Pelican Point (Bachelors of Blueberry Cove) (34 page)

My heart,
he thought
. Right at your feet.

“It is hard to think there wouldn’t be others. After this one.”

The vise grip on his heart returned with an even harder squeeze.
Here we go.

“But it was harder to think that I’d have to leave Blueberry to see to them. I just . . . want both. But coming home for short stays between months- or even years-long projects isn’t what I want, either. It was all I knew growing up in Thunder Bay, but it’s already different here. I never really missed the bay because everything that was important to me went with me when I left.” She looked at him. “I will miss the Cove.”

He was surprised his heart hadn’t turned to dust, the vise grip was so tight around it. “Alex, just—for the love of God, tell me before you kill me.”

She looked honestly surprised by his outburst. “I am. I mean, it’s—”

“Did you find the missing piece to the puzzle?”

She nudged the hamper toward him. “You tell me.”

He looked at the beautifully restored walnut piece, then at her, then back at the basket, eyes widening. “You did this?”

“Every last freaking awesome inch of it. Yes, I did.”

His gaze flew to hers. She looked so damn proud. And happy.

“That’s . . . incredible. But how? Where did you even—?” Then it dawned on him. There was only one person. “Eula? You’ve been working for—”

“With. No one works for Eula. But . . . yes. That’s where I went when I left the station. I just . . . wanted to find out. I wanted to do something, anything, to take a step forward. Like I told you in your office, I felt like I’d been on kind of a roll in the forward-step-taking department that day. She’d offered another path from my crossroads. And she was right. I had to know what they all were before I could decide which one to take. Other than going to Delia’s to sleep, I’ve been at Eula’s pretty much every minute since.”

“Rain is not your friend,” he added. “Well, at least you’re productive. You know, some folks just read a book.”

She shrugged, but looked inordinately pleased by his reaction.

It made him feel good that what he thought mattered to her.

“Eula just up and gave it to me when I finished it. She said it was a testimony, my testimony, and said she wanted me to have it.”

“I can’t believe you did this in three days. If you’ve never done this before, you’re an amazingly fast learner.” He looked at the hamper again, picking it up, studying the work. “When was this made originally?”

“Eighteen-sixty-two, according to Eula. She knows the provenance of all her pieces. Some of the stories are amazing. This one was a mess. I don’t even know why I started with something so hard.”

“Because it was the thing that needed you the most.”
Like me.

She stared at him, and he saw her throat work.

“Maybe.” She looked at the hamper. “Probably.”

“Did your background help at all? I mean, I know they’re completely different realms, but did any of the language or terminology or restoration theory cross over?”

“Surprising amounts of it, yes. You’re right, it’s mostly apples and oranges in the broad spectrum, but when you break it down, it’s really a lot of the same kinds of steps, just applying a different technology to how you go about them. I swear, Logan, if you could see some of the magic that woman works on the really damaged stuff . . . well, even you would start to believe in faeries and elves.”

He looked up at Alex, and she could see the question on the tip of his tongue. But she beat him to it, laughing as she did. “No, as far as I can tell, they’re not. I still don’t know how that back room works, and frankly, I don’t want to know. It will . . . spoil it somehow. She’s teaching me. And I want to learn. Once I saw what I could do with something like this, I wanted to do it again. It really is like she said. Just sitting in that room, I felt there was half a lifetime of lighthouses right in front of me.”

Her eyes were sparkling and she looked . . . ebullient.

Logan set the hamper aside. Then he very carefully moved their plates and empty drinks out of the way. “Come here.”

“Logan, let me get the rest out. I need you to understand—”

“I get a turn. Okay?” He lifted his hand to her.

She held his gaze, then took his hand as she scooted across the blanket until she was in front of him, squealing when he pulled her into his lap.

It felt so damn good to have her in his arms again. He wasn’t sure how he’d ever let her go. He looked down into all that stormy blue and said, “I’m all done pretending that I can even try not to want this, to want you. The more we’re apart, the more I hate it. So, this is me telling you what conclusions I’ve come to in the past three days. And to hell with what comes next and to hell with protecting ourselves. We both know that life hands out awful, horrifying, painful crap, and we have to deal with it.

“Fergus made a comment that life is handing us the best of what can be, and how he didn’t understand why we weren’t going to take it just because we’ve seen the hard stuff. It’s like we’re doubly punishing ourselves and being idiots to boot, because we do have a choice this time. If we were smart, then we’d see that living through the hard stuff should make us appreciate the good, not run from it. Otherwise, what’s the damn point? So . . . I might have you in my life for a month, a year, or, if I’m very, very lucky, every day until I draw my last breath. But I want you in it, Alex. Whether it’s here, or in Timbuktu.”

