Chapter 17
Jasmine
The cab turns onto an unpaved road that winds through a tunnel of bare pine trees. Gravel crunches under the tires. The air coming through the cracked window is cold and carries the salt-heavy smell of the ocean. I sit forward in my seat as the trees thin and the road opens up into a clearing.
“Oh my God,” I say softly, completely overwhelmed.
The house sits on a rise overlooking the Atlantic. It's a sprawling Cape Cod with gray cedar shingles that have gone silver from years of salt air. A circular driveway sweeps around a manicured front lawn.
The roofline is steep with dormer windows and a stone chimney rising from the center. A wraparound porch stretches across the entire ocean side of the house. Beyond the porch, the land slopes down to a rocky beach where the waves are breaking in steady, white-capped sets against dark stone.
There's a three-car garage to the left, a flagpole with an American flag snapping in the wind, and what looks like a small putting green tucked into the landscaped grounds near the driveway.
A pool sits between the main house and a smaller guest cottage, covered for the winter, surrounded by a stone patio.
“You called this a small place on the coast,” I say.
“It's on the coast.”
“Logan, this is an estate.”
“It's a house.”
I get out of the cab, and the wind hits me immediately, sharp, cold, and full of salt. The sound of the ocean is everywhere. Seabirds wheel overhead, calling to each other in short, sharp cries.
Logan pays the driver and grabs our bags. The cab pulls away down the gravel road, and the engine noise fades until all that's left is the wind and the waves and the crunch of our footsteps on the driveway.
“How long have you had this place?” I ask.
“Three years. It was a wreck when I bought it. The previous owner let it go for a decade. Roof was leaking, the porch was rotting, the kitchen hadn't been updated since the eighties.”
“You renovated all of this yourself?”
“The kitchen and the porch. I hired contractors for the rest.” He unlocks the front door and pushes it open. “After you.”
I step inside and stop. The entryway opens directly into a living room with high ceilings and exposed wooden beams, the color of honey. Wide plank floors, sanded smooth and stained a warm gray.
A stone fireplace dominates the far wall with a thick wooden mantel and a stack of split logs in a wrought iron basket beside it. The furniture is simple and comfortable — a deep sectional sofa in navy linen, leather armchairs, a low coffee table made from what looks like reclaimed driftwood.
The entire back wall is windows. Floor to ceiling, facing the ocean. Through the glass, the rocky coastline stretches out in both directions, dark stone and white spray and the vast gray-green expanse of the Atlantic.
I walk to the windows and press my hand against the glass. Outside, the ocean moves and breathes and crashes, and it feels like the house is sitting at the edge of the world.
To the right is the kitchen. White cabinets with brass hardware, butcher block countertops, a deep farmhouse sink positioned directly under a window that faces the water.
A large island in the center with barstools. Copper pots hanging from a rack above the stove. The countertops are clean, and there's a bowl of fresh fruit on the island and the fridge, when I open it, is fully stocked — vegetables, proteins, eggs, butter, cream, two bottles of wine.
“Who did all this?” I ask.
“Susan. She lives in town and takes care of the place when I'm not here. Stocks the fridge, keeps the heat running, makes sure the pipes don't freeze.”
“She stocked the fridge with enough food for a week.”
“I told her I was bringing someone.” He sets our bags down. “She may have gone overboard.”
He gives me the tour. Four bedrooms upstairs, each with its own bathroom. A study with built-in bookshelves lining three walls, half-filled with books, a leather reading chair by the window.
The master bedroom has a king bed with white linen and a view of the ocean that makes me stand in the doorway and forget how to speak. There's a claw-foot tub in the master bathroom and a walk-in shower with stone tiles and a bench.
“The tub was here when I bought the place,” Logan says from behind me. “Only thing in the house that didn't need replacing.”
“I'm going to live in that tub.”
He laughs. “I figured.”
We go back downstairs, and Logan builds a fire in the living room while I curl up on the sectional and wrap myself in a cashmere blanket I found draped over one of the armchairs.
The fire catches, and the room fills with the smell of burning pine, and the warmth pushes back against the cold coming off the windows. Outside, the afternoon light is fading, and the ocean is turning from gray-green to steel.
“Walk?” Logan says.
I look at him like he’s crazy because he is if he thinks I’m walking out there. “It’s freezing out there.”
“I have jackets.”
“Okay, but it’s on you if I turn into an icicle.”
He finds me a heavy parka from a closet near the back door, and we step out onto the porch. The cold hits my face and fills my lungs. We take the stone steps down from the porch to the yard and follow a path through the grass to the rocky beach below.
The rocks are dark and slippery with spray.
The waves crash against them in rhythmic sets, sending white foam across the stone.
Logan takes my hand, and we walk along the shoreline, picking our way over the uneven ground, not talking at first. The sound of the ocean is so big that it fills the silence completely.
We stop at a flat rock outcropping and sit down. The stone is cold and damp beneath me. Logan puts his arm around my shoulders, and I lean into him. We look out at the water and the sky is enormous, gray, and pale, stretching in every direction.
We've been together for weeks now, but there are conversations we've been stepping around. We talk about our days. We laugh, make love, and fall asleep tangled together. But we haven't talked about the thing underneath all of it.
The breakup. We've mentioned it in pieces, but we've never sat down and opened it all the way up. I've been putting it off because it's easier to be happy than to dig into the wound that almost kept us apart forever.
But if we don't do it, it'll sit between us like a crack in a foundation. If we're going to build something real, we need to clear the ground first.
I take a deep breath. “When you left, I didn't just lose you. I lost everything I thought my life was going to be.” I keep my eyes on the water.
