Insider (Exodus End #1)(44)
Author: Olivia Cunning

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.

“Enormous shoes,” she admitted.

“How am I measuring up so far?” He lifted his gaze to hers.

“You’re getting there,” she said. “I’d say you’re currently around a size sixteen basketball shoe.”

He grinned at her, looking rather pleased with himself. “I’m that good, am I?”

“Well, considering my daddy wore clown shoes . . .”

He laughed and squeezed her hand again. “I’ve got a way to go then.” He speared his asparagus with his fork and shoved it into his mouth, not bothering to chew and swallow before he continued asking questions. “And your mother? Does she always keep close tabs on you?”

“She’s not used to me being gone.” Toni stared down at her food. She’d known she’d eventually have to find a life for herself—and she was excited to be exploring the world outside her tiny sphere of comfort—but she couldn’t stop the guilt from clawing at her belly. What if something happened while she was gone and she wasn’t there to protect those she loved? Like she hadn’t been there when her father collapsed. He’d been lying on the porch for almost an hour when she’d found him after school. He might have been saved if she’d been there with him when his heart had betrayed him. How would she ever live with herself if something happened to her mother while she was gone? Or to Birdie? Birdie had been born with a congenital heart defect, so it was probably only a matter of time—

Logan interrupted her upsetting thoughts. “So you live with her?”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

“Yeah.” Why was he so interested in her mundane life? She should be the one doing the interview here.

“This would be a lot easier if you volunteered information,” he said.

She glanced up from her plate and found him grinning at her. “Sorry. I’m just kind of confused as to why you’d want to know about my life.”

“Because I like you.”

“But I’m not interesting at all.”

“I think I’m capable of judging that for myself.”

She took a deep breath. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” he said. “But focus on you instead of your family.”

“On me?” She hadn’t focused on herself much since her father had died. With the exception of trying to find her way through college. “I had a very normal childhood growing up in a suburb of Seattle. The only real difference was that my mom was CEO of a publishing company and my dad stayed at home with the kids. Well, kid. I was an only child until I was fifteen.”

“So you have siblings?”

“A little sister. She wasn’t planned. My mom thought she’d finished going through menopause and then whoops. I guess there was still one viable egg in there after all.”

Logan’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. Doing math, she presumed. Everyone did math when they found out her sister had been born after her father had died. “So your sister was born . . .”

“A few months after my father passed away. He never got to meet her.”

“That must have been hard on you and your mother.”

“Mom isn’t really the maternal sort, and that was okay when I was growing up, because I had Dad, but Birdie—”

Logan’s eyebrows shot up. “Birdie?”

Toni laughed. “We both have formal, rather elegant names. My full first name is Antonia and she’s Bernadette, but Toni and Birdie fit better.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. You had Dad, but Birdie . . .”