by JoAnn Ross
Annie was watching him, her expression still as he stepped out onto the small porch. She obviously noted the album, but said nothing.
“Diego will deliver enough gas every day for the generator I found for you until the plant’s going again. And Sara’s got an electric cooktop she’s going to bring over for you. Maisy said she’s getting Leo to move one of her ranges over to the community center. The generator there’s bigger. She said use it whenever you need to dry your herbs—”
Her lashes drifted down. “I always knew you’d leave. That nothing mattered here enough for you. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”
He left the porch and caught her face in his hands, pressing his mouth to hers for an aching, long moment. “You do matter, Annie Hess.”
“Because now you know we share a daughter who will never be ours?”
“You matter just because of you.”
“But not enough to make you stay.”
The chopper circled again. He cast a look up, watching the Huey scream through the sky. Damn Cole for taking away even the grace of a day. “Enough to know the life I lead is not good enough for you.”
Then he set Annie away from him and jogged up the narrow, gravel path toward the main road. Heading back toward an inescapable life he’d chosen long ago and had hated himself for ever since.
Leaving behind a woman he shouldn’t have loved, but couldn’t regret.
Chapter 17
Seventy-two days without Riley.
Seventy-five without Logan.
Annie turned off the stove beneath her hot chocolate and looked out the window over her sink at the ocean shimmering beyond the sand.
She’d made it through every day. At first counting off minutes. If she made it through five minutes, then she could make it through five hours. Then five days. Maybe in five months...five years...the emptiness inside her would abate.
She filled a tall mug with the cocoa, dropped in a handful of tiny marshmallows and fit the lid on top. It was the beginning of May and entirely too warm for the hot drink. But that didn’t stop her from making it every single day.
She grabbed her wide-brimmed hat off the counter and put it on. She was planting rosemary today. The flat of cuttings she’d taken from the main fields had rooted, and sat on the floor by the door, scenting her house with their distinctively woody fragrance.
The phone rang before she reached the door and she automatically grabbed it as she pulled a fresh pair of gardening gloves out of the drawer.
“Annie!”
Riley’s voice greeted her and Annie’s heart tugged the way she’d accepted it always would. She smiled and tucked the phone in her shoulder. “How’d the debate go?”
“We won, of course.”
“I told you that you would.” She lifted the flat and carried it out the front door to the small pickup parked there, and slid it into the truck bed. The truck had arrived within days of Logan’s departure. Along with a veritable barrage of other supplies. “Never doubted it.” She took the phone in her hand and leaned back against the side of the vehicle. “How’s everything else going?”
“Mom quit her job, but she probably told you that already. We’re taking piano lessons together. She wants to play duets. How old-fashioned is that?” Riley’s voice sounded bored, but Annie heard beyond the surface. Not all of Riley’s family issues had been solved. But her running away had been the wake-up call they’d all needed.
“When they bring you out to visit this summer, you can play them on the piano at the community center.”
Riley snorted. “Not likely. Listen, I gotta go. Just wanted to tell you about the debate. You know, Bendlemaier’s team has been state champions for four years running. My school is gonna stomp their butts next year. Just watch us. Oh. And I got a letter from Logan the other day, too.”
Annie’s smile froze. The tug was more like a yank, this time. And it held on, good and tight, until she pressed her hand to her heart. As if that would be any real help. “That’s nice. What’d he say?”
“Not much. He’s been traveling a lot. The stamp was from Germany. He asked if I still talked to Kenny Hobbes. As if. The guy’s a total dweeb. I’d write Logan back and tell him that, but there was no return address.”
There never was. Annie knew that Logan had written Riley several times over the past weeks. Never saying much more than that he was thinking about her. And the actions seemed to be enough for Riley, who had adjusted to the news of him—and not Drago—being her father with far less trauma than learning about Annie being her mother.
But then, Lucia hadn’t had anything to do with imparting the information about Logan.
Since then, Annie had gone to Olympia twice for long weekends, and Riley was already planning to spend a month with Annie that summer.
It wasn’t always easy. Riley wasn’t always sweetness and light. She was a Hess, after all. But it was better than Annie had ever thought it could be. And, thanks to Noelle’s calming influence, Will had stopped ranting with concern that Logan would challenge them over Riley’s custody.
So, maybe Annie owed Lucia her thanks after all.
She’d ripped off a bandage with intent to harm.
Instead, the festering wound had finally started to heal.
“Oh, gotta go. Mom’s honking. Piano lesson, you know.” Riley’s voice was rushed. But it was the natural rush of teenagers everywhere. “Love you.”
The phone clicked.
“Love you, too,” Annie murmured.
She tilted her head back, looking up at the sky. The sun shone warmly on her face. Finally, she sighed a little. She took the phone back inside, retrieved the gardening gloves and her hot chocolate and went out to the truck.
