Chapter Two
S ophie hurried to finish planting the potatoes, not even showering before she hiked up the trail to the Fraser house.
This house had seemed like a castle the first time she’d seen it, when her mother had brought her here twenty years ago. Gramps’s house was a modest homestead on the flats above the high-water mark, accessed by a lane that wound behind the bluff from the village. This one was perched to overlook the cove and marina.
After losing her husband to a logging accident, Janine Hughes had brought her young daughter to Raven’s Cove, where her father, Art, had been running the marina. Janine had taken a job at the general store, and Sophie had started kindergarten at the one-room schoolhouse up the hill.
Sophie could still remember how awed she had been when she had learned that boy lived in this house. Heading into her very first day of school, she had been intimidated by the rambunctious kids who were big and loud and all knew each other’s names. She had accidentally dropped her sweater and that boy had picked it up to give it back to her.
When school let out that day, on the teacher’s instruction, he had escorted her to the general store. The only other child her age, Trystan, had come with them.
“We live up there,” Trystan had said, pointing to where Reid was striding up the driveway ahead of them, moving with purpose and ignoring his younger brothers.
Reid had never been mean, but he’d never been warm or friendly, mostly keeping to himself. Trystan had become her playmate, disappearing regularly to spend time with his mother’s family, but always paired up with her for lessons, becoming a reliable companion and confidante.
Logan had been godlike, outgoing, and full of jokes. He’d been allowed to say, “Let’s go look at the boats,” and run down to the wharf with his little brother.
Sophie had had to sit at a table by the window in the general store, practicing her printing while her mother finished her shift.
Those early memories of watching Logan disappear down the ramp had ignited her interest in boats and their engines. Her grandfather had nurtured it, eventually taking her down to the wharf himself, then bringing her into the repair shop. Had he ever guessed the real source of her passion for marine mechanics?
Working alongside her grandfather meant seeing Logan. His passion for watercraft—how they were shaped and crafted and propelled—was in his DNA.
She had fallen in love with Logan the way a puppy imprinted on an alpha dog. She cringed thinking of how obvious she’d been with her terminal case of adoration. It had lasted all through their school years and might have been killed by teasing from her schoolmates if Reid and Trystan hadn’t stepped in at different times, telling other kids to, “Shut up. She can like who she wants.”
The fact her mother had been best friends with Glenda, Logan’s mother, had made it worse. So had her close friendship with Trystan. Sophie’s life had been so intertwined with Logan’s, it had made a romantic connection with him seem sensible and feasible. Inevitable. As though they were meant to be together.
She had completely taken for granted that they would marry and live happily ever after.
Meanwhile, he had left the minute he could, same as Reid had done before him. Same as Trystan did after him. All without any intention of coming back.
Glenda had put it nicely, saying the Fraser boys were “restless spirits.” A more accurate statement was that they had had a very complicated relationship with their father and each other. That was no surprise, given they had all been born from different mothers and crammed into the same house where Logan’s mother, Glenda, insisted they all get along. They had done their best for her sake, then got the hell out the minute they could.
Sophie had been convinced, deep in her heart, that Logan would come back for her, though.
Sure enough, as he was heading into his final year at university, he had returned. Glenda had finally had enough of Wilf’s cheating. Logan came back to help her move to Port Hardy.
Sophie had just graduated high school. She had been accepted at a trade school in Nanaimo, planning to become a marine mechanic. In some ways, it was a formality. Like Logan, she’d been learning at Art’s knee, sent into diesel-infused engine rooms from the time she could hold a wrench. Maybe she didn’t love boats the way Logan did, but she liked the work. She was good at it. It was a solid living, especially for a woman, and she found the work satisfying.
Three long, yearning years had slipped by at that point. Her feelings toward Logan hadn’t shifted one iota. If anything, they’d been fed and watered by fantasies of their making a future together.
The day he returned, he saw her. Really saw her. She had reveled in his surprise and sudden interest. They talked like equals. He asked her about her plans, and she told him she was leaving Raven’s Cove. He had congratulated her as though it was a huge accomplishment to move south seven hundred kilometers despite the fact he had chosen a school back east.
Their long catch-up that day had turned into a good night kiss. Several. They were as potent a match as Sophie had always believed they would be. She had always wanted him to be her first and, during a walk on the beach the next day, she asked him if he would be.