“There aren’t any lighthouses in Timbuktu,” she said, trying for a teasing tone.

He saw her heart in her eyes and his was beating too fast for him to do more than tug at one of her curls.

He was the one who was all big talk. Laying his heart at her feet was terrifying. Willing to put everything he was, everything he wanted out there for her to accept . . . didn’t mean she had to, or that she’d see it his way. It was the risk he had to take. Having her in Blueberry Cove and not having her with him was worse than not having her in his life at all.

“Good,” he said when he could finally speak past the big knot in his throat. “That’s one less place I have to figure out how to live in.”

“Logan—”

As he had once before, he cupped her face, rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip, and felt her tremble. Or maybe it was him. “Let me finish,” he said.
Begged
. “You’ve been making all these strides figuring out things, maybe because you wanted to, maybe because I asked you to. But I know you did it because I said I couldn’t see myself in your world. How could I? I don’t know how I’d fit in because I haven’t done what you’re doing—finding the right puzzle piece by trying a few out. So . . . I’m just saying I’m willing to go. I’ll work the puzzle, find the new playground, whatever the hell you want to call it. I just don’t want to keep on doing anything, anywhere without you. I want you, Alexandra MacFarland. You’re my playground.”

Her eyes shimmered, even as the deep blue in them grew steadily darker. And he saw then what he most wanted to see. Beyond the desire, beyond the want. He saw . . . hope. The relief that came with that discovery was so massive, it took his breath away.

“I’m really glad to hear you say that because . . . Logan, I don’t know if this new puzzle piece with Eula will fit. Long term. It fits now. I have time while I work on the cottage and the tower to keep at it, learn more, find out how deep the affinity might run. I know I don’t want to walk away from Blueberry. I don’t want to walk away from you. But it’s even more than that.

“I also don’t want to leave the people I’m just now finding. I’m feeling . . . connected. And I’m realizing why Delia likes her safety net. I like it, too. It used to go with me; my dad was my net. But now it’s just me . . . and I don’t much like it out on the tightrope all alone. In fact, now that I’ve found friends, a place that isn’t home yet, but sure feels like it could be, and . . . you . . . being alone is going to be, well . . . awful.”

“I hate you being gone from this house,” he said, hearing the raw emotion in his voice, but no longer caring. “This used to be my security net. Now it’s just . . . yeah. Awful.”

She reached up and touched his cheek. “I hate being gone. I just . . . can’t promise that Blueberry, even though I love it here, that staying in one place all the time will be a perfect fit for me, either. So . . . if in the end, I need to wander . . . are you really sure you’d be willing—”

He covered her hand, knowing his heart was right there in his eyes. And because he was the luckiest bastard in the universe, he was pretty damn sure hers was as well. “Alex, you have me. Okay? No rules. No boundaries. It’s you and me. That’s it, and that’s everything. The rest we figure out as we go.”

Eyes shining, she nodded. “Okay,” she whispered, emotion in her voice, too. Then, as if testing this new step, a smile spread across her face and she said it louder. “Okay.”

And then together, laughing, they shouted,
“Okay!”

“Can I finally kiss you now?” she asked, framing his face in her palms. “This is pretty much killing me. Has been killing me. Every moment since we stopped, it’s been killing me. Seeing you, hearing you, not having you, not even being able to just reach out and—”

He rolled her to her back in the middle of the blanket before she could finish. “That first night, you kissed me like I was the last man on earth.” He brushed her wild, crazy hat hair away from her flushed cheeks and looked into the eyes of the woman he knew, without a single doubt, he was madly, deeply, head over heels in love with. “Now, because you are the last woman on earth, for me, I’d like to return that favor.”

Proving she was never going to play just by his rules, that she’d always match him with a few of her own, she reached up and nipped his lip, making him groan and his body jerk in response. Grinning, she wriggled at his response. “I even get to be awake this time,” she teased. “Yay, me.”

He was grinning as he kissed her. Finally.
Finally.
He took his time, sinking in slowly, reveling in every gasp, every moan—his and hers—enjoying her taste, taking in her scent, and basically wallowing in being back where he thought he’d never be again. He kissed her intently, softly, passionately, teasingly until she was squirming, gasping, and bucking against him. Then he eased his mouth next to her ear and began undressing her, taking care to touch, to tease, to torment every part of her with his fingertips as he told her exactly how he planned to frolic in his very own, very private playground.

