Author's Note: For the next two chapters, I highly recommend a large glass of wine and putting on the full soundtrack:

Calvin Harris- So Close To You

Nine Inch Nails- Closer

Maroon 5- Lips on You (this song is so sexy your eyeballs will actually fog over, so make sure to wipe them off so you can keep reading).

Chapter 2

Veronica

The drugs are starting to thrill through me, sparkling through my veins. My skin can feel everything and unfortunately, "everything" currently includes the sweaty, sallow bodies of frat boys, dancing poorly.

My panties are getting warm, and the warmer they get, the more I want to get the fuck away from these human trash heaps. Damn my pride. Logan already won, chasing off that bar bimbo by romping all over the dance floor with Dick like a couple of middle school nerds.

Though even I have to admit, their tango isn't half bad.

I have to resort to drastic measures to shake off Baby Face McGee, and then Logan's cracking himself up with his cheesy lasso move, reeling me across the dance floor toward him. But his eyes are bright and shining and it really feels like there's a string between his big hands and my heart, towing me past all these other inconsequential people until I can be close to him again.

It's probably the drugs.

It's got to be the drugs, right?

When I get there, he nudges a gorgeous co-ed out of my way and holds out a hand. As soon as my skin touches his, I nearly go to my knees.

I can feel every ridge of his fingerprints, and they're beautiful. The way they curve and loop, and always seem to know exactly where they're going. As confident and sure as the man himself. I grab his hand and bring it up close to my face so I can see the curves as well as feel them. It's like Braille, and it seems like I can read his whole personality in those sweeping trails. But the lights are pulsing in different colors and I can't see his fingertips the way I can feel them. I close my eyes, my fingers swimming across his as my pulse flutters up toward my throat.

"Veronica? You okay?"

My eyes pop open and Logan's watching me with a quizzical little smile, stepped in close so nobody else on the dance floor can see what I'm doing. Fuck, I'm acting like an idiot.

I glance around, and catch sight of the guys dancing next to us. "Fuck it, they're all idiots!" I don't realize I said it out loud until Logan starts to laugh.

Except now I'm curious, locked onto my theory, and there's only one other person here I know well enough to test it on.

"Dick!" I scream, and the guy next to me leers, "Need a volunteer, honey?"

Logan steps to the side, his face casual and unaware like he's just edging through the crowd, and somehow in the midst of that movement his elbow drives hard into the guy's solar plexus. The asshole drops to the floor. His buddies crowd around, asking him what happened, but he doesn't seem up to the task of explaining. Logan ignores him, and so do I.

"You called for His Majesty?" Dick appears, wearing his rhinestone cloak and Logan's plaid shirt tied over his shoulders, his glittery false abs peeking out.

I grab his hand without explaining, feeling for his fingerprints. His hands are softer than I expected. Not soft like yeah-rich-boy-doesn't-have-a-job soft, but soft like…sweet. Like that's part of the message. His prints aren't as seductive as Logan's, but there's something there that's better than I expected. Kinder. More…afraid?

I close my eyes, trying to feel it better.

Logan touches my shoulder. "Uh, Veronica?"

"I know, it feels great, right?" Dick says, standing obediently while I explore his fingertips. "No man, it's cool," he says to Logan. "You guys never rolled together before? Hey, Ronnie, though, Sailor-boy's watching so no kissy-kissy, you get me? I can't play volleyball with broken legs."

The longer I focus the more I feel it: the ghost of a connection. Not intense and diamond perfect like it is with Logan, but more like a low hum that says we're all the same, even me and Dick. And I don't care to think any more about that.

I drop his hand. "Dick, have you ever roasted a marshmallow?"

"Yeah, yum!" he says, not at all thrown by the change in topic.

"You know how if you roast them for just long enough, they get all golden brown and delicious?"

"Uh-huh, yeah, man."

I take a threatening step forward. "And then, if you leave them in the fire ring too long, then they turn all black." I lock eyes with him, my gaze like the bright flicker of a taser as I drive home my point about what topic I expect him to no longer be bringing up. "And they fall into the fire." I pat his shoulder. "Sometimes it's best to know when to drop something, before it burns you. Run along, Dick."

"Uh…uh…" He backs away. "I'm uh, gonna dance. Man, E usually makes people nice," he mutters as he turns away.

"I'm going to take that to mean he didn't pass the palm reading." Logan sounds bemused but not upset.

