by Lily Everett
Only then, they’d waited on the front porch, and he’d felt like a reanimated corpse after weeks of nonstop work. Now that his brain no longer resembled a cracked-out hamster trapped in an exercise ball, Logan could appreciate the storybook feel of his family’s old vacation home.
Most of the Victorian gingerbreading was festooned over the façade in front, but even from the back, the house was appealing. Three stories, gables, wooden shutters, the whole nine yards. There was even a bay window overlooking the garden; probably a nice spot to settle in and read a book.
Still, as footsteps sounded from inside and Logan braced himself for whatever was about to happen, he acknowledged silently that he was glad Jessica had maneuvered them out of the main house and down to stay in the cozy summer cottage across the garden.
In the cottage, they had privacy and peace, and no … teenagers.
A lanky kid opened the back door and grinned at them from under a shock of dirty-blond hair.
“Ha! Dylan, you owe me five bucks,” he shouted over his shoulder before pushing the door wide and ushering them in. The kid studied them with open curiosity, his wide hazel eyes lingering on Jessica in a way that made Logan suddenly, intensely aware of how extraordinarily beautiful she looked. Dressed more casually than he was used to in a linen button-down shirt over a pair of jeans, Jessica took his breath away.
“You’re very lovely tonight,” Logan told her immediately. He should have said it before. He should be saying it constantly. “Well, objectively, you’re lovely all the time, but tonight you look especially beautiful.”
The blush that suffused her cheeks in no way detracted from her beauty, he noticed with interest.
“Thank you. That’s very sweet—and awkward—of you.” Reaching past Logan, she put out her hand to shake the kid’s. “Hi, I’m Jessica Bell. This is Logan Harrington.”
“Dylan’s brother.” The kid nodded in that know-it-all-way common to teenagers. “I told him you’d show. I’m Matt Little. Come on in, my mom already sliced the pie but she said we had to wait for you.”
At the word pie, Logan shot Jessica a glance and saw her biting her lip against a smile. They followed Matt through the open, airy kitchen, past a round table that showed the obvious marks of frequent use and into a formal dining room.
Dylan sat at the head of a large oval table, his elbows resting comfortably on the polished mahogany surface, one hand extended across the table to clasp the hand of a smallish brunette with a beaming smile. Penny Little, Logan remembered through the haze of exhaustion and confusion that had dimmed his vision when he met her.
The moment before they became aware of the presence of guests, Logan caught a glimpse of something he dimly recognized, an invisible spark that flew between them and tied Dylan and Penny together as they smiled into each other’s eyes. Dylan lifted their entwined fingers to his mouth and kissed Penny’s knuckles so tenderly, Logan felt his own cheeks heat uncomfortably. Feeling as if he was intruding on an unbearably intimate moment, he froze in the dining room doorway, unable to make his feet move forward.
Clearly unburdened by any feelings of being an intruder, Matt breezed past him. “I told you they’d come,” he said confidently, grabbing a dessert plate and a fork before retreating in a rush of big feet and lanky limbs. “No one can resist Mom’s famous buttermilk pie. I’m taking this up to my room so y’all can have boring grown-up time.”
Dylan jerked, clearly startled, and as he started to get up to greet them, Logan’s gaze caught on something sparkly in his brother’s grasp.
It was a ring. A diamond ring, on Penny Little’s left hand, and its facets winked in the light when Dylan pulled her to her feet beside him.
“Logan. You’re looking much better than the last time I saw you. I was worried you’d starved to death down in the cottage.”
“Jessica would never let that happen,” Logan retorted automatically.
“No, sure,” Dylan said, darting a quick glance at Penny. “Of course not.”
Logan swallowed. He’d been right, this was awful. Stilted and weird, too formal and polite. Nothing like the conversation they’d had a week ago, when Logan had told his brother to believe in himself, that he was more than the Bad Boy Billionaire the tabloids made him out to be, that he deserved to find love.
