AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She thought back to her brief meeting with Logan’s father. She’d been at the inn with a potential client and Bonnie had introduced them when they’d passed in the hallway. Looking like an older, more grizzled version of his son, Robert Carmichael had been lean and sun-weathered, his manner gruff but pleasant.
He’d spoken to his daughters fondly but somewhat too jovially, and even at the time, Alexis had thought it was as if he didn’t really know Bonnie and Kinley all that well, but was trying to hide the fact from outsiders. She hadn’t seen him with Logan during that visit, so she had no idea what undercurrents she might have sensed if she had.
Remembering Logan’s comment that seeing his dad over Christmas would hold them for a year or two, she thought it sad that they had such a distant connection. But then again, she’d had a difficult relationship with her own father, so she could relate to an extent.
“My dad stayed around after he and Mom divorced, but I wouldn’t say we were all that close,” she confided impulsively. “There were times I thought he saw me more as a weapon to use against my mom than as his daughter.”
Logan grimaced. “Damn. That’s rough.”
Suddenly realizing what she’d said, she blinked in surprise. A short, humorless laugh escaped her as she shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve ever said that aloud before. Must be the green tea—I think it’s going to my head.”
It was a bad joke, and he made no effort to smile. “Acrimonious divorce, I take it?”
“Very. My brother and I were quite
young and our parents fought several bitter custody battles during our childhood, making certain we knew all the angry details. We were never sure when they went to court who we’d end up living with, though Mom always ended up keeping primary custody with us seeing Dad on weekends and holidays. When we reached our teens, my brother ended up spending more time with Dad and I stayed with Mom. That seemed to satisfy both of them. Mom could live vicariously through my music and dance performances and Dad was free to push Sean toward a career in professional sports. I loved my dad, and I grieved when we lost him, but I can’t say we were ever truly close.”
“Your brother is an athlete?”
She shook her head. “No. He didn’t have the self-discipline to work that hard at any one sport. He’s a department manager in a sporting goods store now. Last I heard, he’s considering pursuing professional bass fishing.”
She touched her napkin to the corners of her mouth, then smiled wryly at Logan. “All this was just my way of letting you know I understand what it’s like not to have a traditional relationship with your father.”
Logan nodded. “At least we were spared the vicious custody battles. There was never any question that we would stay with Mom. And she never said a bad word about him. She claimed to love him until the day she died, she just said she couldn’t live the nomadic way he did, especially after she had three kids in just over four years. She always made excuses for him—said he tried to stay in one place and be a responsible husband and father, but it was simply against his nature. That’s bull, of course. He was just too selfish to make the effort. She made sure we talked to him often on the phone, and that we wrote him letters and sent photos, and she always welcomed him and accommodated him on his annual visits. If she had any bitterness or resentment over the way things worked out between them, she never even hinted at it to us.”
“She sounds like a special woman.”
“She was,” Logan said, his voice deepening. “My sisters and I had a great childhood. We stayed in Tennessee because that was where my maternal grandmother settled when she remarried after losing her first husband in an industrial accident when my mother was a toddler. Mom wanted to be close to her mother and stepdad after her own marriage broke up. Grandma had sold her share of the inn to her brother, Great-Uncle Leo, years earlier, but they remained close and Leo was an important part of my mom’s childhood—as he was of ours. So we had Grandma and her husband to spoil us in Tennessee, and Uncle Leo and Aunt Helen indulging us every time we came to Virginia. I can’t say we lacked for anything, really. The girls and I hardly remembered Dad ever living in the same household with us, so we didn’t miss what we’d never had.”
She believed him when he said his childhood had been a happy one. His still-close relationship with his sisters was ample testimony to that. Still, she suspected it hadn’t been as easy as he implied to grow up without his father in his life, even though he and his sisters had adjusted to that reality from an early age. She thought there was still more about his past he hadn’t told her—something that had left scars on his heart as well as his body. He had his reasons for being so solitary and cynical, and she didn’t think she’d heard them all. But maybe they’d shared enough about their pasts.
“So, what would you like to do after lunch?” she asked brightly, taking out her handy tourist guide. “We could take a ferry over to Bainbridge Island and check out the galleries. Or we could ride a water taxi to Alki Beach and see the replica of the Statue of Liberty there. Or we could watch boats go through the locks from Lake Washington to Puget Sound and vice versa.”
