Disclaimer: Please see Chapter 1.

A/N: Started in response to a couple DAR Challenges; see end of Chapter 1 for specifics. As always, thanks for reading. Reviews still craved; they help me to know whether or not this should continue or it needs to be wrapped up. I still haven't figured out how to read minds through this thing!

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Winter's Chill

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XII.

Logan lay back against the pillows once again, this time wearing not only his warm, soft jersey and sweats, but a warm, sated smile as he watched Max, his head canted whimsically to one side and his eyes warm for her. She was still gowned in one of his t-shirts and he dared to imagine that she was infusing it with her sweet scent even now. She knelt on the bed, apart from him and telephone at her ear, her dark eyes watching his as she described Logan's symptoms and recovery to his neurosurgeon. "I think he was completely out for a while, maybe for thirty minutes in the car. He finally awoke on his own about an hour after we got back..." She listened again dutifully, trusting that Logan was mending and would be as good as new soon, but taking very seriously her role at the moment as Sam's eyes and ears to his thawing patient. "Mmm-hmmm. Groggy; but after he really woke up he was more sleepy than groggy. His speech was clearer, and he sounded like he remembered everything. He sounds pretty normal now, but is still dragging a bit." Again she paused, listening. Her eyes flicking slightly, she nodded, "Yep, he got up about a half an hour ago..." Her gaze never left the patient, and a small smile began to grow for him as he continued to look steadily, appreciatively, into her eyes. She reached over and traced his fingers affectionately; he turned his hand and threaded his fingers through hers. Her smile deepened. "He even got dressed then, and went out to check his mail and messages before I convinced him just to get back into bed."

Logan watched his angel silently, letting her do this, letting her fuss over his recovery and tend to him, to speak to Sam and oversee his "treatment." She had, after all, found him and brought him home and thawed him out, and that in itself should have been enough to allow it. But then an amazing, stunning thing had happened – she had leapt into his lap and had kissed him with a fear and a passion that had smacked him silly and let him start to believe that she might just have something with this "we are like that" argument...

"Oh ... okay; let me check..." From her kneeling position, Max slipped sideways onto her hip, propping the phone up on her shoulder, and turned his hand in hers. Peering intently at his hand as she worked, she squeezed his thumbnail with gentle firmness for a moment, then released it, watching in brief silence before smiling in satisfaction. "Let me see your other hand, Logan," she directed, speaking into the phone as she took his proffered right hand and repeated the action. "The left refilled right away ... right did, too." She released his hand and smiled at him, sweetly, and pivoted on her knees toward the end of the bed. Logan watched with interest as Max quickly pulled the neatly tucked corners of the bedclothes loose, and repeated the action on his big toes. "Both toes refill almost as quickly." Phone still held between her ear and shoulder, she slipped gracefully to her feet and started to tuck the covers back around him when she paused and, clearly, something occurring to her, she stopped and crossed to his chest of drawers, opening two drawers before fishing into the third. With a grin of success, she held up a rolled pair of wool socks and walked back to stand at the end of the bed, still watching Logan, her large, luminous eyes never leaving him. "Okay. Okay; I'll tell him. What about eating, or...? Oh, alright." She smiled again, the prognosis apparently good. "Thanks, Dr. Carr." She listened once more, and her face broke into a beam. "I'll tell him, thank you." She punched the off button and tossed the phone onto the bed, uncovering his feet again. "Dr. Carr thinks you just might pull through," she teased.

"That's convenient – I paid six months ahead on my cable service." He watched her unrolling his socks, her intent clear. Embarrassment poked him despite the recent moments with her, and he frowned slightly to see her sit so comfortably at the edge of the bed, shaking out the first sock and turning toward his unmoving foot. "Max..." he began.

She stopped, looking back up to him calmly, not speaking, the bright, clear eyes awaiting his words.

He didn't want to sound childish or whiny, but he didn't think he wanted to see her doing this. Propping himself up on his elbows, and hoping for a soft delivery, he pointed out, "I can put on my own socks..."

