Oh Christ. He wasn’t going to make it upstairs to the marina office. He’d only had coffee, but it refused to stay down. Better to lose it out here, rather than inside.

He hurried behind the brick building and leaned a hand against a tree trunk while he retched out all sorts of poor life decisions.

Above him, where the road rose up the bank toward the one-room schoolhouse, a young voice asked, “Are you okay?”

This was why he loathed this town. It wasn’t even a town. It was a hundred and fifty people living cheek by jowl in a cluster of houses around a marina. The military had built this place on First Nations land during World War II, to service the navy. It was still the only place to repair a boat within a day’s sail from anywhere. Nobody wanted to be here. If your boat broke down, you were stuck here. It shouldn’t be a sentence, but for most it was.

Not him, though. Nope. No way. He was giving it one week. That’s all.

Please let it only be one week.

“I’m fine,” he lied, spitting and straightening to look up at the boy of seven or eight. He wore a blue raincoat with dinosaur skeletons on it, rubber boots, and a red backpack.

“My mom gives me ginger ale when I’m sick. Do you want some?”

“You got some in your backpack?” Something in the kid’s big, earnest eyes tickled a memory in Logan’s chest.

“No.” He chuckled. “I can go to the store for you.”

“Thanks, but I’m not sick. I’m suffering the consequences of my actions.” A cold ginger ale sounded amazing, though.

“I thought you were having a hangover.”

“I do have a hangover. How do you know what a hangover is?”

“My grandpa has one. Mom is really mad.”

Oh shit. Now he was going to retch for an entirely different reason.

Those eyes. He knew those eyes way too well. And that helpful personality, the one that wanted to take care of him. His entire youth and a very hot angry week in his early twenties had been cushioned by big brown eyes exactly like those ones.

A piledriver had arrived to pound the knowledge into the back of his screaming skull, reminding him that yesterday was not the worst day of his life. That would be today, but he still asked with faint hope, “Who’s your grandpa, little man?”

“Arthur Marshall.”

“Thought so. I was drinking his scotch last night.” He regretted it even more now.

“Is that like butterscotch? Is it good?”

“Not really. Your mom is Sophie Hughes?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He nodded his head inside the hood of his raincoat.

“How old are you?” Logan was doing math that he’d done several times. The first time had been eight years ago, when his mother had told him Sophie was pregnant. He’d run the same figures four years later, when he’d seen her at his mother’s wedding. Sophie had been there with another man and a preschooler who had disappeared after an hour. She had ignored Logan the entire evening.

“I’m seven.”

“And who’s your dad?”

“Nolan Yantz. Do you want to know my name?”

“Brian?” Logan recollected vaguely.

“Everyone thinks that. No. It’s Biyen. Bye-En,” he pronounced slowly. “My dad picked it.” In the distance, the school bell rang. He looked up the hill. “I should go or I’ll be marked late.”

“Okay. Seeya later.” I’m going to stand here and lose a little bit more of the guts your mother hates.

Sophie wouldn’t have lied to him about something as important as whether he was the father of her kid. He had to believe that. She wouldn’t have lied to her mother or his. Not to her grandfather, either. Or her own kid.

Which meant she really had leapt from his bed into another man’s, despite a crush on him that had lasted a decade. A crush he had crushed beneath his Nike runners on his way to the ferry slip.

He had no right to be hurt or disgusted or even curious about her life or her son. He was the one who had left. He would do it again inside of a week.

Whatever had been between him and Sophie back in the day was very much over.

But his belly twisted with one more spasm. He had another spit before he rallied himself to walk inside and face her.

Chapter One

Two and a half months later…

Like everything these days, Sophie was late putting in the potatoes. She should have been turning this soil three weeks ago, but the weather had been nothing but rain and work at the marina had been an equal deluge.

Today, however, she finally had dry weather and a full day off.

It wasn’t the worst way to spend it. She liked physical work. It was satisfying and gave her time to think. Or not. As she jumped on the shovel and levered the clumps out, the noise in her head faded. She absorbed the smell of the earth while a breeze meandered off the water down at the eastern edge of Gramps’s property, floating up the sun-warmed hill to caress her arms and legs. A raven squawked as it commuted overhead and bees buzzed into the nearby chives that came up all on their own.

“Hey, Soph.”

“No,” she said reflexively. Belligerently, because she didn’t have to look to know who had spoken. Much to her chagrin, she had been reacting to Logan Fraser from the time he had picked up her sweater on the first day of school and brushed the grass from it before handing it back to her.

“It’s my day off,” she added, even though her irritation was more about the fact he’d caught her in cut-off bib overalls with only a faded tank top beneath. She was wearing gloves and heavy boots and hadn’t made any effort to tame her hair before rolling it into a messy topknot.

Why did she care? She had never been a girly girl, didn’t wear makeup, and he saw her in shapeless coveralls every day at work.

Also, he didn’t care. He’d made that so clear, so many times.

“I promised Gramps I’d get the potatoes in.” She jumped on the blade of her shovel again.

“It’s not work. It’s something else.”

“Then definitely no. I only talk to you about work.” At twenty-six, she was finally learning how to set clear boundaries.

“I need to stay here.”

The dirt rolled off the blade of her shovel. She held the handle in her lax hand as she turned to look at him.

He was annoyingly sexy, of course, wearing a striped button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up his forearms. His linen trousers had a knife-sharp crease pressed into them and were rolled up to reveal his naked ankles in deck shoes. Being summer, he only allowed his stubble to grow in for a few days before shaving it off. This morning it was a light coat of glinting bronze, tidily precise down the slope of his cheeks and clean on his neck and under his jaw. His blue eyes were not the least bit apologetic or even entreating as he met her affronted gaze.