“I wouldn’t mind visiting the locks,” Logan said. “Unless you’d rather do one of those other things.”
Watching boats, riding a ferry, strolling the streets—it occurred to her that she didn’t really care what they did, as long as they did it together. But maybe it would be best if they spent the rest of the time focusing on fun and not dwelling on their pasts.
* * *
He loved watching her laugh. Her whole face lit up, making her gray eyes gleam as silver as the water sparkling around them as they strolled through the grounds of the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, which included a botanical garden. Alexis laughed quite a bit during their visit, proving she’d put their somber conversation about absentee fathers out of her mind for the afternoon, to Logan’s approval.
The waning sun poked through gathering clouds, beams glittering in Alexis’s hair, which she wore casually loose around her shoulders. Though the air was still chilly enough to make their jackets feel good, the sunlight had brought out quite a few Friday afternoon visitors to the complex. They gathered at the safety fences surrounding the locks, watching barges and tugs and yachts being raised to the lake or lowered to the sound below. At the highest level, the crew and passengers on the vessels were almost even with the spectators, nearly close enough to reach out and touch.
Logan wondered if the boaters felt a bit like zoo exhibits with so many curious eyes and lifted cameras aimed at them, but maybe they were used to the gaping, or simply too busy to be self-conscious. A few of them waved and returned greetings, but mostly they seemed eager to be on their way.
Beyond the two locks, he and Alexis and the other visitors crossed in front of a 235-foot spillway to reach the fish ladder incorporated into the far side. A steel sculpture shaped to look like curving silver waves dominated the pavement at the top of the ladder, and quite a few tourists posed for photos among the repetitive forms. From there, ramps led down to the underground viewing room. No fish jumped in the water that rushed down the twenty-one steps that made up the ladder. They’d been told they’d be lucky to see even one or two steelhead making use of the ladder this late in the migratory season.
Alexis was excited to spot a lone steelhead swimming lazily in the green water on the other side of the glass panels built into the wall of the underground fish viewing room. Stadium-style concrete benches faced the glass and large signs displayed drawings and information about the different types of salmon that could be observed at various times of the year.
“You should come back in the late summer or early fall sometime,” an indulgent elderly man told her, seeing her pleasure at identifying the fish. “It’s a lot of fun watching the big chinook and coho and sockeye salmon jumping up the ladder and crowding into this passage on their way through, sometimes so many of them they can hardly move.”
Somehow Alexis ended up sitting on a bench beside the man, their heads bent over a cell phone filled with photographs he’d taken during his many visits here. Standing to one side to silently watch the interchange, Logan realized that Alexis wasn’t just being polite. She was actually enjoying listening to the man’s stories, and the old guy was lapping up the attention from the attractive younger woman.
She definitely had a way about her, a warmth that drew people to her. Her heart might be well guarded behind hard-earned barriers, but somehow she still came across as open and genuinely interested in others. It was no wonder she’d done so well with her business thus far. Her brides and other clients liked her, and they believed that she was sincerely interested in making them happy. Which was the truth. Despite the strife-filled youth she’d described to him earlier—or maybe because of that early chaos—she had emerged as a thoughtful, generous, outgoing adult. Perhaps ironically, he, who had experienced a happy, supportive, mostly carefree early childhood, was more prone to hiding himself away from people, even pushing them away, closing himself off.
Yet still something had drawn them together. And though he’d originally tried to brush it off as nothing more than a powerful physical attraction, he was increasingly certain there was more to it. He’d enjoyed hanging out with her here in Seattle, even outside the hotel room. He hadn’t even minded too badly when they’d swapped personal revelations because frankly, he’d been interested in what he’d learned about her today. Not that he wanted to spend the rest of their vacation having heart-to-hearts about past pain, but the one conversation hadn’t been as bad as he might have expected. Maybe that, too, just seemed safer here, away from their real lives.
Back above ground a short while later, they took their time crossing over the dam again, pausing to watch seagulls, herons, diving birds and the occasional jumping fish, and to observe the taller ships cruising beneath a railroad drawbridge on their way toward the locks from the sound. A sea lion entertained the spectators by randomly popping up and submerging in Salmon Bay, making younger visitors—and a few older ones—squeal and point whenever it emerged.
