t want you trying to leave without knowing your life was in danger.”

The mention of the hit brought her back to reality. “I am
grateful that you all saved my life, but it’s still a bit difficult to grasp
that my own father wants me dead.”

“If I know one thing about Hugh Langston, he doesn’t care
who he has to kill to get his way.”

“He’s done a lot of things wrong, hasn’t he? More than just
money laundering.”

“I’m sorry to say it, but money laundering is just one of
the many criminal ventures he’s involved in.”

Sara didn’t want to know any of his other activities,
although murder seemed to be one of them. “How do you know so much about him?”

“I used to work for him.”

Surprise stopped Sara’s feet from moving forward. “You
worked for my dad?”

Logan turned to face her. “Unfortunately, for almost a year.
My organization needed someone to infiltrate his operations. The government had
tried time and again and fell short. Schaffer offered me up as someone who
could do it, and I did.”

“What kind of work did you do for him?”

“I started out as a grunt, but I worked my way up the
ladder. I had to do a lot of illegal things, but Schaffer helped fix them on
the back end. I never killed anyone, though. Somehow I always managed to weasel
my way out of that.”

“Killing people?” Sara’s head spun with the words. The real
Hugh Langston was nothing like the father she thought she knew.

Logan started walking again, and she fell in step beside
him.

“Did you get to know my father well when you worked for him?”

“Too well. About nine months into the assignment, I met him
for the first time. He took to me, which was good for our end game, but it also
put me in jeopardy of being caught. I had to play it very carefully for a long
time.”

“Did we ever meet?” Since he confessed to working for her
father, Sara had tried to remember if she saw Logan while on school breaks or
in the summer.

“No, we didn’t. I spent a lot of time in his home, but I
think you were in school when I came around. I heard your name from time to
time, but that was about it. Never even saw a picture of you until this job
came around.”

“He was never the sentimental type to keep pictures of
family in the house. How old were you when you worked for him?”

“Seven years ago… that would have made me 24.”

“I would have been 19. My freshman year in college.”

“Sounds about right. I remember Langston mentioning
something about you being in college.”

She shook her head. “That’s unbelievable. I had no idea you
knew him so well.”

“Both him and Mathers.”

Sara’s heart skipped a beat at his revelation. “You knew
Stephen, too?”

“Almost as well as your father.”

Logan’s words about how she didn’t want to marry Stephen
came back to her. “I’m guessing you didn’t get along.”

“No, we didn’t. Mathers is a wild card, someone I never knew
how to act around. He came up the ranks, much like I did, but he was always
suspicious of me. It may have been because your father was looking for a new
second-in-command and Langston took a real liking to me, while Mathers would have
done anything for that position. He questioned everything I did, had me
followed, tapped my phone, bugged the safe house I was living in for the job.”

“Stephen did all that?”

“He thought I was working for someone on the outside, which
I was. He did his best to convince Langston of that, but until the end, it
didn’t work. Then I made a mistake and it all went to hell. I got out as fast
as I could, but a couple years ago, Langston found me and learned my real
name.”

Though afraid to hear the answer, she desperately needed to
know every ugly truth about her father. “What did he do when he found you?”

“He hired someone to kill me.” Logan took a deep breath
before continuing. “But they missed.”

With his words, a strange bond forged between them. Both
targets of her father, both still alive. Yet with her father as the common
thread, she had a good guess as to why Logan had been so eager to save her.

“Is that why you’re so interested in saving my life?” she
asked, looking up at him. “So you can get to him through me?”

“I can’t say that has nothing to do with it, because it
does. I’m vested in seeing Langston pay for what he’s done and I will make him
pay for it, one way or another.” After a moment of hesitation, he said, “But if
I had a choice between saving your life and putting Langston behind bars
forever, I’d go after him another time. Your life is worth so much more than
getting revenge for his past misdeeds.”

Her heart skipped a beat, then resumed thumping at record
speed. She ripped her gaze away from him and focused on the ground beneath her
feet. Something in Logan’s voice when he spoke about saving her made her body
tremble.

She pushed away her attraction to him once more. Still
engaged to Stephen, thoughts about another man had no place in her world. With
everything Stephen had done to Logan, after all the revelations about him, one
question about her fiancé plagued her, one she hoped Logan could help answer.

Terrified to speak and learn more about her father and
fiancé, Sara finished their walk in silence. Before they reached the back
porch, she worked up the courage to talk again. She couldn’t go another night
not knowing the truth about Stephen’s involvement in her current situation.

“Does Stephen know about the hit?” she asked.

They stopped a few feet from the back door and Logan turned
to her. “I believe he does. The others think maybe he doesn’t. As far as I
know, Langston doesn’t do anything without Mathers. If Langston put a hit on
you, he wouldn’t hide that from Mathers, especially since you two were getting
married. To do it behind Mathers’s back would send the wrong signal to Mathers
and the rest of his guys.”

Sara’s heart sunk. Logan had intimate knowledge of both her
father and Stephen. Given everything she had learned about the two just
tonight, Logan seemed to know them better than even she did. She didn’t want to
believe Stephen knew about the hit, that he would marry her knowing she would
soon die. That he would spend their last morning in bed together, pretending to
love her, using her for his own gratification instead of truly caring for her.

