CHAPTER THREE

Logan eyed the script like it was poison she was asking him to drink. "It won't actually kill you."

"Ah, you say that, but you also think your bacon is crispy."

"You know if it's cooking skills you're after you could always marry Dick."

He thoughtfully stroked his chin, "hmm, he is a blonde." Logan took her hand, "if you're okay with it, I don't need to read it."

"But I want you to." His gaze was intense, prodding and poking at her. He was trying to read her mind to determine why she wanted him to read it. "Stop that."

"I'm not doing anything." She disentangled their hands and walked into the kitchen. Despite his earlier protests, the breakfast dishes were washed and put away. The counters and table were both clean. Wyatt was fed and sleeping. Face it Veronica he makes a better wife than you do. She peeked into the living room. He was still lounging in the corner of the sofa with his feet propped on the coffee table staring balefully at the script in his lap.

She went to check on the baby. Her soft snoring made Veronica smile. She leaned over the crib and stroked her tiny head. It wasn't actually a full two years, they were down to eighteen months now, but she was afraid they were going to be the longest months of her life. She loved Wyatt, loved being with her and she was looking forward to everything. The small firsts like rolling over, and sitting up and discovering her hands and feet. And the big firsts too; crawling and talking and walking, but Veronica didn't think she was ready for the role of stay-at-home mom. You can have your own reality show, Bored Housewives of Neptune. The thought made her feel guilty.

She headed for the bathroom to get ready for tomorrow and her first day as personal assistant to Trina, she better not ask me to get her coffee, Echolls. The list of actors and actresses she'd compiled while reading the script were mostly B-list, or maybe C-list, celebrities with names she didn't recognize. She'd spent time researching them on IMDb and they were still unrecognizable to her with three notable exceptions.

Conner, whose action-star career began with promising roles in a few summer blockbusters, but was now predominately comprised of television guest spots; Chad Taylor, the killer boyfriend, current teen idol and fantasy guy for every girl under the age of eighteen and for quite a few women over it; and, Julie Hanson, the actress playing Violet. She was Hollywood's ingénue-du-jour, usually typecast as the sweet, virginal, and naïve girl-next-door; playing Violet was going to be, in Hollywood parlance, stretching her chops.

The problem Veronica was having was an understanding of why. What was the point of the pranks? How many people on set knew that Trina didn't have a completion bond? For that matter, how many people knew Trina was running out of money? If the point of the pranks was to shut down the production, they would have to be privy to that information and what would they stand to gain? Was it personal? Someone looking to bankrupt Trina for revenge? She didn't really know enough about movie making to see any other reasons. Veronica wrapped herself in a towel and went to find Logan.

"Whoa, who's the hot redhead and does Ronnie know you're cheating?"

Logan wasn't paying attention, he was reading the script. "Yeah, Dick she's totally okay with it, she brings women home for me all the time. We share." Dick pushed the back of his head, "what the fu…" He stopped mid-word when he saw Veronica. "What did you do?"

A little warning might've been a good thing. She combed her fingers through her newly shortened and colored hair. "It's for tomorrow." His frown eased and a slow, sexy smile spread across his face. Veronica swallowed.

"Can we call her Candy?" Dick's question was a much needed bucket of cold water for the sudden and very hot thoughts produced by Logan's wolfish grin.

"I'm sure she tastes delicious," Logan abandoned the sofa and advanced on her, "go home Dick." Wyatt chose that minute to wake up from her nap. He groaned in frustration, "I need to have a serious talk with my daughter about timing."

Veronica shrugged, "eh. I say her timing was perfect."

"You're going to eat those words, Mars."

She grinned and beat a hasty retreat before he decided to exact his revenge now. She fed and changed Wyatt and then got dressed. When she returned to the living room, Dick was gone and Logan was back to reading. "Where'd your future spouse go?"

Without missing a beat, he drolly responded, "out to register for china. We picked a simple pattern, white with a platinum band."

She and Wyatt snuggled up next to him on the sofa. "Is that your new career? Logan Echolls, wedding planner?"

"I thought one of us should know how to do it and I figured it wouldn't be you." He tossed the script on the coffee table and took the baby from her.

"Me? What do I have to do with your wedding to Dick? Wait, am I the best man?"

"And the bachelor party entertainment." He kissed her neck, "how do you feel about popping out of a cake naked?"

"Morally opposed."

"How can you be morally opposed to cake? Too fattening?"

Veronica picked up the script before resting her head on his arm, "okay here's what I can't figure out."

"How I can be this devastatingly handsome, smart and funny too?"

"Aw sweetie, you keep telling yourself that, but it's just not true." She patted his knee, "why would you want to shut down the movie and would these harmless pranks really do that?"

"You realize the movie is going to suck, but you can't get out of your contract?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?" He shrugged. "I'm guessing you didn't like it?"