"Of course you can," she rolled her eyes. "I see you almost every day, and you have socks on every time I'm here, even when Bling is out of town." At his sheepish grin and small blush, she saw her words had the desired effect, and he relaxed a little. "But you're still recovering," she continued, "and I'm down here and need to tuck in the blankets anyway, and Sam wanted socks on you. So just this once..?"

She knew her smile was endearing, Logan could see, and her face was alight with an expression that could mean only that she knew she'd won – but she waited until he agreed to her plan before imposing her socks on his feet. And that simple, understanding act of waiting for his approval, even if grudging, drew a slow smile as he leaned back down against the pillows, as he'd been before. "Maybe just this once..." he agreed. He watched, touched at her care, while she rolled the sock up as if she'd been doing this for ages, fixing it so that she could just roll the sock down over his unhelpful foot. Too curious not to ask, he tried, with soft self-consciousness, "How did you know to do that?"

"What, this?" She looked surprised that he treated it as if it were some sort of professional technique.

"Well, yeah. Rolling them like that." He watched as she repeated the action, slipping the wool sock onto his unfeeling foot without so much as a lost moment. "It's not like I'm helping much."

But she was grinning. "Original Cindy saw me once trying get a pair of hose on and she practically went into shock. She sat me down right then and gave me a lesson. Maybe different purposes, but I figured the technique ought to work just as well here." She pivoted back up to her feet, carefully tucked the sheet and blankets in as they'd been, and straightened, looking back at him with another sudden moment of uncertainty, the call and her task now accomplished, her emotional outburst of not an hour before still rattling her in its unexpected, total dominion of her actions...

Understanding the look, he raised his hand to invite her back. "Aren't you cold out there?"

And with a silent, happy beam, Max scrambled back up across the covers to his side and slipped in alongside his masculine form, nestling into the arm he held out, waiting for her, as with his other hand he lifted the blankets back over them both to tuck them in, protectively...

"Seems to me you're the expert in 'cold' these days." The laugh Logan heard from Max sounded for all the world like a girlish giggle. "If you say I am, maybe I need you to warm me up."

"Glad to." He grinned, his arm bringing her a shade closer in to his side. "And since tomorrow's Sunday, you don't have to leave til Monday, do you? It may take about that long..."

She beamed and snuggled into his arm. "Works for me – except I'm without transportation til I run back out there and get my baby. You can wait right here and warm me up again when I get back..." she suggested, coyly.

"Oh, Max, your bike..." In his frost-induced haze and the emotional upheaval that followed, he hadn't thought about the fact that Max would have come out on her bike and have had to leave it behind. "Look; I can drive you out; now, if you want. You don't want to leave it out there..."

"It's fine, Logan," she assured him, her voice carrying the absolute sincerity of her words. "I pulled it back into the bushes off the road before we left. It was practically dark when I got there, and it was so deserted, it would have been fine right out in the open..."

"Max..." He smiled sadly, in apology. "Your bike, though..."

"Between you and the bike? You win, hands down."

"Really?"

She looked back up at the shining green eyes, not sure if he wasn't at some level asking her that as a serious question. No doubt he was pleased that he took precedence, and she wondered fleetingly that someone with all his advantages, growing up, could be so insecure about his importance to her. She chose to treat it as if he were joking, and let a wide smile cover her momentary sadness for him. "Really." She burrowed into his arm, happily. "You're not going anywhere tonight, Logan Cale. I'll find someone tomorrow who can run me out there and if there's no one else around with the gas for it ... we can go get it. Okay?"

"Okay." He smiled slowly.

"Good. Now get back to work warming me up."

As Logan shifted a bit to wrap both of his arms around Max's exquisite form, the sound of her contented sigh as she cuddled into him made his smile move up a little higher, and he shifted to kiss her brow, resting near his cheek. His own contentment came in waves, as hers did, apparently: he was too much the pessimist, too long carrying the baggage of past hurts to simply trust his good fortune at face value. But he found he could let go, in small spurts, and believe that he was truly alive and awake, that this wasn't a dream or some unexpected reward in the next life...

Whatever came next was worth this, this moment, this realization of his wildest imagination. Max was not only cradled close in his arms but seeking him, wanting him ... would she still want him when he thawed out completely, and he had to confess to her the nitty-gritty of what was left to him that worked, and what was lost to him forever?