“I’m sorry, Sara. I know it’s got to be hard to hear these
things and I wish I could tell you it’s not true.”

She raised her eyes to Logan’s face. “Is there a chance he
didn’t know?”

“There’s always a chance.”

Her fingers reached for her necklace. She tugged on the
locket and moved it up and down the gold chain. “It’s all so surreal. Just two
days ago I was preparing to marry someone I thought I’d spend my life with. Now
I find out my dad was trying to kill me and my fiancé may have known about it.
Instead of spending my life with Stephen, I’m going to spend my life in witness
protection.”

“But you don’t love him.”

She froze. After a moment, she lowered the locket back down
on her skin. “I don’t love him,” she said. “I never have and marriage wouldn’t
have changed a thing.”

“Then why were you going to marry him?”

Remembering Mary’s words at the beach, Sara smirked.
“Because Daddy told me to. Ever since my mom died, I’ve been told what to do.
What’s best for me, what I need, what I want. Nothing is ever my decision.
Everything I do is decided by either my dad or Stephen. It’s like I can’t take
care of myself, or at least no one ever trusts me to.

“And now I have to go with the FBI, where I’m sure someone
else is going to tell me what to do, and I won’t have a choice in any of it.
They’ll tell me where to live, they’ll change my name. So I’m stuck again, not
having a voice in my own life.”

Logan caught her eyes. “I know you’re frustrated. If you
weren’t, you wouldn’t have ditched your security detail. It’s like you had
something to prove, to do something that was your decision.”

“I didn’t mean to do that, it just happened. The moment came
and I went for it. Mary is always telling me to do what I want, and I do have
some little things that are all mine that Dad and Stephen have nothing to do
with.”

“Like what?”

“It’s stupid, really.”

“Tell me.”

She shrugged and a smile took over her face. “There’s a food
truck down at the beach Mary and I always get tacos at. Stephen doesn’t know
about it, at least I don’t think he does.”

His eyebrows jetted up. “A food truck, huh?”

“A little weird since we can eat anywhere we want, but we
love the food there. The owners are a couple brothers that have had the truck
for a little over 10 years. They’re both married with young kids and they drum
up a living with their truck and the best tacos in the world. And then after we
get our food, Mary and I always walk across the street and sit on the short
wall at the beach. I love walking barefoot in the sand.”

Logan didn’t respond, but instead watched her. Uneasiness
crawled across her skin at his stare, the same one she could never read.

“I’m sorry,” she said, to break the silence. “I didn’t mean
to ramble on about it.”

“You’re fine. I was just thinking that in the short time
I’ve known you, I already know you’re nothing like Langston or Mathers.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Is that a bad thing?”

“Not at all. It surprises me that you spent so much time
with them and yet it’s like you’ve never been around them a day in your life.
None of their influence rubbed off on you in anything.”

“Except for the fact that I let them tell me what to do all
the time.”

“You are your own person, Sara. You always have been. Them
telling you how to live your life is one thing, but you constantly rebelled and
remained true to yourself. It shows in the little things, like your personality
and the way you carry yourself. They may have told you what to do, but they
didn’t control who you were or who you became.”

“I’m not quite sure who I am anymore. Everything’s changed
so drastically in such a short time and it’s going to change even more, but
again, it will be out of my control.”

Logan stepped forward. “You are going to have to surrender
some control of your life to the feds, but not like you have with Langston and
Mathers. Think of this as a chance for you to find yourself. It’s not ideal,
but it’s your second chance at having the life you always wanted.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right,” she
said.

“But, Sara, when the air clears and Langston and possibly
Mathers are behind bars, and you’re out there finding yourself, do one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t marry someone you don’t love because someone tells
you to. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. You deserve someone who loves you
more than life itself, who will take care of you and keep you safe. Someone who
is willing to give everything he has if that’s his only chance of being with
you. Don’t settle for anything less than that.”

His eyes held hers captive and his words opened her heart.
She always believed in that kind of love, unconditional and unrelenting, but in
committing to marry Stephen, she thought her chance had passed. Though horrified
at the thought of her father trying to kill her, with it came the opportunity
to start again, to find love, to be happy.

Still mesmerized by his gaze, guilt flooded her again. “I’m
so sorry I cut you with the glass,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“You didn’t know me and you were scared. I don’t blame you.”

“I hope it doesn’t scar.”

“I’ll just add it to the others.”

She chuckled. “I guess it does give you something to
remember me by.”

“I don’t need something to remember you.” Though his face remained
stoic and largely unreadable, emotion danced in his eyes under the glow of the
back porch light. “You are someone I’ll never forget.”

Sara swallowed hard and her tongue flicked across her lips.
Whereas Jack’s flirting at dinner had been fleeting and fun, Logan’s eyes held
something more permanent. Whether real or imagined, her heart crashed into her
stomach. The mystery of the man in front of her ran deep and with each layer
she peeled back, she only wanted to unravel him more.