He stared at the ring on Penny Little’s left hand. Looked like Dylan had taken that advice and run with it.
“So you’re engaged,” Logan said abruptly, aware that his tone was brusque, almost cold, but not sure how to fix it.
“Logan!” Jessica hissed, poking him in the side, but he twitched away irritably and kept his gaze on his brother’s face.
Instead of looking sheepish or caught out, the way he had when he was six years old and dragged every pot and pan out of the lower cabinets and piled them up to try and climb the counter to get to the cookie jar, Dylan seemed perfectly at ease. When he smiled and rolled his eyes, contentment radiated from every pore.
“I should have known you’d notice it the minute you walked in.” Lifting Penny’s hand for another one of those fairy-tale kisses, Dylan said, “I asked Penny to marry me. And she said yes!”
“Congratulations,” Jessica said into the brief silence that followed Dylan’s jubilant announcement. “What a wonderful surprise!”
Some of the light in Penny’s pretty face had dimmed, and Logan noted the way her eyes flicked worriedly from him to her fiancé. But she smiled and held out her hand when Jessica asked to see the ring.
“My boss and coworkers at the Firefly Café want to throw us an engagement breakfast at the restaurant tomorrow morning,” Penny said. “I hope you can both be there.”
“Of course! We wouldn’t miss it,” Jessica assured her, stepping sideways to tread on Logan’s toes in an obvious effort to make him contribute to the conversation.
But Logan was at a loss. This wasn’t Dylan’s first engagement. His previous fiancée had been working an angle, looking for a soft landing with a rich husband—or a heavy payoff for leaving him alone, which was the route their eldest brother had taken to get rid of her.
Logan knew he was the last person on the planet that Dylan would—or should—take romantic advice from, but he couldn’t help being concerned.
“You’ve known each other for three weeks,” he pointed out abruptly, killing the conversation around him.
Dylan’s face went hard, his eyes glittering with emotion. “Don’t start. I already heard it from Miles. Yes, it’s fast—but when it’s right, you know it.”
“So Miles is aware. Good.” Logan seized on the pertinent information and ignored the rest, including the small pang at the knowledge that he was the last to hear about the engagement. So much for Jessica’s theory that Dylan was reaching out to him.
“Yeah, I called him this afternoon.” The downward curve of Dylan’s mouth revealed that it had not been a happy conversation. Logan could only imagine Miles’s reaction to the news that his reckless, directionless youngest brother was marrying a single mom who worked two jobs and lived on a tiny, backwater island off the coast of Virginia. “I’m starting to regret telling either of you. Damn it, Logan…”
Penny moved to Dylan’s side and slid an arm around his waist, presenting them as a united front. She faced him with head held high, her eyes clear and body language open when she said, “I understand your concerns. I truly do. The world you live in—you have to be constantly on guard against people taking advantage, or wanting more from you than you’re willing to give. But that’s not my world. I love your brother, and he loves me. We want to make a life together, here on Sanctuary Island. We think we can make each other happy. That’s my ulterior motive here. My happiness, Dylan’s happiness and my son’s happiness.”
A small flame of respect kindled in Logan’s chest at the proud, direct way Penny spoke. Her matter-of-fact words about love and happiness tugged at his heart in a way he didn’t like. Unsure how to react, Logan looked to Jessica.
She gave
him an encouraging smile, tilting her head as if to say, Go ahead.
Uncomfortable, Logan shrugged and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “Do what you’re going to do. You hardly need my approval or my blessing.”
“We don’t need it,” Dylan agreed, curling his arm around Penny’s slender shoulders. “We’re getting married, building a life and being happy, just as Penny said, whether you and Miles like it or not. But I guess I hoped you’d see that, for once, I know what I’m doing.”
“Are you sure?” With Dylan’s track record, Logan had to ask.
