Chapter Thirteen
W as she disappointed that Logan didn’t join her when she showered, or when she put on the T-shirt he loaned her and went to sleep in the bed in Storm’s room?
Yes. Much to her chagrin, she was quietly devastated that he didn’t even try. At least if he had made an advance, she could have shut him down. Or shared the blame with him for any weakness she showed.
Now that he was becoming noble, she had even less reason to hate him and more to like. Jerk.
After tossing and turning, she rose early and ran home through the dewy grass.
“What are you doing here?” Gramps asked when he got up to find her scrambling eggs and toasting sourdough.
“Making sure you’re not eating canned peaches for breakfast.”
“I’ll eat them after you’re gone if I want them.”
“You’ll be too full,” she assured him, filling two plates, then pouring each of them a coffee.
“This is nice, Sophie. Thank you.” He sat down with her at the table. “I don’t often get you to myself. When is Biyen home?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“It’ll be good to have him back. It was too quiet here yesterday after everyone was gone. Are you and Logan—”
“No,” she stated firmly. “Just friends.”
Was that what they were, though? Last night, she had cracked open a door to something more carnal and he had refused to walk through it.
The rumble that came from Gramps’s chest was equally skeptical.
“He apologized,” she mumbled around her eggs. “Life is too short for grudges, right?”
“I can’t say holding on to one ever enriched my life. I’m glad he’s making up with you. I was disappointed in him when I realized he’d hurt you, but that family”—he shook his head—“none of them had it easy, not even Wilf, so try not to judge any of them too harshly.”
“I don’t,” she fibbed, since she absolutely had judged Logan to within an inch of his life.
She swallowed a lump of egg, but it seemed to stay lodged in her throat. The timing had never seemed right to say these words, but on the heels of what he’d just said, the opening was right there.
“Gramps, I really appreciate that you never gave me a hard time over the way I acted that summer, after Logan left. Or later, when I got pregnant and had Biyen. I am so grateful you opened your home to us. You’re a really good influence on Biyen, too. He has Nolan, but grandads are pretty special. You’ve always been really important to me, and I’m very glad he has you, too.”
“Are we starting our Saturday by crying in our eggs?”
“No. Gotta keep the salt down because of your blood pressure.”
“Hmph.” He gave her a look of disgruntled affection. “I don’t suppose your mother ever told you how I reacted when she came home pregnant?”
“No. Why? What happened?” She closed her mouth over a scoop of eggs.
“I threw her out.” He stabbed his toast crust into his ketchup, mouth tight with self-disgust.
“Gramps.”
“I look back and wonder what I thought that would accomplish. Babies don’t get unmade just because you disapprove. I regret it to this day, losing all that time with her, especially after she left us too early.” Anguish dragged even deeper lines into a face that was as wrinkled as a dried apple, leathered by years of working in winds flowing off the salt-chuck.
“Did you not like my dad or…?”
“I didn’t know him. She hardly knew him herself. She met him on a weekend in Victoria, then he went back to Ontario. When I kicked her out, she got hold of him and he flew her out there. They got married and I didn’t see her again until your grandmother’s funeral. I didn’t know what to say to her when I saw her. You were just a little thing, barely walking. They were living on the Sunshine Coast by then. He’d started logging. I didn’t even know. I was sick, absolutely sick at what I’d done. Your grandmother had never forgiven me for it, but I didn’t know how to change it so I let your mother walk away again without saying a word to her. I hate myself for that, too.”
“Oh, Gramps.” She reached across, and he turned his hand to pinch her fingers in his.
“It wasn’t until she lost your father, and I went to that funeral, that I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d never seen her so heartbroken. I couldn’t stomach her trying to carry on alone. I asked her to come live with me here and she did. I’m grateful for that because you were my second chance to get things right.”
“I really am going to cry.” She grabbed a napkin and shoved it under her wet eyes. Sniffled. “She never told me any of that.”
“No, she never threw it in my face, either. You want to hear a secret, though? When you started acting out and she didn’t know what to do with you, I thought, there. Now you know how it feels when your child no longer makes sense to you. It’s terrifying. But I sat her down and told her not to make my mistakes.”
Janine hadn’t. She had told Sophie that she loved her and urged her to, Look after yourself. Be safe. But she had never shamed Sophie for the way she was behaving, and when Sophie had told her she was pregnant, she had hugged her and asked her what she wanted to do about it.
Sophie had thought seriously about abortion, aware that school and the rest of her future would all be impacted, but there had been something very grounding in deciding to have the baby. All the things she had thought were important, like why Logan Fraser didn’t love her, had ceased to matter. She loved her baby, and when Biyen arrived, he loved her back so hard, she could barely withstand it.
“I was worried about you, same as she was, but you’re so much like her,” Gramps was saying. “I knew you’d clean yourself up and you did. Then we lost her and that was damned unfair on you. I was very worried about you, then. I could see that Nolan was nothing but dead air. I couldn’t interfere, though. Not after what I’d done to your mother. Not until you were in my house. Then I was allowed to tell him to fuck off.”
