Free Edge of Forever by Taryn Elliott Page B

wouldn’t talk to him made him insane. He knew she could—she just chose to lock him out.
    As if he didn’t carry a freightliner’s worth of guilt already.
    He slammed the door and let Fiona tell him where she wanted do her thing. She was pretty much going to sniff everything in sight, so after ten minutes, he led her over to a small copse of trees. She did her doggie spin thing and finally finished.
    He loaded her back into the truck only to find Izzy had moved to the backseat. Fiona thought this was an awesome turn of events and crawled into her lap, vibrating with happiness. Logan couldn’t even hold onto his mad with the soft smile that spread across Izzy’s face as the dog loved all over her.
    She pushed Fiona off her and settled back. The dog curled onto her side and put her head in Izzy’s lap with a groaning sigh of bliss. Yeah, Fiona had found her person. Isabella absently rubbed under her chin to her chest and back in a soothing gesture as she looked out the window.
    He’d been effectively ignored once more.
    Logan got back behind the wheel and pulled out of the gas station. While he waited to take a left out and get back on the main road, he opened a soda. He was bone-tired, but he had another hour to go and he needed to be sharp.
    The roads were winding and narrow this far up into the coastal area. Aidan Roth had found them a cabin that was out of the way, but close enough to a hospital if Isabella needed something.
    Needing to occupy his mind beyond his own fucked up thoughts, he plugged his iPhone into the auxiliary port and found the playlist he used for his workouts. Def Leppard, Metallica, and a little Journey got him through the last leg of the drive. It was too dark to see much more than shadowy trees, but the scent of the lake went a long way to easing his tattered nerves.
    By the time he found the main lodge, Izzy was asleep with the dog in the back again. He reached into the console for his baseball cap and decided against waking them. He locked the doors as he went in for the keys.
    An older man shuffled out from a small office. “Hello there.”
    “Are you Richard?”
    “That I am, son. That must make you…” He flipped through papers on a clipboard on the counter and put on a pair of glasses. “Madigan, John C.” Dressed in plaid and denim, he pulled the glasses off and dropped them on top of the pages.
    “Jack,” Logan said easily. He’d practiced in the shower and in the car on his way to the hospital. He was used to using false names for hotels, but he’d never actually kept a name going. They usually used a pun on names or famous characters from movies.
    The man scraped large, craggy fingers into his shock of white hair. “I was beginning to think you folks got lost.” His Maine accent lengthened the O and made it sound more like an A.
    “My wife needed a pit stop.”
    “As they do,” Richard said with a laugh. “As they do.” He turned and unhooked a key with a carved moose keychain. “This would be a little easier to navigate in the daytime, I’m afraid. You requested the most remote cabin we have.”
    “Yeah. My wife and I are writers.”
    “I’m not much of a reader. Anything like Stephen King?”
    Logan laughed. His life hadn’t quite gotten to Stephen King levels, but it was damn close these days. He tried to think of a few authors he’d seen on Izzy’s shelves at the house. “More James Patterson meets Nora Roberts.”
    “Never heard of ‘em.”
    Logan figured they were safe from snooping if that was the case. “We’ve got a deadline looming so we figured we would get away from home and the intrusions.”
    “Well, we’re on the fringes of the off-season here, so you’ll have plenty of time alone. And you look like the workout sort. There’s plenty of running trails through the woods.”
    “Sounds amazing, sir.”
    “We like it.” He handed Logan the key. “There’s a computer in the rec center off the lake if you need to do email and that kinda