User - NRoberts - G1 Blue Dahlia

So he was invested now in helping to find the identity of what walked those halls.

But a part of him wondered if whoever she was was right. Would they all be better off if he stayed away?

The phone on his belt beeped. Since he was nearly done, he answered instead of ignoring, dragging off

his filthy work gloves and plucking the phone off his belt.

"Kitridge."

"Logan, it's Stella."

The quick and helpless flutter around his heart irritated him. "Yeah. I've got the frigging forms in my truck."

"What forms?"

"Whatever damn forms you're calling to nag me about."

"It happens I'm not calling to nag you about anything." Her voice had gone crisp and businesslike,

which only caused the flutter and the irritation to increase.

"Well, I don't have time to chat, either. I'm on the clock."

"Seeing as you are, I'd like you to schedule in a consult. I have a customer who'd like an on-site consultation. She's here now, so if you could give me a sense of your plans for the day, I could let

her know if and when you could meet with her."

"Where?"

She rattled off an address that was twenty minutes away. He glanced around his current job site, calculated. 'Two o'clock."

"Fine. I'll tell her. The client's name is Marsha Fields. Do you need any more information?"

"No."

"Fine." He heard the firm click in his ear and found himself even more annoyed he hadn't thought to

hang up first.

* * *

By the time Logan got home that evening, he was tired, sweaty, and in a better mood. Hard physical work usually did the job for him, and he'd had plenty of it that day. He'd worked in the steam, then through the start of a brief spring storm. He and his crew broke for lunch during the worst of it and

sat in his overheated truck, rain lashing at the windows, while they ate cold po'boy sandwiches and

drank sweet tea.

The Fields job had strong possibilities. The woman ran that roost and had very specific ideas. Since he liked and agreed with most of them, he was eager to put some of them on paper, expand or refine them.

And since it turned out that Marsha's cousin on her mother's side was Logan's second cousin on his father's, the consult had taken longer than it might have, and had progressed cheerfully.

It didn't hurt that she was bound to send more work his way.

He took the last curve of the road to his house in a pleasant frame of mind, which darkened considerably when he saw Stella's car parked behind his.

He didn't want to see her now. He hadn't worked things out in his head, and she'd just muck up

whatever progress he'd made. He wanted a shower and a beer, a little quiet. Then he wanted to eat his dinner with ESPN in the background and his work spread out on the kitchen table.

There just wasn't room in that scenario for a woman.

He parked, fully intending to shake her off. She wasn't in the car, or on the porch. He was trying to determine if going to bed with him gave a woman like her the notion that she could waltz into his house when he wasn't there. Even as he'd decided it wouldn't, not for Stella, he heard the watery hiss of his own garden hose.

Shoving his hands in his pockets, he wandered around the side of the house.

She was on the patio, wearing snug gray pants—the sort that stopped several inches above the ankle—and a loose blue shirt. Her hair was drawn back in a bright, curling tail, which for reasons he couldn't explain he found desperately sexy. As the sun had burned its way through the clouds, she'd shaded her eyes with gray-tinted glasses.

She looked neat and tidy, careful to keep her gray canvas shoes out of the wet.

"It rained today," he called out.

She kept on soaking his pots. "Not enough."

She finished the job, released the sprayer on the hose, but continued to hold it as she turned to face

him. "I realize you have your own style, and your own moods, and that's your business. But I won't

be spoken to the way you spoke to me today. I won't be treated like some silly female who calls her boyfriend in the middle of the workday to coo at him, or like some anal business associate who

interrupts you to harangue you about details. I'm neither."

"Not my girlfriend or not my business associate?"

He could see, quite clearly, the way her jaw tightened when she clenched her teeth. "If and when

I contact you during the workday, it will be for a reason. As it most certainly was this morning."

She was right, but he didn't have to say so. "We got the Fields job."

"Hooray."

He bit the inside of his cheek to hold back the grin at her sour cheer. "I'll be working up a design for

her, with a bid. You'll get a copy of both. That suit you?"

"It does. What doesn't—"

"Where are the kids?"

It threw her off stride. "My father and his wife picked them up from school today. They're having

dinner there, and spending the night, as I have a birthing class with Hayley later."

"What time?"

"What time what?"

"Is the class?"

"At eight-thirty. I'm not here for small talk, Logan, or to be placated. I feel very strongly that—" Her

eyes widened, then narrowed as she stepped back. He'd stepped forward, and there was no mistaking

the tone of that slow smile.

"Don't even think about it. I couldn't be less interested in kissing you at the moment."

"Then I'll kiss you, and maybe you'll get interested."

"I mean it." She aimed the hose like a weapon. "Just keep your distance. I want to make myself

perfectly clear."

"I'm getting the message. Go ahead and shoot," he invited. "I sweated out a gallon today, I won't mind

a shower."

"Just stop it." She danced back several steps as he advanced. "This isn't a game, this isn't funny."

"I just get stirred right up when your voice takes on that tone."

"I don't have a tone."

