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 naïve. 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.
