Page 3 of Forgiving Her First Love

Two and a half months later…

Like everything these days, Sophie was late putting in the potatoes. She should have been turning this soil three weeks ago, but the weather had been nothing but rain and work at the marina had been an equal deluge.

Today, however, she finally had dry weather and a full day off.

It wasn’t the worst way to spend it. She liked physical work. It was satisfying and gave her time to think. Or not. As she jumped on the shovel and levered the clumps out, the noise in her head faded. She absorbed the smell of the earth while a breeze meandered off the water down at the eastern edge of Gramps’s property, floating up the sun-warmed hill to caress her arms and legs. A raven squawked as it commuted overhead and bees buzzed into the nearby chives that came up all on their own.

“Hey, Soph.”

“No,” she said reflexively. Belligerently, because she didn’t have to look to know who had spoken. Much to her chagrin, she had been reacting to Logan Fraser from the time he had picked up her sweater on the first day of school and brushed the grass from it before handing it back to her.

“It’s my day off,” she added, even though her irritation was more about the fact he’d caught her in cut-off bib overalls with only a faded tank top beneath. She was wearing gloves and heavy boots and hadn’t made any effort to tame her hair before rolling it into a messy topknot.

Why did she care? She had never been a girly girl, didn’t wear makeup, and he saw her in shapeless coveralls every day at work.

Also, he didn’t care. He’d made that so clear, so many times.

“I promised Gramps I’d get the potatoes in.” She jumped on the blade of her shovel again.

“It’s not work. It’s something else.”

“Then definitely no. I only talk to you about work.” At twenty-six, she was finally learning how to set clear boundaries.

“I need to stay here.”

The dirt rolled off the blade of her shovel. She held the handle in her lax hand as she turned to look at him.

He was annoyingly sexy, of course, wearing a striped button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up his forearms. His linen trousers had a knife-sharp crease pressed into them and were rolled up to reveal his naked ankles in deck shoes. Being summer, he only allowed his stubble to grow in for a few days before shaving it off. This morning it was a light coat of glinting bronze, tidily precise down the slope of his cheeks and clean on his neck and under his jaw. His blue eyes were not the least bit apologetic or even entreating as he met her affronted gaze.

“This isn’t aB andB anymore.” Her mother had run it as one on and off, but that had been years ago. Much as Sophie would greedily accept extra cash working overtime at the marina, she didn’t have the bandwidth for cooking and cleaning up after strangers or making the necessary chitchat.

“There’s nowhere else. Not at this time of year. The lodge is buried in renovations, the completed rooms are booked. Anything else has to be used for contractors so they can stay and finish the rest.”

“Is this because Reid and Emma are married now? Are they asking for privacy or something?” She glanced up the hill toward the house on the bluff where the Fraser boys had grown up.

Logan’s older brother had married Sophie’s best friend, Emma, a month ago. Initially they’d been trying to turn Emma from Storm’s nanny into her stepmother, but they’d fallen in love, and good for Emma. She deserved to be loved by someone great. Reid was uptight and wore a resting-glower face, but he seemed to think Em was the cat’s pajamas so that’s all that mattered to Sophie.

“I wish they’d start giving a shit about privacy,” Logan muttered.

Sophie bit back a smirk. She had noticed the pair locked lips a lot, no longer caring if they had an audience. Reid couldn’t seem to walk by his new wife without rubbing her ass like it was a magic lantern, and Emma had taken to wearing low-cut tops and lip gloss on her way to see him at the office.

“Emma’s family is coming,” Logan continued. “Her mom and niece and nephew. They need the beds at the house.”

Oh. Right. Sophie had forgotten about that.

“Don’t you have a fancy boat you can sleep on?”

“Much as I would love to go back to Florida and sleep in my own bed on my own yacht, I can’t. I leased it to help pay for all of this shit.” He waved to indicate the marina and resort, out of sight behind the hillock where the road at the end of her driveway meandered toward the village.

Sophie had meant the shiny new tour boats that also belonged to the resort, but the casual way he threw out “my own yacht” irritated her. She ought to be proud of him and his brothers. They were local boys who had done well. They’d grown up here with roughly the same start she’d had. Granted, Wilf had handed them a six-figure check to get them through school and on their way to building a life. She hadn’t had that leg up, but she could have had a very different life right now if she had made some smarter choices along the way.

Don’t, her inner mama bear warned. She would never regret Biyen and would never ever regret that her mother had lived long enough to hold her grandson. Still, Sophie had caught some really shitty breaks over the years while Logan had lived his best life after refusing to bring her into it.

Which was for the best, she insisted to herself. If a man wasn’t prepared to build a life with you, then the best thing to do was walk away from him. She’d learned that with Biyen’s father.

“I’ll still take my shifts with Storm,” Logan said.

“You guys are still doing that?” Days after they had arrived, Logan’s mother, Glenda, had come along with her nursing background and no-nonsense parenting. She had laid out a schedule for the men to look after their sister in twelve-hour rotations. As much as Emma wanted to be Storm’s mother, she had been hired as a nanny, so they could only rely on her for a standard forty hours a week.