She crumpled her hands in the hem of her button-down cotton shirt and tugged. She wasn’t used to asking for what she wanted. It made her chest tight and her stomach churn.
“I thought we were going to . . .” She glanced sidelong at the open door to the lounge. “You know.”
“Fuck?”
Her heart produced a hard thud at all that word implied. “Yeah, that.”
“I can’t miss dinner,” he said. “My blood sugar will drop while I’m onstage and I’ll black out. As delicious as your pussy tastes, it doesn’t supply sufficient calories.”
Flooded with concern over his wellbeing, she asked, “Are you diabetic?”
“Nothing that serious,” he said, removing foil from a second pan. “I just expend a lot of energy onstage. Sometimes I overdo it.”
“So you’ve blacked out before?” She moved in close beside him, stifling the urge to cling to him.
He nodded. “A few times. It freaks everyone out. Delays the show. So as much as I want to fuck you right now . . .” He grabbed her hand and pressed it against the hard evidence of his desire. “. . . I need to eat first.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a bother. I just got a little worked up when you kissed me.”
He wrapped a lock of her hair around one finger and tugged. “You are no bother,” he said. “What you are, Miss Nichols, is a distraction.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be around a bother. I can’t stop thinking about or wanting to be near a distraction. Does that sound like the same thing to you?”
She flushed with pleasure, still not used to the idea that a man as fun and gorgeous and amazing as Logan Schmidt liked her at all, much less liked her enough to find her distracting.
“You’re a distraction to me too,” she said.
“Do you think we can stop distracting each other long enough to eat?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said with a laugh. “We’ll see how it goes.”
The braised chicken was rather dry and tasteless. The steamed asparagus was overripe—woody and stringy. The garlic mashed potatoes would have been better drowning in butter, but the company was delicious, so Toni very much enjoyed her meal.
“So you’re a bit of a mama’s girl, I take it,” Logan said as he shoved his asparagus to one side of his plate and plopped a second helping of potatoes beside it.
“Not really. She just worries about me.” Toni didn’t want to share the personal details of her humdrum life. Even though he could probably tell she hadn’t had a typical life, she didn’t want Logan to know how completely sheltered she’d been.
“Daddy’s girl then?”
“Not since he passed away.”
“Sorry,” Logan said, frowning at his asparagus. “I didn’t realize.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Of course you didn’t realize.”
“Tell me about him.”
Her heart rose to her throat and settled there as a huge lump. Her father been gone over a decade, and she still found it hard to talk about him.
“Daddy was the nurturer in the family. While my mother went off to build her career, he did the majority of the child rearing. So we were rather close. He died when I was fifteen.”
Toni had been gutted. Just thinking about it now brought tears to her eyes. A few months after Daddy’s passing, Birdie had been born, and it was as if he’d left Toni a precious gift to treasure in his place. Her mother had been angry with him for leaving her to raise a newborn by herself. Birdie hadn’t been part of her plan and neither had becoming a widow in her midforties. It just seemed natural that Toni would take on a parental role with her little sister.
“He must have been young,” Logan commented, reaching across the table to squeeze her hand.
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Forty-six.”
“An accident?”
“Sudden catastrophic heart attack,” she said, images of the paramedics trying to resuscitate him on the front porch swarming her thoughts. “He was such a good person. I guess he gave too much of his heart away and didn’t keep enough of it for himself.”
“Which means any man in your life has huge shoes to fill,” Logan said, watching his fork as he pulled parallel lines through his mashed potatoes.
She smiled, wondering if he meant to hint at something that involved him personally or if he was just making a comment.