"He did, actually." I scowl, because I don't like that one bit, no I do not.

Logan laughs, his eyes crinkling. "Oh come on, admit it already. You love him."

"If that's your idea of love, boyfriend, we've got a conversation or two in our future." The words come out clear, but my body's starting to go warm and fuzzy at all its edges. The colors of the lights brighten and leave little tracers as they dart through the room. Like fairies.

I lift my palm and match it to his. He lets me, standing patiently like we're not the only two motionless people on a floor pounding with writhing bodies.

"You don't feel it?"

He smiles, an odd little catch to it. "You're going to have to be more specific, love. I feel a lot of things."

"Your fingerprints. They're like…bigger. Or I can read them all of a sudden." I realize I sound like a high person, babbling about the meaning of life and how everything is connected, man. I snap my mouth shut and start to pull my hand away.

"No, wait." He catches my wrist. "I'm bigger than you. Takes longer for stuff to kick in. Let me feel."

He trails a touch across the very tips of my fingers, so softly the skin doesn't even give under the pressure. My head falls back a little as sensation tingles all the way up into my scalp. I don't realize I'm making a sound until I feel the deep rumble of it in my throat, but it's so loud in here I can't even hear myself. Over the sweat and alcohol, I can smell the clean tang of his cologne. Faded since this morning but deeper, more interesting than any other scent in here.

His free hand finds my hip and fuck I can feel him perfectly. Even through my jeans. I can pick out every ridge of denim as his touch crosses it, traveling to the curve of my ass. I arch closer to him, heedless of all the people around us because they're all grinding like animals, too. This indrawn breath between us is sharp and crystal bright in the midst of the fuzziness of all of…them. Whatever they're all doing.

"I feel it a little," he murmurs, and I don't know how I can hear him when he's this quiet and everything else is so loud. My ears are so calibrated to the rumble of him that we're almost speaking in our own dimension. "It's…" His eyes flick to mine. "Different than when I've done it before." He folds my hand inside his, drops his head to kiss my knuckles even though he catches one of his own in the bargain. "Then again, I've never paid quite so much attention before."

"Dance with me." I breath it out, but my body's already moving to the beat pulsing through the air. His free hand rises from my tingling ass to the sweat-touched curve at the small of my back. Our linked hands he brings up, draping mine over the back of his neck. He's so tall it's almost awkward to dance like this, but then my palm slips enough to find his pulse and it's like I live inside two heartbeats.

The music, which feels like it's following the veins of the whole world, and his heart.

His pulse feels huge and vulnerable against the heel of my hand. The walls of his veins so thin I can sense each pulse of blood as it swells and contracts.

I look up and his pupils are blown wide and mine probably are, too. Fuck, how high am I? Is anybody going to notice? Can I get home okay?

My hand twitches and goes tense against his neck. Logan turns his head and ducks it so he can press the tiniest kiss to the inside of my wrist. Where nobody else would ever think to touch. His knee slips between my legs as he moves closer, his hand secure at the base of my back. It's so big his sprawled fingers cover the entire width of my hips. I let out a breath and the music pounds louder. Pulsing through my every artery and vein. Living red and wet inside my heart. I love it, and it's a little too good all at the same time. Like an orgasm in public.

I shake my hair out just to feel the whisper of strands against my neck. When I open my eyes this time, his are midnight dark, only the touch of warm brown left to them as they follow my every movement. Anyone further away than I am right now wouldn't even get to see the real color of his eyes.

"I'm glad you came back," I tell him. And that doesn't even make sense. I think I meant to say I'm glad he's here, but his head bends a touch closer to mine, and a kiss whispers over my temple.

"I'm glad I'm here, too," he says, like somehow he heard what I meant to say. "And you don't have to worry, Veronica. I'm impossibly hard to kill when I've got you to come back to. You wouldn't even believe me if I told you."

Fear jogs in my throat for a second. It sounds like he's trying to tell me he's been in a really dangerous situation already and gotten out of it. I need to know and I already know it'll eat me alive if I do know, and then somehow the thought just slips past me, the next song starting in a silkier beat than the last.

My hands slip down his arms, finding the cut of his tricep, the swell of his bicep, and fuck I hate that this shirt has sleeves. Why does this shirt have sleeves? Why does any shirt have sleeves when skin is so much better?

The music thumps faster and his legs flex and move with it. He's effortlessly athletic and my hands are all over him: the dip at his lower back that expands into unrealistic muscle, his hard ass that always flexes when he drives into me.

