Her Dakota Man (Book 1 - Dakota Hearts) (9 page)

“He can have breakfast at the diner. I’ll drive him,” Logan said. “Could you feed the horses while I’m gone? That would be helpful.”

He finally looked at her then. She was searching for answers. He gave her none.

“Sure,” she said with a weak smile.

Fifteen minutes later he was pulling into a full parking lot at his mom’s restaurant. It didn’t matter if there were no seats left in the diner. There was a family table out back in the kitchen where he and Keith had taken a meal on plenty of mornings. He parked the truck in the back next to Hawk’s Jeep.

After giving his mother a quick kiss on the cheek he sat in his favorite chair by the window. Hawk was just finishing up his breakfast. Keith wasted no time climbing into the seat next to his favorite uncle.

“Hey, little man!”

“We’re going to have good pancakes. Not like Auntie Poppy’s.”

Hawk laughed. “Auntie Poppy doesn’t make good pancakes?”

Keith made a face and shook his head.

“It’s a good thing Grammie does. Did you hear that, Ma?” Hawk called out. “Two helpings of pancakes.”

“And chocolate milk!” Keith added.

“Heaven forbid I forget the chocolate milk,” Kate said from the other side of the kitchen.

“Don’t forget your manners,” Logan said, eyeing Keith.

“Please!” Keith added.

“That’s my boy,” Kate said with a smile.

Logan grabbed a container of orange juice and a glass, and filled it before he sat down opposite Keith and Hawk.

As if Kate had been expecting them, she appeared at the table with two plates filled with pancakes. One had a stack of pancakes and a side of bacon and fried potatoes. She dropped that plate in front of Logan. The other plate had one pancake and one slice of bacon. With the plate still in her hand, she grabbed the container of maple syrup from the table and proceeded to make a smiley face on her grandson’s pancake stack, much to Keith’s delight, before she placed the plate in front of him.

“Make sure you eat all of it. Alex is going to be here pretty soon and you can’t play until you’ve had your breakfast.”

“I will, Grammie.”

Kate paused at the table. “How are things going at home?”

Logan looked at her, knowing exactly what she was referring to.

“Fine.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Good.” Then she went back to her tasks in the kitchen.

Hawk laughed.

“Cut it out,” Logan warned.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I expected Poppy to come by with you.”

“Since when are you so interested in Poppy?”

“Since you seem to be acting like a—”

“Uh, uh.” Kate dropped a cup of chocolate milk in front of Keith and bent her head toward her grandson giving a strong look at her sons. “Little ears.”

“My ears aren’t little,” Keith said.

She bent down and kissed him on the cheek as he ate. “And getting bigger and smarter every day.”

As she turned to walk away, she paused and angled back to Hawk, mouthing, “Watch it.”

Hawk shrugged his apology to his mother.

Logan chuckled. He quickly ate his pancakes and then helped finish up the rest of Keith’s pancake while Hawk sat back and drank his coffee. When they heard Skylar come in through the back, it was all Keith needed to declare he was done with breakfast.

“Can I go play in the back room with Alex?”

“Finish your milk first.” Keith drank enough to satisfy Logan, and then he wiped his face clean with his napkin before climbing down from the chair.

Logan waved hello to the babysitter, Donna, who usually watched the boys for a few hours while his mother and Skylar were working out front. Keith ran toward her.

“You know the rules here,” Kate said to Keith, catching him half way. “No running in my kitchen.”

“I guess I need to be getting back,” Logan said.

“Alright, fine. Don’t tell me anything.”

Logan drained his glasses of orange juice. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Hawk’s expression fell and his brows drew inward. “Logan, you can lie to me all you want, but don’t lie to yourself. You’ll waste years of your life chasing a ghost that isn’t there. Hasn’t that gone on long enough?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hawk shook his head. His older brother had always been an open book, direct and honest. You never wondered where you stood with Hawk. It was something he’d always admired about his brother. Right now, he had a feeling it was just going to piss him off.

“Now’s not the time for this,” Logan said, rubbing his jaw line of the itch caused by facial hair that had grown too long.

“You’re getting it anyway. You and Poppy always seemed like you were cut from the same cloth. Poppy was all about laughter and adventure and she brought that out in you. When you got together with Kelly, that all changed. You hold yourself back. Sometimes I wonder what’s driving you to stay there.”

“I grew up.”

“That’s a lousy excuse and you know it.”

Irritation coiled in him. “I have a family and responsibilities.”

“Yeah, but you also have a life. You can enjoy it once in a while and still be responsible. Let’s face it, you stopped living long before Kelly died, bro.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hawk hesitated and seemed to look around the corner to see if their mother was watching, just like he’d done a hundred times when they were kids and getting ready for a prank. Except this time there was no prank, just straight talk.

“Everybody, including me, was shocked as hell when you came home and said you were marrying Kelly. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Kelly like she was my sister. But after the miscarriage…well, I half expected the two of you to split before the year was over.”

He threw his napkin on the table. “We didn’t. We had Keith.”

“I know. After three years of fertility treatments. But from where I was sitting Keith was pretty much the only thing you two had in common.”

“Keith is the best thing in my life.”

“He’s the only life I’ve seen in you in years. Truth be known, I hadn’t thought much about it for a long time until I saw you with Poppy the other night. Since then I’ve been wondering if you and Kelly would have gotten together at all if Poppy hadn’t left Rudolph.”

Logan’s jaw tightened. “Poppy made her choice not to come back.”

Hawk nodded. “Would it have made a difference if she had?”