...but even that now-entrenched, self-deprecating thought was harder to hold, no matter how stubborn he might be, given another new twist to his evening: just what was he to make of the fact that the longer she lay there in his arms, responding to his touch and his lips, the stronger his physical desire and the craving he felt for her, which more and more was starting to feel like the sort he felt, before his injury?

Breaking off his kiss to draw a deep breath and get a grip on things before Max knew what was going on in his head, he heard Bling's words spring unbidden back into his thoughts, from months before. "You're going to hear a lot of the guys say that the primary sexual organ is the mind," he'd counseled, sage as always. "You give yourself a chance, you may find that you're in agreement with them."

Damn it, Bling... he thought with a chuckle. Time after time, he'd found that Bling was right about things. About everything. But when Bling had tried to have the "Talk" with him three months after his injury, and he was being his usual mulish self, it was something that Bling had offered almost as an afterthought. He'd slipped it in amid the other knowledge he was imparting that had taken most of Logan's attention – namely, that while everyone was different and even injuries like his were in many ways unpredictable, it just was not the least bit likely that with a spinal cord severed around T8, he was going to just bounce back and start banging the gong as he did in the Day. What little he'd registered at the time about the mind being a sexual organ of any sort – let alone "primary" – was taken with a great deal of skepticism and doubt.

...now he wasn't so sure...

"What's so funny?" Max looked up to him with eyes large and sweet, sparkling for him. His "mind" threw him yet another left hook and he wanted to wrap himself around her, taste her skin and let her soft hands find places he'd forgotten he had...

Damn! Was the man ever wrong?

"Not funny, so much, as ... what, overwhelming?" Logan reached out to trace her features, amazed yet again that he was actually caressing the cheekbones he'd admired from the distance he'd erected between them, that her body now pressed close to his, intimate, the promise of much more to come. "Max, I thought about this, for as long as I've known you ... but I really never believed it would happen." His eyebrows lifted, the unexpected events still leaving him at a loss to know what was ahead. "I'd thought of too many reasons it wouldn't ... or shouldn't."

Her brow clouded slightly. She knew it was what he'd been trying to say before she cut off his protests; she wasn't so naive as to think that his concerns would evaporate like magic with her kiss. But she didn't want to hear it, didn't want to hear his words confirming how much he hated himself and his life. "Logan, just for tonight..." she urged, softly, "let's pretend there is nothing but us, and how this feels – no gunshot wounds or wealthy family, no Manticore or age difference ... no world to save or packages to deliver... just us, Logan ... and if tomorrow you want to talk about why you could think we'd be better off alone than just dealing with those things, we'll talk..." her eyes glittered with the welling of new moisture, the emotions still so powerful here in his arms. "But tonight, Logan ... can we please just pretend that we're all that matters?"

The pain in her eyes and the poignancy in her voice pulled in his chest, and in aching regret for causing them, he brushed her cheek tenderly. "Of course, Max... I'm sorry..." he leaned his forehead onto hers, hating how he made things worse for her just as he was reveling in his own hope, and drew his hand around to stroke her hair gently. "I don't have to pretend all that much ... you matter more than anything in my life, you know that, don't you?"

She pulled back to look at him, with his words; she really didn't want to give him any chance to dwell on the ugly or seamy or unpleasant realities in their lives, not when they lay so warm and close in his bed ... but she wanted to believe these words more than anything, and needed to see the truth she hoped she'd find in his eyes as he said them. "There's a lot of competition," she temporized. Her joke was more truth, she feared, than she wanted to hear...

"Nothing in serious contention." He assured her immediately, and eyes sad, he nonetheless smiled a haunted, aching smile and asked, "What part of 'Max, I love you' didn't you understand?"

She blinked in surprise, and an unbelieving, tentative smile played her lips. "The part where... you actually said it?"

His own eyes seemed unnaturally bright as his smile softened a little, pleased to see her response. "I just hadn't exactly managed to get that far, yet. But we've got 'til Monday." Her laugh and look of devotion for him suddenly made his throat tighten in emotion, and he knew he never wanted to leave his bed or this moment. When she shifted then to pull up across his chest, kissing him more fully and passionately, his ability to think left him all together...

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