"Easy, Bobcat," he purrs in my ear. "Or we're going to be giving Nicole's desk a workout and something tells me she's got cameras in that room."

I pull my hands back to his belt line and hook my fingers into it, letting my fingernails dig into the leather to keep my hands to a safer area. My hips are moving with his, and I know every move he's going to make before he does it. I've always been an okay dancer, but right now, I feel like I am the music, and he's the music, and I can read it all perfectly. I couldn't step wrong if I tried.

"Wheee-ewww!" Dick shrieks, coming past us in a conga line that can't possibly exist in the same silky, heart-thumping song we're dancing to. He tosses something at us. I duck and Logan catches it one-handed without letting go of me.

"Ribbed for her pleasure," he reports. "Don't say Dick never did anything for you."

I lean into him, kissing his throat because it's all I can reach. "Oh, your dick does a lot of great things for me. In fact, it's doing a lot of delectable things right at this moment."

And considering I have an IUD and no longer have to put up with the buffering sensation of the condoms Dick just brought us, it could be doing even more delectable things in my near future.

He laughs with a bit of a rasp to it and says, "Wanna get out of here, gorgeous?"

I hook my leg around the back of his and kiss him until his arm clenches and lifts my other foot clean off the ground.

When he puts me down again, I immediately start hauling him toward the door. He chuckles. "You forgot your bag, killer. How many people are you going to need to tase before morning?"

"Bobcat, remember? I've got my own claws." I curl my hands to demonstrate, and then remember my bag has the all-important surveillance footage. "Dammit, I need—"

"That video," Logan finishes for me. "And my jacket, which I'm pretty sure Nicole put up there."

"Your jacket?" I groan as we edge through the crowd toward the office. "God, aren't you hot right now?"

"You have no idea. Follow me." He puts on his stone bodyguard face and barks in his Naval Officer voice, "Matters of national security!" The crowd parts like it's giving obedience lessons to the Red Sea, and he grabs my hand and tows me along in his wake.

We make it up to the office and back out to the front. I'm feeling magnanimous enough that when we reach the exit, I even let Nicole steal a kiss to Logan's chiseled cheek before she fist-bumps me. I love her. I love her drugs. I love that club and the way the sea air is soft on my skin and the way the brick wall is hard against my shoulder blades when Logan spins me up against it and kisses me until I invent a sound halfway between a growl and a whimper.

We giggle and spin and kiss our way through the nine blocks back to our condo, dropping onto park benches so I can press his growing hardness against me, leaning against walls so he can lift me by the thighs and wrap my legs around him. Stumble to a stop midblock just because the way his tongue feels against mine is the most distracting thing I've ever felt and I can't…really…think…when he—

"Don't move, bitch. Or I'll cut you."

I growl with frustration. "Oh, you really don't want to go there with me tonight." Twice in one week. This town is going to hell a lot faster than a handbasket travels. It's flying more at instant message speed, these days.

"I'm going to have to ask you to remove your hand, buddy." Logan's voice is as sharp as the cold metal against my throat. "Or I'm going to remove it for you."

Something about the way he says it makes it pretty clear he's not talking about the knife, but the whole hand.

I sigh, pouting. I'm really not in the mood to save this guy's life, but he'll thank me when he still has enough hands to pop his own pimples.

"You've got two choices, buddy," I lie to him, shifting my hips slightly to the left.

"Oh, I don't see it that way. Because I—YRP!" He cuts off into a sharp bark of surprise from the hit, then nothing as the electricity of the taser locks down his vocal chords.

"Really, Veronica?" Logan surveys the guy now laying full length on the concrete. "In the dick? Now I don't know if I should be turned on or shriveling in sympathy."

I pick up the guy's switchblade, close it, and stuff it in my pocket. A second later I've got his ID, the other wallets he stole tonight, and have tied his shoelaces together. I stand. "Well, I'm ready to go, if you can tear your libido away from its existential crisis."

"One more second." He hauls the guy back to standing by the shirtfront, so fast it rips some of the fabric out. "Friend," he says conversationally, "I don't want to see you out here giving women any trouble during spring break, or it's going to feel like this." He drives his fist into the guy's stomach, so hard it lifts both his feet off the ground.

The mugger comes back down, sort of screech-wretching in pain and Logan shakes him, sorting out his tied-shoelace feet for him so he's more or less holding his own weight again.