A slow smile spread across Dylan’s face as he stared down into the upturned eyes of his fiancée. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Marriage is a big step, a real commitment … but I spent years wandering around, not even knowing I was searching for something until I found it. Until I found her, and Matt, and Sanctuary Island. This might seem too fast to you—but for me? I’ve waited long enough. I’m ready for my life to finally begin.”
Chapter 9
Jessica was a pace behind Logan all the way back to the cottage, his long legs and quick, restless strides eating up the path.
The rest of the evening with Dylan and Penny had been … well, “disaster” was probably too strong a word, but not by much. Logan had shut down completely after Dylan’s heartfelt speech. He sat there at the table with an untouched piece of pie in front of him, mouth a thin, hard line and his eyes dark and shuttered.
Jessica did her best to keep conversation flowing by offering to help Penny set up for the engagement party and asking if they’d set a date yet, while the two brothers glared at each other across the table in silence.
Sighing as Logan slammed into the screened-in porch and flopped down on the glider, Jessica leaned against the doorway. The drone of cicadas rose and fell around the cottage, accompanied by the song of crickets and the rustle of a breeze through the magnolias. It was a beautiful night.
Too bad her plan to strengthen Logan and Dylan’s relationship was a total bust.
“That could have gone better,” she observed to the top of Logan’s head as he leaned over his knees and fisted his hands in his hair.
“Where is my phone?” he asked abruptly, glaring up at her.
That startled her into straightening away from the doorjamb. “It’s in a safe place, don’t worry.”
“Give it to me,” he demanded.
Jessica crossed her arms over her chest as dismay trickled into her belly. “No. The rules haven’t changed.”
“Everything is changing.” Standing in a controlled rush, Logan prowled the length of the porch. “Too fast.”
Empathy tightened like a fist around Jessica’s throat. Always an introvert, Logan had locked all his tumultuous emotions away in a box when his parents died, and then carefully constructed his life so he never had to deal with them in any way.
Until now. The lid was coming off that box, exposing him to feelings he hadn’t ever learned to master, and no matter how hard he worked to suppress them, Jessica didn’t think he’d be able to close that box up again. Not entirely.
The boy who’d learned that deep personal connection only led to pain and loss had grown into a man who did his best to hold people at arm’s length. But in the last few days, Logan had gotten closer to his brother—and to her—than he’d been to anyone in a long time. It was no wonder he was freaking out.
“It’s late,” she tried. “Come to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
Heart heavy with guilt, as if she were somehow responsible for the fact that Logan and his brothers couldn’t seem to find common ground, Jessica attempted a smile. “I could tire you out.”
His eyes gleamed briefly in the moonlight, but he shook his head. “You’re right, it’s late. You should get some rest. I’ll follow the rules, have some hot milk, come to bed when I think I’ll actually be able to sleep.”
Jessica hesitated before agreeing. Those were the rules, suggested by sleep experts who alleged that spending time lying in bed unable to sleep would only begin a cycle of frustration that prevented a person from nodding off. Better, they said, to reset the brain by getting up and reading for a bit, then going back to bed to try again.
And Logan was used to spending most of his time alone. If he needed a few solitary hours to process the evening’s events, that was certainly understandable.
Still, this felt like a step backward. He’d been doing so well, falling asleep every night in her arms, that tonight’s nervous energy and restless pacing made her nervous.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Wake me up when you come to bed?”
He nodded, crossing the porch to cradle her face in his large, warm hands. Her pulse fluttered like the wings of a moth, unable to resist the lure of the light.
Logan bent his head and brushed a kiss over her mouth. “Good night,” he whispered against her lips.
“Wake me up, seriously,” she reminded him again.
“I will,” he promised.
But when Jessica startled awake hours later, as the silvery light of dawn filtered through the curtains, she was alone in the bed. The sheets on Logan’s side were cool to the touch, the pillow undented.
Sliding from the bed, Jessica shivered and wrapped her blue silk robe around her shoulders. She padded from the bedroom out to the main room, her bare toes flinching from the cold hardwood floor. “Logan?”
