Wish Upon a Christmas Star by Darlene Gardner Read Free Book Online Page A

hugged her back. “You’re forgiven.”
    Then his father was grabbing his hand and pulling him into a
hearty hug. He ushered Mom toward the concourse, yet she looked back at Logan
three times.
    Logan waved, both sad and relieved that it was time for them to
part ways. Sad... He wondered why that word had
popped into his head. And why had the sentence snagged in his throat when he
went to tell his mother he was happy?
    An image of Maria’s face floated in his mind. He shut it out,
irked at how potent the power of suggestion could be. He wouldn’t dwell on how
things might have been. He liked his life in New York just fine, thank you very
much.
    He started walking toward the opposite concourse from his
parents, again moving with the crowd. Though wreaths hung on the walls and
Christmas music spilled out of restaurants, he’d seldom felt less holiday
spirit.
    Logan was halfway to his gate when his cell phone rang. It was
Annalise DiMarco. He quickly rolled his carry-on suitcase over to the side,
stopped and clicked through to the call.
    “Annalise, what’s up?” he asked.
    “I can barely hear you. Where are you?” Annalise hardly took a
breath. “Oh, my gosh, you’re already at the airport, aren’t you?”
    “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just tell me why you
called.”
    “Okay, but you won’t believe it. Maria’s in Key West. She’s
been there since yesterday.”
    “Ah, hell.” He’d had an inkling that telling her about his
conversation with Mike on the morning of his death had backfired. Maria had
heard only that her brother was thinking about quitting his job. “I’m sorry,
Annalise. She told me she wasn’t going.”
    “It’s not your fault, Logan. She told me the same thing. She
didn’t want us to know.”
    “What can I do?”
    “Nothing,” Annalise said. “I almost didn’t call to tell you,
but I hadn’t thanked you yet.”
    “For nothing.”
    “For trying,” she insisted.
    Had he tried hard enough? Logan wondered after disconnecting
the call. He remembered as clearly as though it were yesterday how he’d
persuaded Mike to go to work on that fateful morning.
    “I can’t let you stay here and freeload off me,” Logan had
said. “You’ve got to work.”
    “I know it,” Mike had answered. “But I hate being a
busboy.”
    “Then quit after you find another job,” Logan had told him. “In
the meantime, though, there are a lot of things worse than working at the World
Trade Center.”
    Not on 9/11, there hadn’t been.
    Logan felt sick to his stomach. It was bad enough carrying
around the guilt that he was responsible for Mike being at the restaurant that
day. Seeing the false hope in Maria’s eyes had been worse.
    He couldn’t rewind time and take back what he’d said to Mike.
He could, however, do something about Maria.
    He headed for his gate and got in line at the counter.
    “How may I help you?” an airline representative asked when he
reached the front of the line.
    Logan slapped his boarding pass down on the counter. “I need to
make a change. Do you fly to Key West?”
    * * *
    M ARIA WOKE UP W EDNESDAY morning thinking about
Logan Collier. She turned over on the lumpy mattress, half expecting him to be
on the other side of the bed, his chest bare, his face soft in sleep.
    He wasn’t there.
    She sat up, pushing the hair back from her face. Images from
her dreams bombarded her consciousness. Of Logan kissing her, stripping off her
clothes, making love to her. Of Mike bounding down the stairs, bursting into the
basement and covering his eyes with a hand. “Whoa. Didn’t
mean to interrupt.”
    She groaned aloud. Part of her dream was actually a memory.
Mike had been a fan of Logan’s, treating him like another big brother. On one
memorable occasion, he’d come to the basement to say hello to Logan and had
barged in on them necking.
    That was all she and Logan had been doing. They’d never gone
all the way. Annalise had gotten pregnant when she was a senior in