She choked slightly on her eggs, washing them down with coffee.
“It was still big of you to let me and Biyen move in. He can be a lot, bashing around here, always asking questions and eating nonstop.”
“Is that what you think?” He shook his head. “All I ever think is how easy he is. A helluva lot easier than girls.”
“Sexist! I am the son you always wanted, in case you haven’t noticed. I can replace a coupling on a transmission shaft and make you breakfast. Also keep you taking your meds. I’ll do that while I’m thinking of it.” She rose and fetched them.
When she brought the pills to him, she gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek. “I mean it, you know. Thank you.”
“You’re a good girl, Sophie.” He patted her arm. “I like having you and the boy here. How would I know so much about myself, if he wasn’t telling me all those dinosaur facts?”
“Ha!” She sat to eat her last bites, then took her plate to the sink, coming back to top up their coffee.
“I’ll say one more thing about Logan,” Gramps said somberly. “He’s made mistakes and I don’t condone them, but I couldn’t turn my back on him, either. Even though I wanted to kick him in the ass for hurting my girl.”
“I know,” she murmured, sitting and taking up her mug, staring into her coffee. The way Logan had worked under Gramps all those years made him the son Gramps always wished he’d had.
“He was never going to get where he wanted to go by staying here, Soph.”
True. Raven’s Cove was a far cry from Genoa.
“They all have Wilf’s sense of ambition and one-track mind.” He set his hand between his eyes then knifed it forward. “They had to chase whatever it was they were chasing. They would have stagnated if they’d stayed here.”
“I know. But that’s why nothing will happen between me and Logan,” she said with a philosophical shrug. “Eventually, he’ll go off to chase more dreams and I’ll still be here.” Raising her son and looking after her grandfather. “We want different things.”
She wasn’t sure if she was clarifying it for him, or saying it aloud so she would hear it and accept it.
His mouth pursed in something that might have been disappointment, but he only said, “That’s his loss and my gain, then. Isn’t it?”
She doubted Logan would see it that way, but, “Sure is.”
*
Logan was already working when Sophie got there. Aside from a, “Morning,” mumbled around a couple of nails poking out of his mouth, he didn’t say anything about last night or the fact she had disappeared before he saw her this morning.
She got to work, trying to ignore this confused but shimmering awareness between them.
Nothing would make me happier than for you to hate-fuck me. Not because I want sex…
Did he want sex? She did.
Oh God. She did.
Between his kiss after the water rescue and the lessening of her anger and their intimate conversations and his touch on her ass yesterday, she was starting to think—fantasize, really—about sex with Logan. Not sex colored by hate, but with something else. Forgiveness?
She leapt on a callout to the wharf, even though it was so simple she could have sold the part to the skipper and hurried back upstairs. She installed it herself and waved off the labor charge, grateful for the break.
On her way back upstairs, she stopped at the pub and picked up a couple of bowls of mulligatawny, which she and Logan polished in short order, then got back to work.
The rest of the day was quiet enough that they were down to finishing work and a first coat of paint by five.
“I’m going to knock off and make dinner for Gramps,” Sophie said with a stretch.
“Why don’t you invite him to join us at the pub?”
“Honestly? The pub is great but ask me to recite the menu. I can do it, word for word.”
“I hear ya,” he said as he wrapped a paint roller. “I eat there so often I don’t need a menu, either.”
“Come join us,” she offered impulsively. “I’m only making salmon patties with a salad, but Gramps will enjoy your company.”
It turned into a nice evening with a good meal and some big belly laughs.
“What time does the boy get in tomorrow?” Gramps asked at one point.
“Around two.”
“I’ll come to get him and inspect this new office of yours while I’m there,” Gramps told Logan, briefly turning melancholy as he added, “I wish Wilf could see all the work you boys are getting done. It would have made him really happy.”
Sophie caught the flex of anguish on Logan’s face. She felt it.
So did Gramps because he said, “He did the best he could, son. That’s all any of us can do.”
“Yeah,” Logan said under his breath and ran his hands up and down his thighs.
Sophie heard his regret, his inner question as to whether he had done his best.
“He was really proud of you guys, though,” Sophie said. “It’s not as if he thought you should have stayed here, rather than accomplish all the things you’ve done.”
“We could have come back now and again, though,” Logan said with quiet self-contempt. “I could have thanked him, just once, instead of being so angry…” He shook his head at himself, profile carved to a sharp line as he stared at his empty plate. “Such a waste of energy.”
And time. And opportunity. She felt that, too, as she thought about how much she had resented Logan’s presence here all these weeks, only lately coming around to forgiving him.
He swore under his breath, then shook off his mood. “Everyone done? I’ll wash dishes.”
While Logan did the dishes and Sophie started laundry, Gramps moved into his chair. He was snoring by the time she got back to the kitchen.
“It’s really nice out,” Sophie said as she came in and took up the tea towel. “The sky is pink and the tide is low. If Biyen was here, we would go down to the beach and dig for geoducks.”
“He eats them?”
“No. He likes to count their rings to see how old they are. Sixty-two is the record.”