“I was eighteen, and I had this picture in my head of us.
You in the NHL, me going to college, and we'd figure out the distance, and we'd make it work because we loved each other.
“Our future was so clear to me.”
Logan’s arm tightens around my shoulders.
“And then your mother told me I wasn't the right kind of woman, and you left. And the picture disappeared. Like someone ripped a photograph in half.”
“Jasmine—”
“Let me finish.” I take a breath. The cold air burns my throat. “I got through college on anger. And it worked. The anger got me through.” I pause. “But it also built the walls. Every man who tried to get close to me after you hit those walls and walked away.”
“I wish I could go back in time and do things differently, Jasmine,” Logan says in a sad voice.
I’m not done yet. “My father left before I was born. He and Mom were together for a few months. When she got pregnant, he disappeared. Mom never talks about him. When I was little, I used to ask, and she'd say it was just us and that we didn’t need anybody else.”
Logan laces his fingers through mine.
“When you left, it confirmed everything I'd already learned from a man I'd never met. Men leave. You love them, and they leave. And your mother standing in her kitchen telling me that I wasn't built for the hockey life was the extra layer.”
“I'm sorry,” Logan says. His voice is rough. “I'm so sorry, Jasmine.”
“I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I'm telling you because you need to understand what's underneath the walls. It's not pride. It's fear. Every time you cancel on me or choose your family or go quiet on your phone, my heart goes back to eighteen.”
He pulls me closer. His chin rests on the top of my head. The wind blows my hair across both our faces, and the ocean crashes against the rocks below us.
“I'm not leaving,” he says. “And I'm going to keep saying that until your heart believes it too.”
We walk back to the house as the last light fades. The windows glow warm from the fire still burning in the living room. Logan holds the door open for me, and the heat wraps around us as we step inside.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Starving.”
He cooks while I sit on a bar stool and sip on a glass of wine. Logan is confident in the kitchen. Logan sears the shrimp in batches and builds a sauce with white wine, butter, and lemon.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” I ask.
“YouTube, mostly. I started with eggs and worked up from there. My mother still doesn’t believe I can cook for myself,” he says with a laugh.
“She sees you as her little boy,” I say lightly, then anxiety grips me. How will we deal with the issue of Cat when she finds out about us? Despite Logan’s assurances, I know she’ll do everything in her power to ruin things for us.
I inhale deeply and push that thought away. I’ll worry about it later, just not this weekend.
“Shrimp scampi is not hard to make,” Logan says. “The trick is not overcooking the shrimp.” He drains the pasta and tosses it into the pan with the sauce. “Five minutes on one side, flip, two minutes on the other. Pull them out before they curl all the way.”
“You sound like a cooking show.”
He laughs. “I've watched a lot of cooking shows.”
He plates the pasta and sets a bowl in front of me. Steam rises off the linguine. I twist my fork and take a bite, and the flavors hit. It's perfect.
“This is incredible.”
We eat at the island, side by side, our knees touching. He opens a second bottle of wine. The fire crackles in the living room, and the wind howls against the windows.
After dinner, we wash the dishes together. When we’re done, I hang up the dish towel, and Logan turns off the kitchen light.
The living room is glowing with firelight, flickering across the ceiling. I take his hand and walk him to the sectional. We sit down and I pull the cashmere blanket over both of us.
Logan turns me to face him, his kiss soft and gently. His hand slides under my sweater and his fingers trace along my spine. There's no urgency tonight. We have all the time in the world.
I pull my sweater over my head. He runs his hand down my side, over the curve of my waist, across my hip. His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to my neck, his breath is warm against my skin. I tilt my head back, and his lips trail down my throat.
“Come here,” I whisper, and pull him down on top of me on the wide sofa. His weight settles over me. His face is lit in gold, and his blue eyes are fixed on mine.
He undresses me slowly, piece by piece. Every time he removes something, his mouth follows — a kiss on my collarbone where the sweater was, a kiss on my stomach where my jeans sat, a kiss on each hip bone as he slides my underwear down my legs.
I pull his shirt off and press my palms against his chest. His skin is warm from the fire. I trace the muscles across his shoulders, down his arms, over the ridges of his stomach. My fingers find the scar on his side, and I press my lips to it the way I did the first time.
He groans. “Tell me what you want, baby.”
“You. Right here.”
He reaches for the condom in his jeans pocket, and I take it from him and roll it on. He settles between my legs and pushes into me. I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him close.
Deep, satisfying strokes follow. The fire pops and sends a shower of sparks up the chimney. The wind pushes against the windows. The ocean crashes against the rocks outside. And Logan is inside me, looking into my eyes, and the world is warm, dark, and safe.
He slides his hand under my lower back and lifts my hips, and the angle changes. I gasp. He keeps the pace slow, refusing to speed up even when I pull at his shoulders and rock my hips against him.
He's savoring this. Every stroke is intentional, designed to ruin me.
“Logan, please.”
“Please, what?”
“More. I need more.”
He gives me more. Deeper, harder, his grip tightening on my hip. I wrap my legs around his waist. The rhythm builds. My breath comes faster.
I come first, gripping his shoulders, my back arching off the sofa. Logan follows seconds later, his whole body tensing and then releasing against me.
We lie tangled together on the sofa, the blanket half on the floor, the fire burning low.
“I could stay here forever,” I say.
He pulls me tighter against him. “Me too.”
Outside, the ocean sounds different at night. Deeper, slower, like the water itself is breathing. The house creaks and settles around us.
I fall asleep in his arms and for tonight, I’m not afraid of what happens next.