“Can I kiss you good night?” he asked.
Before she had a chance to think too hard about it, she nodded.
He moved a little closer, cupped her face in both his hands ... looked deeply into her eyes, and then kissed her tenderly on the mouth. His lips were soft and warm, and the kiss sent tremors through her body.
Gracefully, he drew the kiss to a smooth finish, stepped back, and looked at her with wonder. “I didn’t expect to meet someone like you when I came here. I just wanted to disappear for a while. And work on that project.”
“Weareworking on it,” she reminded him, while her heart raced.
He grinned. “Is that what we’re doing?”
Emma brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “I’m not sure.” She felt suddenly shy, along with a need to be cautious. She’d fallen too hard once before and didn’t want to get hurt like that again.
Logan must have sensed her hesitation because he took another step back. “Thank you for the tea. Everything about tonight was wonderful.”
He turned and walked toward the staff house. Emma remained on the bottom step, watching him grow distant in the misty glow of the outdoor lights until he stopped and looked back.
“Will you be riding tomorrow morning, as usual?” he shouted across the yard.
“Of course!” she answered. “Unless it’s raining cats and dogs.”
“Then I’ll pray for sun!”
As he was backing up, he stumbled over the uneven ground and nearly fell, but was cheerful and undaunted, making Emma laugh as he turned and began to jog. Seconds later, he reached the large Quonset hut and went inside.
For a moment, Emma stood and looked up at the stars. It was all so astonishingly beautiful: The night sky. The constant roar of the ocean.Life.Eventually, she climbed the porch steps and smiled when she reached the door. There was so much joy in her heart. Where had it come from? The night sky? Or the kiss? Or both?
Inside the great room, her father was snoring in his chair. She went to him with love and shook him gently. “Papa, it’s time to go to bed.”
He woke with a start. “Already? Is Logan gone?”
“Yes, he left a few minutes ago.”
Her father reached for his cane. “He’s a nice young man. I like him.”
“Me too.”
“Shame I didn’t get to say good night.”
Emma held his elbow to support him as he rose from the chair.
“I can’t complain, though,” he added, “because I was dreaming about your mother just now.”
“Was it a good dream?” Emma asked.
“Oh yes. She walked in from the kitchen and told me that I should go to bed. She said she couldn’t fall asleep without me. It was like having a little visit from her.”
Emma walked with him to the bottom of the stairs and couldn’t help but feel sadness and sympathy for her father, who had slept alone for the past twenty years, missing the only woman he’d ever loved.
She supposed that his loneliness for her mother, like an inheritance, was buried deep inside her bones.
Chapter 14
Emma met Logan every morning for the next six weeks, sometimes in secret not far from abandoned Station Number Two. There was a deep hollow in the heath—cozy like a candy bowl surrounded by bayberry bushes. Each time Emma and Logan rode up to it, dismounted, and skidded down the steep slope to the bottom of the sandy basin, they felt the temperature rise a few degrees. The sun’s warmth in their private sanctuary felt luxurious on their skin after the chill of an early-morning ride on the breezy beach where fog lingered.
Regarding the regular nightly meetings in Emma’s great room after supper, always with her father present, Emma learned about thesis sentences, footnotes, and formal conclusions. She came to appreciate the importance of paragraph structure and how grammar and punctuation could affect clarity.
But it was not only Logan who taught her these things. Her father made many contributions as a first reader and editor. As an added benefit, the project gradually pulled him out of his doldrums, and he was finally back behind the wheel of the Jeep and making his way confidently along the concrete sidewalks at Main Station.
