I walked through the front door and was struck by the mild warmth of the sun and the brisk, chilly breeze. I realized distantly that I’d forgotten my coat on the hook by the back door, but the effort to go back and get it didn’t seem important. Not when Logan was stretching his arm out in front of me to open the passenger side door of Adam’s BMW, looking down at me with amusement in his eyes as I got in and sat down.
He shut the door after I was fully in, and then rounded the front of the car to let himself in on the other side.
I pulled up my map app again, confirming the route to the store. “It looks like it’s just about two miles down the main road in town.”
Logan nodded and shifted the car into gear.
The first four minutes of the ride were silent as Logan kept his focus on the road. I was attempting to hide the fact that I was cold, bouncing my legs up and down to both create some movement in my body for warmth as well as to alleviate some of the mild anxiety I was feeling about being alone in the car with him.
“So,” I said, cutting through the silence, “turns out you’re a bit of a lumberjack.” I kept my eyes on the windshield but felt his focus shift to me.
“You saw that?”
I turned to him, smirking. “Yes, I definitely saw that.”
He looked back at the road, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Your father had us out there earning our Thanksgiving meal tonight.”
“And did you?”
Logan’s smile grew. “What do you think, Mills? Did I?”
I felt my heart pound wildly, but I kept my face controlled. “I’d say so.”
A flash of white teeth and crinkling eyes, it felt like the first genuine smile I’d been able to pull out of him in . . .years.
At the store, Logan told me to hang tight before getting out of the car and jogging back to my side to open the door for me.
“And they say chivalry is dead,” I teased.
He rolled his eyes at that.
We walked through the automatic doors of the store where cold air blasted from the ceiling, and a shiver rattled through me.
“Are you cold?” Logan eyed the goosebumps on my arms and was already taking off his jacket.
“I’m okay,” I responded, but it was useless. He was holding open his jacket for me to put on, the decision to give it to me already made, so I reached my arms through the sleeves and relished in the warmth from his body heat.
And the smell of him. All over me, now.
“Thank you.”
He took lead as we walked through the store, looking for the baking aisle where sugar would be. Something about his confidence as he navigated through a grocery store, like he wasn’t a man above such an activity, had me feeling like I was walking on the thinnest edge of a tightrope.
We eyed the sugar options for a moment before I grabbed a couple bags of the generic brand. “This should be fine.”
Logan nodded once. “Looks good to me.” He took the bags out of my hands to carry them himself before moving to the line of fridges in the back of the store where the beer was. I trailed closely behind him, and as we approached the fridge that held Adam’s favorite brand, Logan casually stacked both bags of sugar into his left hand and then used his right hand to open the glass door and grab the cardboard handle of a full case.
“I can help carry something,” I said, reaching out to take the sugar back.
Logan steered the sugar away from my reach and shook his head. “Nah.” He winked, and then effortlessly pulled a case of beer out of the fridge, as if it were as light as a pillow.
“Show off,” I muttered. I heard his low chuckle deep in my chest.
We took our items to a cashier in the front of the store to pay—Logan somehow pulling his wallet out faster than me despite my hands being empty—before we walked back out into the cold. The wind had picked up considerably in the ten or so minutes that we’d been inside, and what was left of the leaves on the trees around the parking lot cascaded down to the ground in angry flurries.
Logan again opened my door for me and waited for me to get situated in my seat, shutting the door behind me and jamming the groceries in the trunk before getting in on the other side. “Good thing we got to the store when we did. The clouds are looking pretty damn angry over there—” He pointed to where the sky was dark and ominous to the north of us, a total juxtaposition from the bright, blue sky directly above us.
I pulled Logan’s jacket tighter around me. “Good thing we weren’t planning on leaving Breckenridge tonight.”
