The Lucky One(33)

Well, it wouldn’t be with Beth.

Beth would throw a hissy fit if she found out what he’d been doing, but fortunately, he hadn’t had to do it all that often. Just every now and then, and things were working out fine.

More than fine, actually. Even the whole coed picture-taking fiasco had turned out okay. Neither the camera nor the disk had surfaced at either the sheriff’s department or the newspaper since last weekend. He hadn’t had a chance to look for that hippie loser on Monday morning because of some papers that had to be served out in the county, but he found out the guy had been staying at the Holiday Motor Court. Unfortunately—or fortunately, he supposed—the guy had checked out, and he hadn’t been seen since. Which most likely meant he was long gone by now.

All in all, things were good. Real good. He especially liked the brainstorm he’d had about Beth—the friends with benefits thing. Wouldn’t that be something? He clasped his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillows just as Nikki stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in her towel, with steam trailing behind her. He smiled.

“Come here, Beth.”

She froze. “My name is Nikki.”

“I know that. But I want to call you Beth tonight.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eyes flashed. “Just shut up and come here, would you?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Nikki took a reluctant step forward.





10

Beth

Maybe she’d misjudged him, Beth admitted. At least as far as work went, anyway. In the last three weeks, Logan Thibault had been the perfect employee. Better than that, even. Not only hadn’t he missed a day, but he arrived early so he could feed the dogs—something Nana had always done until her stroke—and stayed late to sweep the floors of the office. Once, she’d even seen him cleaning the windows with Windex and crumpled newspaper. The kennels were as clean as they’d ever been, the training yard was mowed every other afternoon, and he’d even started to reorganize the customer files. It got to the point that Beth felt guilty when she handed him his first paycheck. She knew that the paycheck was barely enough to live on. But when she’d handed the check to him, he’d simply smiled and said, “Thanks. This is great.”

It was all she could do to muster a subdued, “You’re welcome.”

Other than that, they hadn’t seen much of each other. They were in the third week of school, and Beth was still getting back into the flow of teaching again, which necessitated long hours in her small home office, updating lesson plans and correcting homework. Ben, on the other hand, raced out of the car as soon as he got home to play with Zeus. From what Beth observed from the window, Ben seemed to view the dog as his new best buddy, and the dog seemed to feel the same way. As soon as their car rolled up the drive, the dog would start nosing around for a stick, and he’d greet Ben with it when the car door swung open. Ben would scramble out, and as she walked up the porch steps, she’d hear Ben laughing as they raced across the yard. Logan—the name seemed to fit him better than Thibault, despite what he’d said at the creek—watched them as well, a slight smile playing across his face, before he turned back to whatever he was doing.

Despite herself, she liked his smile and the ease with which it surfaced when he was with Ben or Nana. She knew that sometimes war had a way of crawling into a soldier’s psyche, making it hard to readapt to the civilian world, but he showed no sign of any post-traumatic stress disorder. He seemed almost normal—aside from walking across the country, that is—which suggested that he might never have been overseas. Nana swore that she hadn’t asked him about it yet. Which was odd in and of itself, considering Nana, but that was another story. Still, he seemed to be fitting into their little family business better than she’d imagined possible. A couple of days earlier, just as Logan was finishing up work for the day, she’d heard Ben race through the house to his bedroom, only to clatter out the front door again. When she peeked out the window, she realized that Ben had retrieved his baseball from his room to play catch with Logan in the yard. She watched them throw the baseball back and forth, Zeus doing his best to chase down the missed balls before Ben could get to them.

If only her ex had been there to see how happily Ben played when he was not being pressured or criticized.

She wasn’t surprised that Logan and Nana were getting along, but the frequency with which Nana brought him up after he’d left for the night, and the glowing nature of her comments, took her aback. “You’d like him,” she’d say, or, “I wonder if he knew Drake,” which was her way of hinting that Beth should make an effort to get to know him. Nana had even begun to allow him to train the dogs, which was something she’d never allowed another employee to do. Every now and then, she’d mention something interesting about his past—that he’d slept beside a family of armadillos in north Texas, for instance, or that he’d once dreamed of working for the Koobi Fora Research Project in Kenya, investigating the origin of man. When she mentioned such things, there was no denying her fascination with Logan and what made him tick.

Best of all, things around the kennel were beginning to calm down. After a long, hectic summer, their days had settled into a rhythm of sorts, which explained why Beth was eyeing Nana with apprehension over the dinner table at Nana’s news.