Logan had seemed startled but touched.
“Are you sure?” he had asked her a thousand times.
She had been more than certain. They were meant to be, weren’t they?
He had initiated her in a way that had seemed utterly perfect. Sexy and playful, tender and passionate. Maybe it hadn’t been exactly the way all those romance novels of her mother’s played out, but afterward, she’d been more in love than ever.
Then, two days later, when Glenda had flown to her new home in Port Hardy, and the trailer Logan was driving onto the ferry was loaded and locked, he had said good-bye.
Good luck at school. Make yourself a good life.
Sophie had packed a bag and caught up to him at the ferry slip. She would live with Logan while he finished university and go with him if he got into that program in Italy he was applying for. Trade school? Who needed it! She wanted their future together to start now.
Oh, to be that young and na?ve. She had been so excited to surprise him with her decision. It was romantic, wasn’t it?
No, it definitely was not.
He had been floored that she thought he wanted her to come with him. Uncomfortable.
“You asked me to be your first, Sophie. Not your last.”
She shuddered, shaking off the ice water of that memory as she knocked on the door of the Fraser house.
She cracked the door seconds later, calling out, “Emma? You here? It’s me.”
“I’m downstairs,” Emma called.
The split level made the most of its position overlooking the cove and marina. It had plenty of windows and jutting decks, but stairs. Man, did it have stairs.
Sophie left her dirty boots on the stoop and slipped from the foyer through the living room to the kitchen, then down the stairs to the basement where Emma was folding laundry that she piled onto a bench press with a barbell across it.
“Who let you off your overtime chain?” Emma teased.
“I know. Logan’s covering the office, the store, and all the callouts today. Good luck with that,” she said with an eye-roll. “I live in terror that Randy will fail his exam and have to stay for another rewrite. Or won’t come back at all. That would actually kill me.”
“You really think he wouldn’t come back?”
“Forty-sixty?” She wavered her hand to indicate she didn’t like the odds. “He would have to pay the company for his tuition and everything, since we sponsored him, but he has a girlfriend in Nanaimo. And he has a wedding to go to. This is probably my only day off until he gets back in July.”
“And you used it to come see me?” Emma clutched a sleeper to her chest. “I’m touched.”
“Logan told me Storm’s aunt might make a play for custody? What’s going on with that?” Sophie shifted a box of framed photos off a paint-spattered kitchen chair and sat on it.
“I’m trying not to think about it.” Emma grimaced and shook out a receiving blanket covered in yellow ducks, halved it, then halved it again, before she ironed it down her front. She rolled it to the size of a burrito, then added it to the ones already in the basket. “I thought you and Logan only talk about work?”
“That’s the deal, but he told me they’re all staying longer. Gramps told Logan he can stay in our house ,” she added with outrage.
“Because my family’s coming?” Guilt flashed across Emma’s oval face. “I’m sorry, mate. Does Art not realize you two lock horns?”
“Gramps has a soft spot for him.” For all the Fraser boys, really, but especially Logan. Logan had been more than a willing pupil. He’d extracted every scrap of knowledge he could from Gramps, but she suspected he’d confided in him, too. “Gramps probably feels he owes something to Wilf. They were friends all those years. And Glenda, for that matter. She used to come up to cook for Gramps when Mom was sick.”
Glenda had been a godsend throughout Sophie’s life, but especially while Janine had been in treatment. Sophie had been stretched thin between her new baby and her terminal mother, unable to travel up here to look after Gramps as well.
Neighbors help neighbors , was Gramps’s view. Especially in a small community like this one. If Logan needed a bed, then Gramps would give him one.
Sophie was less inclined to be neighborly, especially to him.
“Maybe we can figure out something else,” Emma murmured, moving along to the rumpus room that Logan had been sharing with Trystan until Emma had married Reid and moved out of the room she’d been using upstairs.
The basement had yet to benefit from the updates upstairs. Everything was tidy, but dated. In here, there was a distressed dresser, a television with slots for VHS and DVDs, and a sofa that turned into a bed. If Logan’s muttered remarks were anything to go on, that sofabed was a medieval torture device.