But her gaze lingered on the tree stump from the Castillo estate that sat in her front yard. So far, the town council hadn’t been able to agree what to do with the thing. Until then, Sam had assured Annie the trunk would stay in her yard.
But it wasn’t really the stump that she looked at. It was the fresh carving there.
Then she shook herself a little. She spent too much time looking at the darned thing. Her foot hit the gas pedal and the truck revved neatly up her path. She turned south at the road, making the drive to Castillo House in mere minutes. Which was good, considering that Sara was expecting her at the shop in a short while. It was the middle of spring and tourism was ripening. So was business at Island Botanica.
She pulled up as close to the house as she could, and walked around the truck bed, her gaze on the plants. She’d given up trying to cultivate the land near the fence and had moved closer to the crumbling house. So far, a leggy vine of bougainvillea was all that grew.
But it was more than ever had grown before.
She lifted the rosemary out of the truck and carried the wooden crate toward the house. She’d plant on the southwest side, she thought.
“Like the hat.”
She stopped. Her hands loosened.
The flat fell straight to the ground. It hit with a thud, and fine soil burst out from beneath it.
“I looked for you at the shop.”
“I’m not there,” she said inanely. Her eyes roved over him. His hair was a little longer. His bronzed face lean and hard, the scar along his jaw nearly white. And his eyes were bluer than the ocean. “What are you doing here, Logan?”
He stepped forward, away from the weathered house. He wore a white shirt and khaki pants and she thought he’d never looked so good.
He nodded toward the vine that clung gamely to the roughly textured wall. “You were right. You can grow plants anywhere.”
“Logan—”
“See you got the truck. It’s working out for you?” He walked over to the vehicle and circled it.
“Kick the tires, why don’t you?”
He slanted a look her way, dark. Amused.
She crossed her arms. “The truck has been helpful. Thank you. The windows were perfect, the new roof is better than the entire cottage deserved. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted you to have what you needed.”
“Well, your conscience can be clear,” she said evenly. “I’m the envy of half the island.” And hers was one of very few houses—along with Sara’s, Maisy’s and Hugo’s—that now possessed a generator of its own that could probably power them through the next millennium if need be. He could dislike his father all he wanted. He’d still had a generator delivered and installed, and that was no cheap feat. “So far we haven’t had to use the generators,” she added. “But you never know when a freakish storm might blow in.”
“So, you’ve got everything you need, then.” He walked toward her and her mouth dried a little. But he merely knelt down and picked up the flat of rosemary. “Where do you want it?”
She pressed her lips together and pointed.
He deposited it at the spot.
She blindly reached into the truck bed and grabbed the bucket that carried her tools. She knelt down beside the flat and pushed her shaking hands into the gloves. If he wanted to act as if his presence was not extraordinary, then so be it.
Just because he’d carved their names into that infernal tree didn’t mean that she’d been waiting for him for seventy-five endless days.
She grabbed the short-handled shovel from the bucket and pushed it into the earth. She’d barely turned over the second shovel of soil when he crouched beside her. He took a spade from the bucket and neatly fitted a cutting into the row she was digging.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he murmured. “You don’t think Sara was the only one who learned a little about gardening growing up on this rock, do you?”
She tossed down the shovel and sat back. “I don’t know what to think, frankly. What are you doing here, Logan?”
He sat back, too. Crooked his wrist over his bent knee and pointed the tip of the spade at the bougainvillea. “How’d you get that thing to root?”
“I told you. There’s nothing wrong with the soil here.”
“Yeah, but you’re the only one to come along in forty years or so who believed it enough to prove it.” He turned his head, surveying the land behind them. “I used to come out here when I was a kid.”
“Yes, I remember. To watch the sunsets, you said.”
“Before that.” His smile flashed, far too briefly. “When I was little. Scared the devil out of my mom. She was always afraid of somebody going off the cliff behind the house.”
“Aren’t you just full of reminiscences.” She didn’t care if she sounded peevish. She was. He’d left her. He’d stayed away. Eighteen hundred long, endless hours.
“You and Sara haven’t found the current owner yet?”
“No.”
He nodded. Reached over and neatly planted several more cuttings, then sat back again. “I quit.”
“Well, I didn’t ask you to help me plant in the first place. I didn’t ask anything of you.” Her tongue didn’t stop. “Didn’t expect anything. You leave behind that tree trunk for me to find and then you just show up here and act as if everything is hunky-dory! For all you know, I could have been pregnant when you left here, regardless of what I said the day you left.” She hadn’t been. She’d been relieved. And saddened.
Logan’s gaze drifted down her body. Slender, curvy. Wearing a pair of dark green shorts that displayed impossibly beautiful legs. The shorts were modest, but they were not the camouflaging dresses she’d worn.
“You weren’t pregnant. I called Sara a few times. I know you wouldn’t have kept that a secret from her and she’d have told me.”
“You send letters to Riley. You call your sister.” Her jaw tightened. She leaned forward again to turn the shovel.
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I came back to you.”