"And if you see her." He grabs the guy by the face and pivots it toward me. "And you don't run immediately the other direction? It's going to feel like this."

He moves so fast I hear the crack of bone before I register where his fist landed. The mugger shrieks and Logan swaps hands, breaks the bottom rib on the other side. Drops the guy.

Our criminal-in-training makes a wheezing whine and tries to make a break for it, trips on his shoelaces. Toes out of them and goes scrambling barefoot back into the dirty streets of Neptune.

I sigh. "Sorry about that, babe. I've been meaning to tell you the riff raff is a little thick on the beaches these days." I tuck the wallets and taser back into my bag but before I finish he's pulling me into a deep, breathlessly hard hug.

"Shut up," he says. "I know you're fine. Just give me a minute." He swallows. "He took you right out of my arms, Veronica."

I sigh. "Now you're not going to let me kiss you the whole way home, are you?"

He hugs me a little harder, the waves washing up on the beach with a quiet crash and whoosh of retreat. "C'mon." He keeps hold of my hand, his eyes scanning the area this time as we walk. I don't bother.

The kind of baby PCH'ers they send to pick the tourist's pockets aren't dangerous enough to make either of us break a sweat. Even with the element of surprise.

Besides, I've never noticed before how strong Logan's wrists are. They're impossibly thick and veiny, the ropes of muscle wrapped tight over dense bone in an intricate pattern. I've never paid much attention before, but it's absolutely perfect, the way it's designed to let him move and grip so many different ways. No wonder his hands are so strong.

"You know, if you were this into stroking that law school guy's forearms, it's no wonder you had so much trouble shaking him off." Logan slants me an amused look, before his gaze flicks to another sweep of the shadowy parking lots on the other side of the boardwalk from the beach.

"Ugh." I make a gagging sound, then something occurs to me. "Wait, how did you know he was in law school?" The corner of my mouth kicks up. "Did you background check my mark on your phone, Mr. Intelligence Officer?"

"When you grow up around the Hollywood crowd, you learn to ID the different species of douchebag by sight. How did you know he was in law school? Did you cheat and talk to him?"

"Cheat? Moi?" I bat my eyelashes, but seeing him in flashes only makes his jaw look more chiseled, his face more leanly handsome, and I have to look away before I can sort out how to keep up with this whole moving-legs-to-walk thing. Logan is handsome every day. But Logan when I'm on ecstasy is really…well, it makes me understand why women used to keep fainting couches close on hand, is all I'm saying.

Good thing this sand looks soft.

"Nice evasion. I'm counting that as a double win for me, since you cheated."

"I didn't cheat! He told me he was in law school within the first two minutes of dancing, like any good douchebag." I sniff. "And I'm not agreeing to that handicap again. Talking is my best tool for driving guys away." The words taste bitter on my tongue, probably because they're true. "Especially since blowing them off is how I get them hooked in the first place."

"So how did you do it?"

"Farted on him."

Logan shouts with laughter. "What? No, you didn't."

"Had to do it twice before he took a hint!" I shake my head. "Guys these days, Jesus."

Logan's laughing too hard to keep walking now, and he's bent over with his hands braced on his knees. A tiny smile tugs at my lips. I fold my arms and wait for him to be done having a laugh at my very undignified expense. I keep watch, just because if we get mugged again right now, he probably won't laugh again for six months. The big, overprotective lug.

Therapy may have smoothed him out, but he still can't stand any threat to me. As that poor PCH'ers ribs found out.

He wipes his eyes and takes my hand again, still chuckling. "Damn, Veronica. You need to work a little less. I forgot how much fun you are."

"You and me both," I mutter, and wish I had another shot of whiskey. But then his hand shifts against mine and the pleasure ripples out through me like a pebble dropped in a pond, erasing any reflection that was there before.

It's funny, I feel like I'm thinking perfectly clearly. And then as soon as he touches me, my pulse jolts another notch higher, all my skin starts to heat, and I'm so excruciatingly aware of every place we're touching that I can't hold another thought in my head. His body feels new and exciting, the way it used to be back when we were making out in his old yellow Xterra and every touch was a first for us.

I let go of his hand and slide my fingers up under the back of his shirt. He starts walking faster, the muscles in his back flexing with every step. "One more block," he promises me, and wraps an arm over my shoulders, hurrying me along.

One more block is way too long to wait for a man like him.