"It wasn't the worst thing I've ever read. Have you seen some of the crap they make in Hollywood these days? But I can see why a studio would take a pass on it."

"Enlighten me."

"It's not big enough for a summer slate- no car chases, no explosions, no superheroes. It's definitely not Oscar worthy and the mystery is weak. I knew it was the boyfriend at the crime scene."

"At the crime scene? I don't think so."

"Aw sweetie, did you not figure it out?" It was his turn to pat her knee condescendingly. "First if there's a pool with a girl swimming alone at night and it's not porn, she's dying. The strangling thing is dumb. Not enough of a visual. You need blood in the water. Second, she's strangled with a belt and the scene right before, and I mean right before, was the boyfriend getting dressed in a suit with a belt."

"So?"

"The screenwriter made too big a deal of the belt. The guy actually talks about his belt. You've seen me get dressed. Have I ever held up my belt and told you…what's the line? Something ridiculous about hand-tooled leather?"

"To be fair, I usually don't pay that much attention to you when you're getting dressed. Undressed, that's an entirely different story."

"Which we will explore in greater detail later."

She smiled, "if you cut the belt scene, it's still obvious the boyfriend is the killer long before the end of the movie. In the scene where…" Veronica started flipping through the pages to find what she wanted and stopped on page five. Logan had written notes in the margin. She slowly turned the pages, he'd written notes throughout the entire script and they were good. "Are you a frustrated screenwriter?"

"I'm frustrated, but it has very little to do with words." He sounded distracted. Veronica looked up from the script. He'd drawn his knees up, cradled Wyatt between his legs so she was facing him and was playing peek-a-boo. The baby was smiling and gurgling. Whenever he looked at Wyatt, his expression was unguarded and happy. The five hundred pictures he joked about her taking were Veronica trying to capture that exact look. He stroked his finger across the bottoms of her feet and smiled. She would make a hundred babies with him if it meant him always being this blissful.

Back to work Veronica, before you completely lose your edge and turn to goo. "Why would two well-known, up-and-coming stars agree to be in the movie?"

"Chad Taylor and Julie Hanson?" She nodded, "Best guess? They want to play something against type. Taylor seems destined to be the lead in all those dimwitted romantic comedies Wallace enjoys so much. Maybe he's hoping playing a killer will break him out of that mold. Same reason for Hanson. She wants to ditch little miss innocent and play the slutty…" A slight frown and then he withdrew; first in his closed expression and then by leaving the sofa with Wyatt. "You keep working and we'll make dinner."

"Pizza sounds good. Order from Cho's and get me a lemon grass linguini please."

"Pizza? I was going to cook."

"Sure you were." Veronica hunted through the pages for the fight between Violet's parents. It was blank. Not one note or comment from Logan anywhere. She followed him into the kitchen and waited until he was done ordering. "Do you think Violet is Lilly?"

"Do you?" The best defense was a good offense.

"I think she's supposed to be, but whoever wrote this, didn't know Lilly at all, only what they read about her in the papers during the trial."

"What did they get wrong?" His question surprised her. During the twenty minutes of screen time before she gets killed and then in three flashback sequences, Violet was an unmitigated bitch. Not to say Lilly didn't have her moments, but the real bitchiness was mostly reserved for her mother. No surprise there, Celeste Kane, could make Mother Theresa bitchy. The screenwriter missed the joie de vivre that was Lilly. The, life is grand; let's enjoy everything while we can, Lilly. Her spirit and sense of adventure were nowhere to be found in the character of moody, angry Violet.

Granted, she didn't date Lilly. She wasn't cheated on and dumped repeatedly. Lilly didn't try to make her jealous by sleeping with her friends and flaunting every new boy-toy in her face. And she didn't sleep with your father at the same time she was sleeping with you, Veronica. Not for the first time she wondered if Lilly had waited until she ended things with Logan before having sex with Aaron. Veronica frowned and what about the abuse? She'd seen Logan's scars, there was no way Lilly could've missed them, naked, during sex, while they were still fresh? How could she sleep with Aaron knowing he did those things to his child?

"Go ahead and ask Veronica, I can see you're dying to communicate about it."

"I don't know, Logan. You and I…" The raw fear in his eyes made her stop and try again, "what I mean is, Trina came back at the wrong time."

"When is there a right time for Trina?"

She sighed. "We have enough issues here in the present without us trying to have conversations we should've had years ago."

"What are you trying to say?" The fear was back and he pulling away.

"See that right there? Any time I try to bring up something even remotely serious, you back down. I don't want to play house with you Logan. We're adults now. Either we're going to work on it or we're not. You decide."

Veronica was stunned as she watched him walk out of the room. Why did you have to push him? She wanted to chase after him or call him back, but she did neither. Wyatt, their home, marriage, the future was he really walking away from all of it. "Logan?"

