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Skye shrugged. “I had to do something. I needed to remember her and all I could think of was her lipstick. That she wouldn’t want some boring bench with her name on it. She’d want this.”
Bella’s eyes filled. “No, she wouldn’t. She would have painted the whole store in crazy colors if I’d let her.” She stared at the sidewalk. Their store was across the street. She couldn’t stand the idea of looking at it. Knowing that everything was gone.
Logan’s hand moved up to tangle in the hair at the nape of her neck. Quiet and supportive even as part of her wanted to shove his hand away. She leaned into his side. He tensed and she looked up.
Jacob Stack was striding across the street from the grocery store. If Mayor Darcy was the matriarch of Winchester Falls, then Jacob was the patriarch. Two people couldn’t be more different and alike in the entire town. But they both loved it with a singleminded determination that couldn’t be denied.
And when he dragged her up and off the bench and into his arms, Bella wasn’t sure what to do with herself. The tears she’d been battling choked her and she clutched his back.
Jacob had sheltered her in the storm of the paparazzi, he’d stood up for her against Sharon when she’d taken over the Festival planning, he’d always been there in the background.
“Ah, Bella, we missed you. We’ve been so worried about you two.”
She pulled back and smiled up at him. “We had to go.”
Tanned and lined with years of farming, his face melted into a rare smile. “I know it. We all knew it, but we were afraid you were never coming back, girl.”
She stepped back next to Logan and slipped her hand in his. “It was time to come home.” She looked up at Logan and his red eyes and granite jawline. The emotion was just as close to the surface for him, too.
This was his home, not just hers. It had been his for far longer. Logan was right. It was time to fight for their home. She twisted her fingers in Skye’s for a moment before letting go and moving around Logan’s Escalade.
People were standing out in front of their stores. Shopowners and customers—faces she’d come to know in the years she’d been in town. She threw her shoulders back and crossed the street to the first place she’d settled into.
She’d been an apartment dweller in New York City, a college nomad, a woman who’d created her entire empire online, but this brownstone had been the first place that had truly felt like home. The life she’d created with Logan had been the second. The cabin near the falls had become theirs.
But this was hers.
It had been hers with Nic and Adam. Her only family until Logan.
Logan slipped his hand in hers as she came up to the front of the store. The front window had been boarded up, the glass swept away. But the scorch marks remained. The old door they’d been so proud of was charred and the brass hinges glowed out of the inky stains.
Amazingly the stairs to the lower level were barely marred. The corner of a paper tacked to the front fluttered in the breeze. She went to the stairs and Logan pulled her back.
“It’s okay. I need to see it.”
Large block letters explained the status of the building, but the only word that was important in her mind was one.
Condemned.
Her vision blurred. Late morning sun slanted across the white and yellow form letter. Logan curled his fingers over her shoulders. “I’m rebuilding.”
“I wouldn’t expect any less.”
“I have an idea.”
He pressed his cheek to her temple. “I’m probably not going to like this, am I?”
“Probably not. We’re going to need Marcus.”
“Can we trust him?”
He asked the question that she’d been asking herself the entire car ride there. She didn’t know the answer. But something had felt off since she’d looked at the pictures. “We’re missing something with those pictures. I know it. I don’t think we can do this alone, Logan. It’s too big—and Aimee has too much influence.”
But she had an idea that was probably going to make Logan go off the deep end.
Thirty-Two
Logan felt naked.