“Logan,” she said, then moaned, making an almost keening sound as he followed the trail his fingertips had taken with his mouth, his tongue. Like the first night he’d had her in his arms, she clutched at him and cried out, but for entirely different reasons. “Don’t let me go.”

He brought her mouth to his as he moved over her, nudged her thighs apart. “It’s okay,” he promised her. “You’re here now. I’ve got you.” And he always would.

S
he was ripping up linoleum in the kitchen when he came downstairs the next morning.

“What does it say that after a night when you woke me up not once, but twice, and then I woke you up a third time, you’re down here at the crack of dawn, working? It’s enough to give a guy a complex.”

She stopped and sat back on her heels, wiping the cracked putty flecks from her cheeks with the back of her hand. She was wearing one of his white work T-shirts and nothing else. Well, if you didn’t count the knit cap on her head.

“And may I say that’s very fetching headgear we’re sporting this morning.”

She reached up, touched her head, and closed her eyes. “Yeah. Well. I came down with the intent of making coffee for us. Then I caught my toe—again—on that stupid spot that’s curled up and I just kind of snapped and reached down and yanked it up. Then I yanked some more, and I got into it and I guess I kind of forgot about the coffee.”

“So, I guess I shouldn’t ask about the hat? There wasn’t some kind of horrible putty knife incident, was there?”

“My hair was getting in my eyes. It was on the table.” She shrugged. Bending down, she grabbed the edge she’d been tugging and yanked some more.

For his part, he calmly stepped over the mess, bent down and slipped an arm around her waist, and scooped her straight off the floor and back against his chest.

“Hey! Unfair gender advantage!” she called, as he shifted her over his shoulder. “Bad, Neanderthal, bad.”

“That, too.” He crossed the living room and climbed the stairs.

“Logan, I’m not even walking normally this morning. I don’t think I can—”

“We’re taking a shower.”

“Oh?” Her voice dropped from shrill to sultry. “We?”

“Well, I can’t have you walking funny when we get to Delia’s. People will talk.”

“True,” she said, as he carried her straight to the bathroom. “And we can’t have that.”

“We’re probably going to have a lot of things. Including that. But let’s see if we can not embarrass the neighbors over Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Yeah. We’ll hold out until at least tomorrow.”

He stepped in the shower and slid her off his shoulder until her feet touched the tiled floor.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re naked.”

“That you just now noticed could stunt my ability to perform.”

She snickered. “Yeah, right.”

Grinning, he tugged her cap off and tossed it toward the bathroom door, then turned on the shower.

“Hey! I still have a shirt on.”

He ran his hands down the front so the white T-shirt molded to her breasts. “Oh, yeah, you do.”

“You’re such a guy.”

He bent down so he could suck on one of her nipples darkly outlined though the wet cotton. “Lucky you.”

She grabbed his shoulders and held on as he worked his way down, gasping as he made it past the hem. “Oh, yeah I am,” she breathed.

“We might be late for Delia’s,” he murmured.

“You know,” she said between gasps, “I still have a room there. With a foldout couch.”

“Maybe we should keep it. It’s close to the station.”

“You should take more lunch breaks anyway.”

He worked his way back up and she had to clutch his shoulders just to stay upright. Her legs were officially jelly.

She felt him brush against her thighs. “You’ve managed to overcome your performance anxiety, I see. And feel. Dear . . . God. Would you hurry?”

“I thought you were worried about walking funny,” he said, bracing his palms on her hips.

She reached down and took matters into her own hands. “So, you can carry me into Delia’s. You seem to like hoisting me up.” She wrapped her hands around him, smiling when he jerked and twitched at her touch. She liked that he wasn’t the only one with the power. She stroked him and nipped his chin. “Only not over the shoulder. Be romantic.”

“I can be romantic.”

In a blink, he had her hiked up against the shower wall, urging her legs around his waist. Then he kissed her, deep, slow, and hard as he pushed up and inside her, inch by devastating inch, until she took him completely.

“Oh,” she gasped against his throat as he started to move. “Yeah, you can.”

 

They were very late to Delia’s. He did carry her in, and it was very romantic. Everybody cheered.

“Look,” she told Delia, blushing even as she grinned. “I made a new friend.”

“I can see that. Fast learner. I like that about you.” She gave Logan a onceover, then looked at Alex’s flushed face. “Might have to rethink what I said about getting one of my own.”

“Really.” Alex wiggled her eyebrows. “We’ll talk.” She smiled. “That’s what friends do, right?” Logan set her on her feet, then pulled her to his side. Alex slid her arm around his waist and leaned into him. “I’ve got time. I’m not going anywhere.”