Apparently, she didn’t.
“Don’t you know who Jessica Rabbit is?”
Sam only nodded at him.
He shrugged. “Well, you look like her.”
“No. I don’t. She’s all … all … gorgeous and hot and … all … all …”
Logan’s grin was irrepressible. “She’s tall and voluptuous and sexy as hell. Exactly like you.”
He went back to eating, but he could feel Sam’s gaze on him so he raised his gaze to hers again. “What?”
He could see the gears in that gorgeous brain of hers cranking a mile a minute as though she were calculating something and not coming up with the right answer. “It’s a compliment, Sam. Nod your head. Smile. Say thank you and move on.”
“Oh. O-okay,” she said and went back to her food, but the pinched brows stayed as she continued to fuss at the problem in her head.
Logan laughed but went back to eating. He had a feeling Sam would need to puzzle over things for a while on her own. No one else would be able to convince her of her beauty. She’d likely go home and somehow reduce the issue to numbers and equations and look for proof. And, damn how he wanted to be the one to give her that proof.
There was a time when Logan would have looked at a woman like Samantha and known right off the bat he shouldn’t be with her. It was the old problem of Sam being a woman made for marriage, and long-term love. Commitment.
She didn’t have the personality for one-night stands or short-term romance. Logan’s life hadn’t matched her needs until now. When he’d been in the Teams, his life had been a revolving door of deployments and training, with no room for a relationship in between. Sure, some of the guys had married, some even making it last for a while.
But Logan just never got how you could walk away from a woman you loved and stick yourself in the middle of the hellholes they went into and not lose your mind with worry. Or be distracted as all hell wondering how she was, if she was holding up all right or worried to pieces for his safety. He’d watched too many men tell one of their buddies to give a final message to a woman back home. He didn’t want to be that man.
Now that he was home for good, that was no longer an issue. In fact, Logan had begun to crave a longer-term connection with someone, the sharing of a life. The only problem was, he was enough of a man to know this wasn’t the time for that. He wasn’t whole enough right now and he honestly couldn’t say when he would be whole again. He didn’t feel like he could start something with Sam until he had found a way to beat this demon that seemed to be chasing him. If he could only fix what was broken in him, then maybe, just maybe, he’d be man enough for her.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, slowing down on his food now that he’d satiated the worst of his hunger. “I’m on level seventeen. I hope you’re adding new levels soon.”
Sam looked up, surprise in her eyes again.
He grinned. “Tangled Legacy.”
“You play?” She asked and he was surprised to see her blush. Why would she be shy about her game? It shouldn’t be a surprise he played. Hell, half the world played her game.
“Of course. I love the way your mind works. It’s like I can see the way you’ve woven the different pieces of the puzzle together in the world. But usually only after the fact.”
She licked her lips and the movement distracted him, but he still heard her words.
“I’ve got two more levels ready to go out with the next update.”
He watched her mouth, wanting to lean in and capture it. She was so damned sexy.
Instead, he nodded at her words and focused back on his food.
An alert chimed on his computer and Logan glanced to the screen. A message from a friend in Colorado popped up.
“Sorry, Sam. I just have to reply to this real fast,” Logan said as he turned his attention to the screen.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, but Logan shook his head.
“Nah, just have to get him some info real fast. It’ll only take a minute.”
“’Kay,” she said.
Logan typed the name and contact information for another one of his buddies into the message screen. He hit send before turning back to Sam. “Sorry. Just connecting a couple of people together about a job.”
Sam raised her eyebrows in question and Logan continued. “I have a buddy who got released from a rehab center about a month ago. He’s having trouble finding work and he’s got a young kid and a wife to support. It’s not looking good where they are, so I told him I’d hook him up with another friend in Colorado who might be able to find him work out there.”
“They’re former SEALs, too?” Sam asked, packing up the remnants of her lunch and tossing used napkins into the bag the food had come in.
“One guy is. The other is Army. I served with him in Afghanistan for a while. They sometimes pair a SEAL to an Army unit during deployments. We worked together for a few months.”
Logan shifted in his seat, not sure he wanted to tell her about any of this, but she had this way of simply looking at him and waiting with her face open and genuinely interested.
It made him want to talk to her. Damned woman could have been an interrogator in another life. That, or a shrink. She had mad skills. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just her effect on him. He seemed somehow undone by her.
“Some of the guys I know are coming home to some pretty screwed up situations. They can’t get work, their kids either don’t know them at all or they don’t want to listen to them anymore because they’ve been gone so long. Their spouses have been holding things together here for so long, they’re just excited to have their partner back, but for the guys coming home, it’s not easy to slip back into things. They can’t really just step back into what their wives need them to be. Add in the stress of not being able to make a living and things get sideways pretty fast.”
“So, you’re networking for them, helping them find work?”
“Where I can.”
“How many people have you tried to help this way?”
“A few,” he said.
More like twenty, but she didn’t need to know that. He’d discovered he could match people up around the country. If one person couldn’t help, that person got in touch with someone who could, and so on, and so on.
So far, things had worked out pretty well for many of the guys. “I’m really lucky to have this job from Jack. A lot of guys coming back aren’t finding work, anywhere. And, I don’t even have a family to feed. They do.”
Sam was quiet for a bit and Logan became lost in his own world, thinking about the guys who were struggling with coming home and the guys who hadn’t made it back.
“Oh, I get it,” Sam said quietly. Logan’s eyes flew to hers but he looked away just as quickly.
She knew. Somehow, she knew.
“You’re feeling guilty because you have this job, aren’t you?” Her words were soft, but she wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
Logan didn’t answer. What the hell could he say? Besides, the woman seemed to know everything whether he voiced it or not, so he didn’t see why he needed to participate.
“You earned it, you know,” she said. “It’s not just because you’re friends with Jack’s brother-in-law. Jack might be a softie nowadays, but he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to. And, he would never make a decision for Sutton Capital that isn’t the right decision. He’s not going to give you a job like this out of sympathy or loyalty to Zach or anything. Maybe a mailroom job, but not this job, Logan. You’re here because you’re the right man for the job.”