He returned without the baby. "I didn't want her to see us fight."

"Is that what we're going to do?"

"You tell me." He leaned against the counter, not looking at her. "You tell me what you want from me Veronica and I'll do it. You want to forget our deal? Done. You want to know every detail of my childhood? Give me a pen and I'll start writing it down. Want to know about Lilly? Ask."

"Why did you join the Navy?"

His confusion was apparent. "Direction. My life was out of control." He shrugged, "I didn't really care about anyone or anything. I was doing some pretty sketchy and dangerous things Veronica."

"And why are you leaving the Navy?"

He blew out a pent-up sigh of frustration, "we went over this. I'm leaving for Wyatt. I want to come home every night. I don't want to spend six months out of every twelve away from her on training and deployments."

"Would you feel the same way if I was a secretary or a housewife or if I opened a nice, quiet law firm and prepared contracts all day?"

"But you don't."

"No, I don't."

The doorbell rang. "Guess that's the end of round one," was his parting shot as he left to get the pizza. When he returned, he tossed the food on the kitchen table, "ready for round two, or should we eat first?"

"Does your decision have anything to do with Parker?"

"Round two it is then, or is this still the first since the topic hasn't changed? I don't think you understand, when the bell rings that's the end of the round. You won by the way."

"I can do without the sarcasm."

"No you can't." He sat at the table and cradled his head in his hands. "Yes. Is that what you want me to say? You almost died, Veronica and I wasn't here. If you weren't pregnant, I wouldn't have been able to come home for you."

She touched his shoulder, "what do you mean?"

"Family emergency leave; Wyatt, not you. The Navy wouldn't let me come home for my girlfriend. I could've been on that ship, while you were dying, and not known."

Veronica sat. His return to duty two days after Parker's arrest kept them from talking about it. When he came home, it was a rush of activity, trying to get them moved into the house before the baby arrived. Then Wyatt was born and he was gone again for another twelve days. She left the table to get plates and silverware. She could feel him watching her. "Will you teach me how to shoot?"

He fell back in his seat like she'd punched him. "What?"

"I'm going to buy a gun."

"Veronica, if this is your way of making me feel better, you suck at it."

She rejoined him at the table. "I've been thinking about it since Parker, but I didn't want to tell you. I wasn't sure of your reaction."

His response was quiet, "you can't point a gun at someone unless you're prepared to pull the trigger. Are you? Could you live with the consequences?"

Could she? She remembered the fear of seeing Parker holding that gun on Logan. Too many things could've gone wrong. She could've heard the door open. Logan could've moved the baseball bat. At any point in her walk across the house, Parker could've turned and spotted her. Then what? Her baseball bat was no defense against a gun. "I would've shot Parker."

He studied her for a long time. "Okay. I'll teach you how to shoot."

They silently ate pizza. "When you walked out of the kitchen with Wyatt, I thought you were leaving," she confessed.

"How are we going to move past this? You tell me you're not going anywhere and I hear the words, but…nine years is a long time Veronica."

"It was for me too."

"Are you sure? Forget about Wyatt for a minute and look at me. We had two weeks together before I shipped out and they were amazing, but we're making lifetime decisions here. Understand me; I don't want to play house with you either. I want it. All or nothing. Not because we have Wyatt, but because you want me."

Life without Logan? Her mind rejected the idea. "I'm here. Not because of Wyatt. I want to be here, with you, but you have to stop. It's too much pressure. I can't watch what I say and dance around issues because you get that look in your eyes. The uh-oh I've fucked up, Veronica is going to leave now, look."

"It's going to take time."

She adopted a gentle teasing tone, "can you give me a hint? A week, ten days? A month?"

"Let me check my calendar and get back to you." He smiled, "dancing around issues? When were you doing that, I seem to have missed it."

"Now I'm insulted. You haven't noticed my restraint and lack of questions? My easygoing attitude and extreme patience?"

"That's what all this has been? What a relief. I thought living with you was going to be hard." He put down his pizza and turned serious again. "I loved Lilly, but I don't necessarily think it was healthy. It didn't matter how she treated me or what she did, I just took it. She would snap her fingers and I would come running. I don't know if she was sleeping with my dad while we were still together, but I like to think she wasn't."

"You don't have to do this."

He continued as if she hadn't said anything. "She didn't know about the abuse because I didn't tell her. Whenever it was bad, I did something to make her break up with me. Or, I would start a fight with someone and blame my injuries on that. My reputation was well deserved, but not for the reasons people assumed. I don't think Violet is Lilly and I don't identify with the killer boyfriend. I do think the aging rock star and the pill-popping wife are my parents. And that fight? It happened exactly like that, almost word for word, but it wasn't only Trina who witnessed it, I was there too and I was eight."