“That kid,” Logan said with a chuckle. Then, as he rinsed the sink, asked, “Why would you tell me that? You know how competitive I am.”
“You want to go dig geoducks?”
“I was going to head back to the office and put a second coat on the walls, but yeah, let’s go down to the beach for a few minutes.” He dried his hands on the tea towel she still held.
When they came outside a minute later, the breeze was ribboned with the warmth off the dried grass and underlaid by cool, salty currents from the wet tideline.
They ambled down the short path to the beach, which was an eroded drop down to a handful of washed-up logs and a rocky intertidal zone. They hadn’t brought a bucket or shovel which was a small shame because there were tons of holes in the sand, indicating loads of clams and geoducks.
“Why is Biyen a vegetarian? Because his dad is?”
“Yeah, Nolan is very counterculture, in case you haven’t noticed. But Biyen is so nature-focused, avoiding meat is probably something he would have done regardless. It can be a hassle sometimes, but there are worse things a kid could do than make you cook him extra vegetables. That wasn’t a dig,” she added with a small grimace as she heard herself.
“I know.” He shook his head, obviously still ruminating about Wilf.
“Oh, don’t,” she urged, nudging his elbow with her own. “It would be nice if we all had a crystal ball to know what was coming, but we don’t.”
“Precisely why we should be our best self in the moment we’re in.”
“That’s a very lofty aspiration, but it’s not very realistic.” She moved to stand in front of him, drawing his pensive gaze off the distant shores onto her. “We’re all going to be dumb shits sometimes. And life isn’t always going to offer you a tidy choice between black and white. Sometimes you’re going to wind up with regret no matter what you do. Because if you said to me that you wish you hadn’t been my first, and that we didn’t have that memory between us, I’d be really hurt.”
“Ah, Soph.” He dragged her into a loose embrace. “I regret everything about how I treated you that summer except that. If I could…” His tortured voice trailed off.
“No. That’s the point. There was no winning for you that summer.”
She hugged around his waist and leaned into him, allowing the simple embrace to heal some of her old wounds because there had been no winning for her, either. Even if he had taken her away with him, at some point there would have been a reckoning. She had been too immature for a serious relationship then. Her behavior after his rejection proved it.
She couldn’t regret their lovemaking, though. Not when his body still made hers sing this way simply by standing against hers.
Closing her eyes, she savored the feel of him, familiar, yet new. They’d both changed, maturing physically as well as emotionally. His chest was broader and more muscled, his arms heavier on her shoulders, his presence that much more imposing and confident. His scent was deeply familiar, carrying those odd vestiges from the marina office and the purity of coastal rainforest and him. That boy who was now that man.
Her fingertips found the indent of his spine in his lower back. She tilted her face up so her chin was on his chest, caught in the murky choice between being smart and taking advantage of the opportunity before her.
“Those eyes of yours,” he said with a vexed pull of his brows. “I never needed you to look after me. Do you realize that?” He cupped her face while he seemed to take great care to memorize every aspect of her features.
“You always seemed lost,” she whispered. “You still do.”
He didn’t seem to know what to say to that. His gaze tangled with hers and her hands flattened to climb behind his shoulders. He dipped his chin and his mouth touched hers.
He hesitated.
She went up on her toes, increasing the pressure.
With a rumble in his chest, his hand slid to cup the base of her skull and he slowly dragged her into a deep, thorough kiss, one that lavished attention from one corner of her mouth to the other, plundering even as he worshiped.
Here was the razor’s edge between living for today and repenting tomorrow. He was leaving and she was anchored here forever, but in this second her skin was electric and her body swamped by sensations. Heat engulfed her. The velvet brush of his tongue against hers was an erotic tease. The lazy roam of his wide hand down her back unfurled her sensuality as easily as sliding open a zip.
The sting in her nipples had her pressing tighter to him. The hardness of his thighs brought her own up to crook against it.
Dizzy, she drew on his bottom lip, enjoying the groan she pulled out of him right before his hands hardened and he dragged his head up. He caught her ponytail in his fist. His heart was thumping hard enough for her to feel it against her breast, but maybe that was her own. Neither of them was drawing a steady breath.
“Soph.”
“You have an empty house,” she reminded him.
“Believe me, I know,” he said grittily. “I’m still kicking myself for not doing terrible, illegal things to you last night.” He released her hair and cupped the side of her neck, thumb caressing the hollow beneath her ear. “But this is where you drive me nuts. You act tough enough to make me believe it, but now I know how easy it is to hurt you and I won’t do that again.”
She pulled away. “I’m not eighteen anymore.”
“It wasn’t being young that made it easy for me to hurt you, Soph.”
She bit back a gasp, surprised how deeply that struck.
“We can hurt each other,” he said with a squeeze of her shoulder, as if that was some kind of consolation. “I don’t want us to do that again. So I’m going to go put another coat of paint on the office. Tomorrow, I’ll just be putting my desk together so unless you get a call-out, you don’t have to come in.”
“Sure. Thanks.” She crossed her arms. “Good night.”
He hovered an extra few seconds before he exhaled and walked away.