“Logan was going to set up his desk in here but hasn’t found the time or the right place. This room is too small for his desk once the bed is pulled out. I was planning for the kids to stay in here. Trystan stays in my old room on his nights with Storm, which is actually the room he used to share with Logan,” Emma said with a chuckle. “He’s mostly on the Storm Ridge now, but I’ll need it for Mom. I guess Logan will be on the bed in Storm’s room when he’s on shift.”
“They arrive this weekend, don’t they? Have you decided whether you’re going to Vancouver to meet them?”
“I am.” Conflict had her squinching up her nose. “I hate to leave Storm, but I’m excited to see the kids. I’ve missed them so much.”
Emma didn’t say she missed much from her life in New Zealand, but her niece and nephew were the top of the list when she did.
She frowned with concern. “I also have to ease Mom into the idea of all this without, you know, putting Storm in her arms from the jump. That dinosaur exhibit you suggested hasn’t started yet, by the way. We’ll try to catch it on the way back, but we’re going to the suspension bridge and the aquarium. Then we’ll fly here, mess around for a few days, go on the boat tour with Trystan, another few days here, then back to Vancouver before they fly home. It will go fast.”
“Maybe from your perspective. Logan’s going to be at my house most of that time.” Sophie quickly waved off her acrimony. “I’m just having a whinge.” Having Logan under her roof would stir up old feelings, ones she didn’t want to allow.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Emma searched her expression.
“No. It makes me feel too stupid.”
“Been there,” Emma said with a faint smile of empathy. She planted her hands on her hips and looked to the stairs. “We thought about making our walk-in closet into a temporary nursery, but that’s a lot of work and once Storm is in there, she might not want to go back to her old room.”
“Honestly, Em, it’s fine.” Sophie gave in to the inevitable. She hadn’t come here to plead her case anyway. She was far more concerned about what would happen to Storm and thus Emma.
Before she could pry any further on how Emma was coping, Emma asked, “Did you ask Biyen if he’d like to play with Immy and Coop while they’re here?” Imogen was Biyen’s age and Cooper had just turned five.
“He does, but he’s supposed to go camping with Nolan as soon as school finishes.”
“Oh? I thought…”
“I know. They usually go later in the summer, after Biyen’s birthday, but Nolan and Karma aren’t getting along.”
“Metaphysically?” Emma lifted intrigued brows.
“Yes?” Sophie brought her shoulders up to her ears. “Karma is his girlfriend.”
“Oh right.”
“But Nolan has never bought into the idea of cause and effect. Most people understand that if you move in with your girlfriend, but never pay rent, eventually she’ll kick you out. That blindsides him every time.”
“How does she pay rent? I thought she sold oils and crystals and such.”
“She does. She also works for BC Ferries. She wants to quit and open a store. I’m getting all this through Biyen, reading between the lines. She thinks Nolan should get on with the ferries and support her while she opens her own business, rather than, you know, him doing odd jobs for beer money and smoking weed all day.”
“Maybe she should have consulted her runes before she let him move in.”
“She should have consulted me ,” Sophie said out of the side of her mouth, but they were both chuckling. God, she loved Emma for those deadpan dunks of hers.
“Does Nolan smoke pot around Biyen?” Emma tucked her chin with concern.
“No,” Sophie said firmly. “That’s a red line and he knows it. But it’s legal now and he used to bring it to Mom when she was in treatment so I can’t be too judgmental about him using it on his own time. Biyen knows what it is. I’ve talked to him about it and why I don’t want him to try it.”
Infuriatingly, Nolan was not a bad father. He might be lousy at paying taxes or even buying a cup of coffee if he could bum one, but he showed up regularly to take Biyen fishing or hiking or kite-flying. It might only be an afternoon, but his time with Biyen was almost always one-on-one, nurturing Biyen’s love of nature and sense of self-worth.
“Tell you what,” Emma said brightly. “After Mom and the kids leave, you and Biyen can move in here. Logan can stay with Art. Would that work?”
“I don’t hate that idea, but you might want to ask your husband first.”
“I’m just going to tell him. I want to see his face.”
They both knew Reid well enough that the mere idea had them bursting into laughter.
*
As Logan sat down with Reid, Trystan, and Emma, Emma said wistfully, “Our last dinner as a family for a while.”
She had roasted a prime rib, maybe to turn it into a bit of an occasion. Reid was pouring wine, looking for anyone else who wanted a glass.