There was no answer but a shuffling sound from above. Still half-asleep, Jessica looked up. Had he slept in the loft? Since they started sleeping together, the loft and its smaller, less comfortable bed hadn’t seen much use beyond storing their empty suitcases.
Annoyed at herself for feeling a pang that Logan might be learning to sleep better on his own than with her, Jessica started for the built-in stepladder that reached up into the loft space.
She was on the third rung before she remembered what else was up in the loft, besides a low, narrow bed.
Hurrying up the ladder, heart in her throat, Jessica cleared the floor already knowing what she’d see.
And there he was. Logan crouched beside the bed with his confiscated cell phone clutched in his hand, thumb typing so furiously and intently, she knew he hadn’t even heard her call his name.
This was why she’d taken the phone. When Logan got embroiled with work, he lost track of everything else. Nothing mattered but the problem in front of him.
Nothing and no one.
Gritting her teeth against the vulnerable girl inside who was hurt that she’d been forgotten in favor of a piece of technology, Jessica climbed the rest of the way into the loft and cinched her robe more tightly around her waist.
“All right, you checked in. Now hand it over,” she demanded.
Without looking up from the backlit screen or ceasing his lightning-fast typing, Logan bit out, “There’s an emergency at the lab. They need me back there. I’m catching the morning ferry back to New York.”
Jessica closed her eyes and gathered her patience. This was exactly what she’d tried to avoid. “No, you’re not. You’re on vacation. Deal with it. The lab can deal with it—this so-called emergency is nothing more than a group of employees who have been spoiled by constant access to you, and who need to learn to self-direct and take responsibility for their jobs.”
His head shot up, his bloodshot blue eyes lasering in on her face. “You knew about this?”
“I’ve kept up to date with the e-mails from the lab, yes.” The increasingly frantic e-mails, begging for more direction and next steps on the project Logan had handed them before he left. “I told you I’d monitor the situation, and I have. You left them with adequate instructions. They may not be geniuses like you, but they should be able to figure this out on their own, without bothering you.”
Finally tossing the phone aside, Logan rounded the bed and dragged his suitcase out of the space by the wall. “I’m leaving. I need to get back to my lab, my work.”
“You need to stay here
and keep healing,” Jessica said, reaching to take the suitcase from him, but Logan jerked away.
“I’m fine,” he said in a rusty voice. His swift, shaky movements told another story, and Jessica noted all the familiar signs with a growing sense of alarm.
“You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you? Logan, you have to see how bad for you this is.”
“It’s my job. I’d think you, of all people, would understand why that’s important to me.”
Rocking back on her heels, Jessica didn’t have time to figure out why that felt like a slap. “Important enough to jeopardize your recovery?”
“I’m not jeopardizing anything.” Dropping the suitcase over the side of the loft with a bang that made Jessica jump, Logan started down the ladder after it, clearly intent on packing.
A deep wellspring of panic bubbled up unexpectedly, goading Jessica to say, “So the fact that once we go back to Manhattan, this thing between us is over—that doesn’t even factor into your decision.”
She heard Logan pause halfway down the ladder, but mortification and an intense need to hear his response kept her from walking to the edge of the loft to catch sight of him.
When he replied, his voice had lost some of the frenetic distraction in favor of a coolness that sent shivers down her spine. “You still want to go back to the way we were, when we leave here.”
“I mean—that’s what we agreed.” Surprise and confusion pushed her to the loft ledge to peek over. Logan stood with his legs braced apart, his head slightly bowed so that Jessica’s gaze snagged on the vulnerable nape of his neck, the light brown tendrils of his overlong hair. From this angle, his shoulders were immense, wide and strong, before his torso tapered to the whipcord leanness of his waist.
As well as she now knew that body, and as hard as she’d worked to make herself an expert on the man inside, this trip to Sanctuary Island had shown her how much there still was to learn. She could spend a lifetime unraveling the complexities of a man like Logan Harrington, and never tire of the challenge.
