“Come see me?” he invited.
Storm looked up at him and grinned, their disagreement over the hot dog forgotten. Her arms came up so he could grasp her torso and gather her into his chest as he straightened.
“Thanks,” Emma said absently and began collecting gift wrap and other litter from the blanket. Reid helped Delta take leftover watermelon and hot dogs into the house, and within a few minutes, nearly everyone had left, including Delta who was being chauffeured home in Art’s Gator.
“Immy, Coop,” Emma called. “Time to walk home.”
“Biyen wants them to come to the beach with us,” Sophie said. “You guys go home and put your feet up. I’ll bring them home later. Thanks for coming.”
She waved and turned back to whatever Nolan was saying to her.
Logan wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. He only moved closer because he was picking up the diaper bag, but he heard Nolan say, “…and said not to come back. I’d rather move here anyway. If I could stay until—”
“No,” Sophie said, quiet but firm. “It’s Gramps’s house, not mine. He said only until Biyen’s birthday. Plus, it would be confusing for Biyen. He would think you and I are together.” She glanced for Biyen, who was playing tag over by the shed with Imogen and Cooper. She stiffened as she realized Logan had come close enough to overhear them.
Nolan looked at him, too.
“Art let him move in.” He cocked his head at Logan. “Does Biyen think you two are together? Are you?”
Perhaps he wasn’t a clueless as he seemed, if he could sense the possessive hackles that were rising across Logan’s shoulders.
“Logan pays rent,” Sophie said flatly. “If you need a loan for a damage deposit so you can get a new place, I can front you that, but no. You can’t move in with us. I’ll ask Gramps if you can stay on the lawn until Biyen leaves with Reid and Emma this weekend, but that’s it.”
“Come on, Soph.”
She didn’t even shake her head. Only stood with her shoulders straight and her face impassive.
“This was fun,” Logan said with firm cheer as Storm tried to crawl from his arm onto his shoulder. “Thanks for having us.”
“Uncle Logan.” Imogen came running up. “Are you going? Can Storm come to the beach with us?”
That sounded like a recipe for sand from scalp to diaper, but he said, “She’d probably like that. Are you ready to go?” he asked Sophie, offering her a reason to walk away from Nolan.
“Let me get the rest of the food put away. One minute.”
Chapter Eleven
A large portion of Sophie’s Monday was spent kneeling in bilge water, working to get a pleasure cruiser on its way.
When she was done, she threw her filthy coveralls into the soiled laundry and had a quick shower in the cubicle off the locker room next to the machine shop. She dressed in a clean tank, cycling shorts, and the old boots she kept in her locker for exactly this situation. She grabbed clean covvies from the rack and carried them up to the hook by the office, hoping she wouldn’t need them until tomorrow, but they were there if she got another call to the wharf.
When she pushed into the office, she found Logan in the middle of the room, hands on his hips. He was staring at the wall. Not at the nautical map of the central coast that hung over the coffeepot and not at the computer where she and Randy logged work orders. He was staring at the empty space between those two things.
He glanced at her and the clash happened, the one where she felt his presence down to her toes. His gaze went from her bare shoulders and arms, down to her bare legs, and landed on her heavy boots.
In all these weeks since his return to Raven’s Cove, her antipathy toward him had acted as a force field, allowing her to deflect this intense awareness of him, but that protection had been eroded by his apology. She couldn’t seem to hate him as much as she used to. That meant all those other feelings—the old infatuation and her newer, growing admiration for the way he was stepping up here at work and with his sister—were surfacing. It made her movements feel uncoordinated and filled her with a suffocated, restless sensation.
“That valve replacement turned into a bubble bath in the bowels of hell,” she said as explanation for her wardrobe change. She moved in front of him and slipped onto the stool to log her time. “What are you doing? Practicing how to be mad?”
“Reid said we’re likely to make a deal on the Missionary II.”
“That’s cool.” She swung around on the stool. “How were you thinking of approaching the restoration?”
“As a rule, the right way. Invariably, that’s the expensive way. I need to run some numbers, but I need an office. I’ve been trying to do my design work off my laptop since I got here and it’s hell on my eyes. I bought a desk and a couple of extra monitors, but there’s nowhere at the house to set it up. I keep getting kicked out. I’d rather work here.”
“I sense an eviction coming. Are you going to send me back to doing paperwork behind the counter in the hardware store? Because that’s a lot of interruptions, which means mistakes. Also, sometimes people are listening to calls they shouldn’t be privy to.”
“No, you and I talk too much about day-to-day stuff. I don’t want to have to walk downstairs every time I want your two cents.”
“I have a solution for that.” She waved at the desk. “We have these things called telephones. They’re a primitive technology, but they still work in a pinch.”
“So you don’t mind walking upstairs every time I call and tell you I need to talk to you?”
She walked up and down those stairs a thousand times a day, but point taken. She would kill him if he called her more than once a week.
“What did you have in mind?” She glanced around. “Taking out that coffee shelf isn’t going to give you much room for your own desk.”
“No, but there’s a supply closet on the other side of that wall. It’s for all those reams of paper no one uses anymore.”
“And a photocopier that’s been broken for years.”
“It doesn’t even work?”
“The fax machine part does.”
“That’s useful,” he snorted.
“There’s a recycle place in Bella Bella. I’ve been suggesting for ages that it would make a good school fundraiser for the company to cover the cost of shipping a pallet over. No one wants to pack their old TV across on the seabus, but they’ll pay a few bucks to add it to a pile of electronics that’s already going.”