He was silent for a moment. He should have been shocked by Hawk’s direct question, but he wasn’t. Truth was Logan had mulled over that very question many times himself.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not what happened. I married Kelly.”

Hawk leaned forward in his seat, pushing his empty coffee cup to the center of the table. “Kelly was the real deal. She was a good person, a good mother, and a great friend. Thing is, Logan, Kelly is gone. All I’m saying is maybe you settled for something because you couldn’t have the one you really wanted. And that person is here now.” When Logan started to protest, Hawk stopped him. “I know you loved Kelly. And you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but…were you really happy with her? Were you really
in
love with her?”

“Of course.”

“Are you sure? I’ve known you all my life and you’re one of the most honorable men I know. But there was something always missing and I haven’t seen it in you since Poppy left.” He hesitated a minute. “And as ticked off as you say you are that Poppy is here, I saw it again that day at the ranch when I saw you looking at her.”

# # #

The drive back home was filled with haunting memories Logan hadn’t wanted to remember for years. He’d made mistakes for sure. But had it really been as Hawk said? He had loved Kelly, come to love her, but their love had never been a passionate kind of love he imagined people could have. It was comfortable. Steady. But was he happy?

That was a hard question to answer and he fought to find closure with it as he pulled into the driveway and parked the truck next to Poppy’s rental car.

He couldn’t face her. There were too many demons in him that he was afraid of what he’d say. Kissing her last night on the porch had been as intense as it had been all those years ago. He could still taste her, feel her softness against him. And he suddenly couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed Kelly that way, if he ever had at all.

The thought of what he’d deprived his wife of made Logan sick to his stomach. How could he have been that kind of man to saddle Kelly with a husband who didn’t love her wholly, the way she should have been loved?

He climbed out of the truck and decided to walk to the pond on the far side of the property, letting the cold March wind whip at his face and bite into his exposed skin. He needed it to feel something other than the emptiness of knowing that Hawk had been right. He’d traded happiness for duty. He hadn’t been fair to either one of them.

He kept walking until he reached the trail through that woods that led to the large boulder jutting out into the pond. As kids, they used to jump off the boulder into deep water as the rock formation gave them a height of about fifteen feet to jump.

He stood there for a moment overlooking the water and remembered Poppy swimming the day she’d found out her parents had sold the house. She’d just come from his mother’s restaurant and had been crying. He’d tried to console her, but she’d run away. Only when he’d gone to her house and her parents told him Poppy hadn’t come home yet that he knew she’d come here.

The March winds whipped at him, but still he looked at the sun shining on the water, feeling the heat of that day as if it were real. He’d come upon her quietly and had ignored the clothes haphazardly dropped on the boulder. It was only after he’d seen her naked wet skin glistening in the sun that he’d realized Poppy was skinny-dipping.

His initial relief that she was smiling, not crying, had immediately changed to blazing desire.

“It’s a rite of passage to go skinny-dipping in a creek here in Rudolph and now’s my chance,” she’d said. “Are you going to just watch me swim or are you going to join me?”

The heat in her eyes that day still made his body react now the way it had as a young man. She’d wanted him. Under her watchful and unashamed eyes, he’d stripped down and jumped into the water. They didn’t come together at first. But he knew they would. His fingers itched to touch Poppy in delicate places he’d only dreamed of in the darkness. And there she was, naked and wanting him like he’d wanted her.

She swam around completely unfazed that anyone might come upon them. She revealed her beautiful body without any shyness and swam around him as if it was a dance, seducing him and taking pleasure in teasing him with her untamed spirit.

So many times since that day Logan had imagined the two of them making love in the water or right there on the shore. He felt himself grow hard just thinking about it again. But that had never happened. Kelly had come charging through the woods and discovered the two of them there. He’d been so angry with her for bad timing that day and the fact that she’d stayed there with her hands crossed over her chest telling them they were about to get busted by Poppy’s parents if they didn’t get dressed quick.

But none of that had any effect on Poppy. She’d just laughed, gave Logan a wink, and climbed out of the water in front of him naked as the day she was born as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And despite her crying fit earlier, she didn’t. That was Poppy. She’d done something to him that day that had stayed with him for ten years.

Funny how he and Kelly had never come here together in all the years they’d lived here. It was only now that Poppy was spinning his head in circles that he was back to where he was as a teen, all knotted up inside and aching with need for her.

Logan looked at the creek, and despite the flood, its water level was much lower than it had been a week ago. The watermark on the boulder was a telltale sign of just how high the water had gotten. Debris was pushed up along the banks, clogging the water’s path. He grabbed a long branch that seemed to have wedged itself in a thick pile and pulled it free. That one small move was enough to allow the force of the creek to pull a chunk of more branches and leaves free, sending it down stream to where it belonged.

One small move.
That’s all it took to change the course of life. If not for his one small move in a fit of drunkenness, he would have driven all the way to Long Island to convince Poppy how much they belonged together, how much he loved her.

With a deep sigh, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked for messages. There were none. His son was having the time of his life with his best buddy. Everyone in town was busy working on cleaning. And he was reminiscing about a woman a few hundred yards away from him instead of tending to a long list of things that needed to be done on his ranch.

The sound of an engine growing louder drew his attention to the path back to the house. He turned and saw Poppy out in the back pasture blazing around on the four-wheeler, driving all willy-nilly and at full throttle. The back wheels were spitting up mud all around her but she didn’t let off the throttle. She did some figure eights and then pulled onto the trail toward him stopping just short of embankment to the creek.