“Jasmine—”
“Let me finish.” I take a breath. The cold air burns my throat. “I got through college on anger. And it worked. The anger got me through.” I pause. “But it also built the walls. Every man who tried to get close to me after you hit those walls and walked away.”
“I wish I could go back in time and do things differently, Jasmine,” Logan says in a sad voice.
I’m not done yet. “My father left before I was born. He and Mom were together for a few months. When she got pregnant, he disappeared. Mom never talks about him. When I was little, I used to ask, and she'd say it was just us and that we didn’t need anybody else.”
Logan laces his fingers through mine.
“When you left, it confirmed everything I'd already learned from a man I'd never met. Men leave. You love them, and theyleave. And your mother standing in her kitchen telling me that I wasn't built for the hockey life was the extra layer.”
“I'm sorry,” Logan says. His voice is rough. “I'm so sorry, Jasmine.”
“I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I'm telling you because you need to understand what's underneath the walls. It's not pride. It's fear. Every time you cancel on me or choose your family or go quiet on your phone, my heart goes back to eighteen.”
He pulls me closer. His chin rests on the top of my head. The wind blows my hair across both our faces, and the ocean crashes against the rocks below us.
“I'm not leaving,” he says. “And I'm going to keep saying that until your heart believes it too.”
We walk back to the house as the last light fades. The windows glow warm from the fire still burning in the living room. Logan holds the door open for me, and the heat wraps around us as we step inside.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Starving.”
He cooks while I sit on a bar stool and sip on a glass of wine. Logan is confident in the kitchen. Logan sears the shrimp in batches and builds a sauce with white wine, butter, and lemon.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” I ask.
“YouTube, mostly. I started with eggs and worked up from there. My mother still doesn’t believe I can cook for myself,” he says with a laugh.
“She sees you as her little boy,” I say lightly, then anxiety grips me. How will we deal with the issue of Cat when she finds out about us? Despite Logan’s assurances, I know she’ll do everything in her power to ruin things for us.
I inhale deeply and push that thought away. I’ll worry about it later, just not this weekend.
“Shrimp scampi is not hard to make,” Logan says. “The trick is not overcooking the shrimp.” He drains the pasta and tosses it into the pan with the sauce. “Five minutes on one side, flip, two minutes on the other. Pull them out before they curl all the way.”
“You sound like a cooking show.”
He laughs. “I've watched a lot of cooking shows.”
He plates the pasta and sets a bowl in front of me. Steam rises off the linguine. I twist my fork and take a bite, and the flavors hit. It's perfect.
“This is incredible.”
We eat at the island, side by side, our knees touching. He opens a second bottle of wine. The fire crackles in the living room, and the wind howls against the windows.
After dinner, we wash the dishes together. When we’re done, I hang up the dish towel, and Logan turns off the kitchen light.
The living room is glowing with firelight, flickering across the ceiling. I take his hand and walk him to the sectional. We sit down and I pull the cashmere blanket over both of us.
Logan turns me to face him, his kiss soft and gently. His hand slides under my sweater and his fingers trace along my spine. There's no urgency tonight. We have all the time in the world.
I pull my sweater over my head. He runs his hand down my side, over the curve of my waist, across my hip. His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to my neck, his breath is warm against my skin. I tilt my head back, and his lips trail down my throat.
“Come here,” I whisper, and pull him down on top of me on the wide sofa. His weight settles over me. His face is lit in gold, and his blue eyes are fixed on mine.
He undresses me slowly, piece by piece. Every time he removes something, his mouth follows — a kiss on my collarbone where the sweater was, a kiss on my stomach where my jeans sat, a kiss on each hip bone as he slides my underwear down my legs.