“You sound like Glenda.” Trystan was offering spoonfuls of pureed carrot to Storm, but she was more interested in squashing the banana pieces on her tray.
“Because she called us a family?” Reid pointed a warning finger at Logan. “Do not accuse me of marrying your mother.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Glenda offered to come stay while I’m away,” Emma said as she passed the mashed potatoes.
“To look after us?” Logan asked dryly.
“Wait a minute. Are you our nanny?” Trystan circled his finger to indicate all three men. “Guys, we’ve had this all wrong.”
“To look after Storm,” Emma said impassively, ignoring their silliness.
“I’m insulted. Are you insulted?” Logan asked Reid.
“I feel my ability to parent has been slighted, yes,” Reid agreed.
“Trys?”
“Glenda knows I won’t be here. Obviously, her faith in the two of you is somewhere below sea level.”
“She offered to clean the house and make some food so I could spend my time visiting with my family instead of cooking, but I’ll leave all of that in your capable hands, then.” Emma raised her brows at Logan in a silent, Ha. “Seeing as you don’t feel a need for assistance.”
“That is exactly something Mom would say,” Logan noted, curling his lip in annoyance.
“I take that as a compliment. I adore her.” Now Emma’s eyes were sparkling, her teeth flashing as she closed her smile over her fork.
“She’d probably like to meet your mom,” Reid said.
“She told me she would.” Emma nodded. “I explained we won’t have any spare beds once my family gets here.”
“She stayed with Art and Sophie when she was here for Dad’s service. They’d have her, wouldn’t they?”
Trystan’s cheeks went hollow. Emma gave the end of her nose a rub.
“What,” Reid demanded, looking at each of them in turn, ending up at Logan.
He refused to be a coward about it.
“Art invited me to stay with them while Emma’s family is here so there’s no room at that inn, either.”
Reid’s expression hardened. He slowly turned his attention back to Emma. “What does Sophie say about that?”
“Not much.” Emma shrugged.
“It’s nice that you all care so much about Sophie’s tender feelings but can we all take one step out of my private life and remember that it’s been eight years since Sophie and I—” Logan cut himself off as all eyes turned to look at him.
Even Storm turned her innocent, curious blue gaze onto him.
He refused to kiss and tell, but it was painfully obvious that Sophie wished him dead. He had thought she would have lightened up on her mad by now, but nope. That woman had a strong grip when it came to a grudge.
“Can we move on?” he said.
“She’s your direct report,” Reid said without heat. “Moving into her home is a recipe for an HR issue.”
“Raven’s Cove is one long HR issue.” The hiring pool was microscopic. Even when they managed to recruit from afar, the isolation took a toll. Attrition was rampant, but hiring locals also had pitfalls. Firing someone who didn’t work out impacted their ability to pay rent, creating a domino effect through the community. Outside of work, affairs and personal conflicts were rife. “David Attenborough himself hasn’t seen this much raw, animal behavior.”
“You should set one of your episodes here, Trys,” Emma said with a wink.
“Too dangerous,” Trys assured her.
“There’s nothing else to rent,” Logan said, since Reid was continuing to glare at him. “You know what this place is like.”
“I know what Dad was like.”
“Says the guy who slept with our fucking nanny,” Logan shot back. “That apple fell right at the base of the tree, didn’t it?”
“As family dinners go, I’m starting to feel right at home,” Emma said with false brightness. “How are preparations coming for your first tour, Trys?”
Reid kept his gaze locked with Logan’s. “You’ll notice I married her.”
“Reid.” Emma touched his wrist. “Sophie is a grown-up. If she felt threatened by Logan being there, she would say so. Art wouldn’t put her in the way of harm.”
“Everything is done that can be done,” Trystan answered Emma. “Now we need to launch and work out the kinks. I’m glad we’ll have your bunch on board for one of our early trials. You’ll be more forgiving. And maybe do the dishes?”
Reid finally looked away, turning his attention to Trystan. He began quizzing him about staff. He was a big brother in the Orwellian sense sometimes, micromanaging in ways that drove Logan and Trystan nuts.
But as his brothers hashed out some fine points, Logan caught Emma watching him. Calm, sweet, compassionate Emma.
She didn’t say it, but he heard her all the same.
Watch your step, mate, or the next roast in my pan will be carved out of your sorry gut.