"Yankee schoolteacher. I'm going to be sorry if you ever lose it." He made a grab, and instinctively

she tightened her fist on the nozzle. And nailed him.

The spray hit him mid-chest and had a giggle bubbling out of her before she could stop it. "I'm not

going to play with you now. I'm serious, Logan."

Dripping, he made another grab, feinted left. This time she squealed, dropped the hose, and ran.

He snagged her around the waist, hauled her off her feet at the back end of the patio. Caught somewhere between shock and disbelief, she kicked, wiggled, then lost her breath as she landed on the grass on top

of him.

"Let me go, you moron."

"Don't see why I should." God, it felt good to be horizontal. Better yet to have her horizontal with him. "Here you are, trespassing, watering my pots, spouting off lectures." He rolled, pinning her. "I ought to

be able to do what I want on my own land."

"Stop it. I haven't finished fighting with you."

"I bet you can pick it up where you left off." He gave her a playful nip on the chin, then another.

"You're wet, you're sweaty, I'm getting grass stains on my—"

The rest of the words were muffled against his mouth, and she would have sworn the water on both of them went to steam.

"I can't—we can't—" But the reasons why were going dim. "In the backyard."

"Wanna bet?"

He couldn't help wanting her, so why was he fighting it? He wanted the solid, sensible core of her, and the sweet edges. He wanted the woman obsessed with forms who would wrestle on the floor with her children. He wanted the woman who watered his pots even while she skinned him with words.

And the one who vibrated beneath him on the grass when he touched her.

He touched her, his hands possessive as they molded her breasts, as they roamed down her to cup her hips. He tasted her, his lips hungry on her throat, her shoulder, her breast.

She melted under him, and even as she went fluid seemed to come alive with heat, with movement.

It was insane. It was rash and it was foolish, but she couldn't stop herself. They rolled over the grass,

like two frenzied puppies. He smelled of sweat, of labor and damp. And, God, of man. Pungent and gorgeous and sexy.

She clamped her hands in that mass of waving hair, already showing streaks from the sun, and dragged his mouth back to hers.

She nipped his lip, his tongue.

"Your belt." She had to fight to draw air. "It's digging—"

"Sorry."

He levered up to unbuckle it, then just stopped to look at her.

Her hair had come out of its band; her eyes were sultry, her skin flushed. And he felt those roots take hold.

"Stella."

He didn't know what he might have said, the words were jumbled in his brain and tangled with so much feeling he couldn't translate them.

But she smiled, slow and sultry as her eyes. "Why don't I help you with that?"

She flipped open the button of his jeans, yanked down the zipper. Her hand closed over him, a velvet vise. His body was hard as steel, and his mind and heart powerless.

She arched up to him, her lips skimmed over his bare chest, teeth scoring a hot little line that was a whisper away from pain.

Then she was over him, destroying him. Surrounding him.

She heard birdsong and breeze, smelled grass and damp flesh. And heliotrope that wafted on the air from the pot she'd watered. She felt his muscles, taut ropes, the broad plane of his shoulders, the surprisingly soft waves of his hair.

And she saw, as she looked down, that he was lost in her.

Throwing her head back, she rode, until she was lost as well.

* * *

She lay sprawled over him, damp and naked and muzzy-headed. Part of her brain registered that his arms were clamped around her as if they were two survivors of a shipwreck.

She turned her head to rest it on his chest. Maybe they'd wrecked each other. She'd just made wild

love with a man in broad daylight, outside in the yard.

"This is insane," she murmured, but couldn't quite convince herself to move. "What if someone had

come by?"

"People come by without an invitation have to take potluck."

There was a lazy drawl to his voice in direct opposition to his grip on her. She lifted her head to study. His eyes were closed. "So this is potluck?"

The corners of his mouth turned up a little. "Seems to me this pot was plenty lucky."

"I feel sixteen. Hell, I never did anything like this when I was sixteen. I need my sanity. I need my clothes."

"Hold on." He nudged her aside, then rose.

Obviously, she thought, it doesn't bother him to walk around outside naked as a deer. "I came here to

talk to you, Logan. Seriously."

"You came here to kick my ass," he corrected. "Seriously. You were doing a pretty good job of it."

"I hadn't finished." She turned slightly, reached out for her hairband. "But I will, as soon as I'm dressed and—"

She screamed, the way a woman screams when she's being murdered with a kitchen knife.

Then she gurgled, as the water he'd drenched her with from the hose ran into her astonished mouth.

"Figured we could both use some cooling off."

It simply wasn't in her, even under the circumstances, to run bare-assed over the grass. Instead, she curled herself up, knees to breast, arms around knees, and cursed him with vehemence and creativity.

He laughed until he thought his ribs would crack. "Where'd a nice girl like you learn words like that?

How am I supposed to kiss that kind of mouth?"

She seared him with a look even when he held the hose over his own head and took an impromptu shower. "Feels pretty good. Want a beer?"

"No, I don't want a beer. I certainly don't want a damn beer. I want a damn towel. You insane idiot,