Helene was perfect for him. A savvy businesswoman, beautiful, smart, and her even temperament made her easy to get along with. She’d never once complained about his frequent seventy-hour workweeks, and he could count on one hand how many disagreements they’d had.
She was the only child of state senator Edwin Langford and a former Miss Texas beauty contestant. Her family loved him, and Logan was pretty sure his own family felt the same way about her.
“You got the ring?” Lucky whispered. Or rather, tried to whisper.
Yeah, his siblings, sibling-in-law and future sibling-in-law were buzzed on champagne, all in the name of celebrating the fact that he was finally going to pop the question to the woman he’d been dating all these years.
Logan double-checked the ring. The blue Tiffany box was in his jacket pocket. It was perfect, as well. A two-carat diamond—flawless like Helene—with a platinum setting. It would look just right on the hand of the woman who would eventually help him run McCord Cattle Brokers.
He took another bottle of chilled champagne from his car. This one he would share with his future bride right after she said yes, and he’d do that sharing without his family around. He wanted to get Helene alone, maybe show her just how spontaneous he could be by having sex with her on her pricey antique desk. The very one she had professionally polished every week.
“All right, no talking once we’re inside,” Logan reminded them. “No giggling, either,” he warned Claire.
It was dark, after closing hours, and any chatter or giggling would immediately carry through the building and all the way to Helene’s office in the back of her interior design business. He wouldn’t have to worry about other customers, though, since it was Wednesday, the night that Helene used to catch up on paperwork.
Logan eased his key into the lock, turning it slowly so that Helene wouldn’t be alerted to the clicking sound. He gave the sign crew one last stern look to keep quiet, and they all tiptoed toward the back. Well, they tiptoed as much as four drunk people could manage, but he wouldn’t have to put up with their drunken giddiness much longer. Logan had already arranged for the town’s only taxi driver to pick them up in fifteen minutes.
Leading the way, Logan headed to Helene’s office. The door was already cracked so he pushed it open, motioning for the others to go ahead of him and get ready to spring into action. They did. Lucky. Riley. Claire. Cassie. All in the correct order, but what they didn’t do was hold up their signs. That’s because they froze.
All of them.
They stood there, signs frozen in their hands, too.
Logan’s stomach went to his knees, and in the split second that followed, he tried to figure out what would have caused them to react like that.
Hell.
If Helene had been hurt, at least one of them would have rushed to check on her, but there was no rushing. Even though it was hard to wrap his mind around it, the freezing could mean they’d just walked in on Helene doing something bad.
Like maybe she was with another man.
She couldn’t be, though. Helene had never given him any reason whatsoever not to trust her. Ditto for giving him any reason whatsoever to believe she was unhappy. Just an hour earlier she’d called Logan to tell him she loved him.
Riley looked back at Logan, shaking his head. “Uh, you don’t want to see this,” Riley insisted.
But Logan did. He had to see it. Because there was nothing in the room that was worse than what he was already imagining.
Or so he thought.
However, Logan was wrong. It was worse. Much, much worse.
LIARS AND CLOWNS. Logan had seen both tonight. The liar was a woman he thought loved him. Helene. And the clown, well, Logan wasn’t sure he could process that image just yet.
Maybe after lots of booze, though.
He hadn’t been drunk since his twenty-first birthday nearly thirteen years ago. But he was about to remedy that now. He motioned for the bartender to set him up with another pair of Glenlivet shots.
His phone buzzed again, indicating another call had just gone to voice mail. One of his siblings no doubt wanting to make sure he was all right. He wasn’t. But talking to them about it wouldn’t help, and Logan didn’t want anyone he knew to see or hear him like this.
It was possible there’d be some slurring involved. Puking, too.
He’d never been sure what to call Helene. His longtime girlfriend? Girlfriend seemed too high school. So, he’d toyed with thinking of her as his future fiancée. Or in social situations—she was his business associate who often ran his marketing campaigns. But tonight Logan wasn’t calling her any of those things. As far as he was concerned, he never wanted to think of her, her name or what to call her again.
Too bad that image of her was stuck in his head, but that’s where he was hoping generous amounts of single malt Scotch would help.
Even though Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie wouldn’t breathe a word about this, it would still get around town. Logan wasn’t sure how, but gossip seemed to defy the time-space continuum in Spring Hill. People would soon know, if they didn’t already, and those same people would never look at him the same way again. It would hurt business.
Hell. It hurt him.
That’s why he was here in this hotel bar in San Antonio. It was only thirty miles from Spring Hill, but tonight he hoped it’d be far enough away that no one he knew would see him get drunk. Then he could stagger to his room and puke in peace. Not that he was looking forward to the puking part, but it would give him something else to think about other than her.
It was his first time in this hotel, though he stayed in San Antonio often on business. Logan hadn’t wanted to risk running into anyone he knew, and he certainly wouldn’t at this trendy “boutique” place. Not with a name like the Purple Cactus and its vegan restaurant.
If the staff found out he was a cattle broker, he might be booted out. Or forced to eat tofu. That’s the reason Logan had used cash when he checked in. No sense risking someone recognizing his name from his credit card.
The clerk had seemed skeptical when Logan had told him that his ID and credit cards had been stolen and that’s why he couldn’t produce anything with his name on it. Of course, when Logan had slipped the guy an extra hundred dollar bill, it had caused that doubt to disappear.
“Drinking your troubles away?” a woman asked.
“Trying.”
Though he wasn’t drunk enough that he couldn’t see what was waiting for him at the end of this. A hangover, a missed 8:00 a.m. meeting, his family worried about him—the puking—and it wouldn’t fix anything other than to give him a couple hours of mind-numbing solace.
At the moment, though, mind-numbing solace even if it was temporary seemed like a good trade-off.
“Me, too,” she said. “Drinking my troubles away.”
Judging from the sultry tone in her voice, Logan first thought she might be a prostitute, but then he got a look at her.
Nope. Not a pro.
Or if she was, she’d done nothing to market herself as such. No low-cut dress to show her cleavage. She had on a T-shirt with cartoon turtles on the front, a baggy white skirt and flip-flops. It looked as if she’d grabbed the first items of clothing she could find off