Her green eyes turned glacial. “Don’t toy with me, Logan.”
“I’ll help you find the owner.”
She blinked at his sudden change of tack, but she recovered quickly. “Another little trick you can pull from your bag along with trucks and roofs and generators?”
“I know people,” he said. There was no point in pretending he didn’t have connections across the globe. And maybe he was uncertain enough about what he was doing here that he wanted her to know he came with some sort of ability.
“Bully for you.” She leaned forward, stabbing the shovel into the dirt. “Don’t do me any favors, Logan. I can manage on my own. I should have sent all that stuff back when it started arriving. The truck, everything.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It was all from you.”
He absorbed that. “You found the tree trunk?”
Her expression tightened. The muscles in her lightly tanned arms flexed as she settled plants in the soil. “Sam made sure of it. You didn’t admit that the cut on your jaw happened while the two of you were moving the tree trunk.” Only the faintest shimmer in her voice gave the slightest clue to her emotions as she glanced at him. “Looks like it healed up all right, though.”
“I meant what I carved.”
“Really.” She looked unconvinced. “‘Logan loves Annie.’ Was it supposed to be my consolation prize or something?”
He deserved that. He changed tack again. “How’s Riley?”
“Call her yourself and find out.” She sighed a little. “Rising above all of her parents’ imperfections. Including yours. Now is that all the information you need? Because I need to get these in the ground and get to the shop. Sara’s expecting me.”
“I quit my job.”
Her shoulders bowed for a moment. Then she kept digging. “Why? You believed you were your job.”
“I wanted to make something rather than destroy it.” Cole had countered that Logan wasn’t destroying anything, but salvaging a bad situation caused by worse circumstances. “But there aren’t many who quit Coleman. When he picks you, he picks you to stay.”
She paused. “He sounds dangerous.”
He supposed Cole was. But the real danger was in a world that had created a need for such men. For clandestine agencies that operated in the murkiness that guarded the boundaries of decency. “He was...” he searched for a description, “...peeved.” Despite his own hand in the situation.
She suddenly looked at him. “Did he hurt you?”
Logan laughed softly and caught her hands in his. He drew off her gloves and tossed them aside. “Would you go for his throat if you thought he did?”
Her fingers flexed. Then slowly tangled with his. “Maybe.”
Probably. She wanted to protect what she had. Because of the decisions she’d had to make.
“There’s no person I respect more than you, Annie.”
“Respect.” Her lips turned down.
Her fingers started to slide from his. He tightened his grip. “But there’s not a lot of reason for you to respect me.”
Her mouth rounded. “How can you say that?”
“The facts pretty much speak for themselves, Annie. I’ve left you alone. Twice.”
“Facts.” Her gaze went beyond him. She drew off her hat and her hair, longer than it had been during the storm, tumbled past her shoulders in a wealth of white-gold waves. “Facts don’t necessarily tell the truth, Logan. You told me that yourself. When I was seventeen, I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted it. And you were what I wanted. So I took, even though you’d tried to stop me.”
“But I didn’t stop.”
“I know you didn’t. And that night is still little more than a dream to me, Logan. But I wouldn’t change it, because we created something beyond measure.”
She moistened her lips. And her
gaze wasn’t glacial. It was softer than spring dew. Her eyes were the eyes of a girl he’d never been able to forget; of a woman he didn’t want to forget.
“Every one of us could have made different choices somewhere along the way, Logan. Maybe better choices, even. Ones less hurtful. But I believe that Riley is exactly where she was intended to be. Not because it’s the easiest thing to believe—the least painful for me. But because it is right. I believe that coming to Turnabout and opening up Island Botanica with Sara is exactly where I was intended to be. I may not be an official Turn, but this is my island, too. It’s my home, and I love it.”
“Are you willing to share it?”
She went still. “That depends. On whether you meant what you carved on the tree trunk.”
“I do.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you’ll have me.”
“Why?”
“Because I heard you can make things grow anywhere. I’m not sure if I’ve got anything worthwhile that’ll take root, but maybe given a century or two, you might have some luck.”
She leaned toward him. “Sometimes a person needs a challenge in their life.”
He held her off. “I didn’t want the darkness of the world I lived in crossing paths with the sunlight in yours. But when I left, it was like your light came with me. I couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t shake you. And I didn’t want to. I hated what I was doing, what it was making me. You’d turned your life around into what you needed it to be for you. So I came back. There was nothing about this place that I couldn’t live without before. Until I found you here. I swear to God, Annie, leaving you after just those few days was like leaving behind an entire lifetime. Sam said something that day we were out here clearing the trees about not looking at what the island would give me but what I could give to it.” He looked at the Castillo house. Half crumbling. Not barren, after all. “And I want to give it back this place.”
“Restore it or get rid of it?”
“I’m done in the ‘getting rid of’ business. I love you, Annie. You’re the first woman I’ve said that to. And you’ll be the last.”