He’d made himself valuable. He knew it. Andres Costa had said it himself. The man had filled Logan’s pockets with portions of what he’d earned. Promised him more if he kept performing the way he had.
Logan had tried to keep his nose to the paper and his fingers out of the wickedness, just like Trent had warned him to do, but that was hard when you’d become an integral piece of it.
But he knew what he was doing with Aster Rose was more dangerous than any of that.
He’d never even touched her, but his mind was all over her.
He pushed to standing when she gave him the go, and he took a furtive glance around, too, before he slipped behind the building hidden by high shrubs and bushes, out of sight of the guards and cameras.
Not that there was a whole lot of attention on this area.
Andres Costa’s concern was keeping threats out. Well, that and his daughters in.
Aster slipped down onto a patch of grass. Logan sat beside her, and he fought the urge to reach out and touch her sweet face when he did, tried to ignore the way his heart raced and his blood pounded.
Sure, he’d been with girls before, but this one…this one had him losing sleep and acting rash.
Dangerous ideas and reckless acts.
He wasn’t even supposed to look at her, and there they were, sneaking out to meet each other whenever they got a chance.
When he’d found the piece of paper folded into a star where it’d been tucked under the logbook he often worked in, his heart had sped, the way it did every time she left him a secret message.
Nine, was all that it said.
Prime time for hisdinner break.
“How are you?” Aster murmured, peeking at him like maybe she felt the way he did, too.
“Good, now that you’re here.”
Her lips pursed. “That bad?”
Logan shrugged. “It’s fine.”
“You hate what my father is making you do.” It wasn’t a question, just soft understanding.
Really, it was his father wielding the command. Two men who were radically different and basically the same.
At least Aster’s father seemed to maintain some semblance of humanity.
He blew out a sigh and returned his gaze to the hazy glow of the city sky.
“I think the problem is that it doesn’t bother me as much as it should.” He’d grown to like the feeling he got when he saw the numbers double. The pride he felt when Aster’s father rewarded him. The fact he’d lost any twinges of guilt over what he was doing somewhere along the way. “It’s better than the alternative, that’s for sure.”
Aster frowned. “The alternative?”
Logan plucked at a blade of grass, warred with the confliction he felt over Trent and Jud’s role in the family. “Way better than what my brothers do,” he admitted.
He glanced down to catch the sorrow carved in her expression. Her wide, knowing eyes and the pained sweep of her plush, full lips. “They don’t have another choice?”
“Sometimes we’re bred from the beginning to become something we don’t want to be.” He mused it quietly toward the heavens.
He knew neither of his brothers had ever wanted to follow in their father’s shoes.
He’d formed them into the shape and then shackled them to his truth.
Trent and Jud might try to shield him from every sordid detail, but he listened close enough that he knew—he saw—he recognized the upper hand.