“He married someone else and treated you like an outsider. I wonder how he treated her. She might have had a few things of her own to prove.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t considered that.” Then he scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry—you’ve got your own issues today. I shouldn’t have even brought the box with me.”
“You know what?” she said, reaching out and grabbing his arm. “I’m glad you did. And he never saw this, did he? So whatever your mom had hoped for didn’t happen. Instead, you got to see what your mom treasured from your childhood, and that’s beautiful. Unless...” She swallowed. She wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, and she’d started to forget that—expecting more from him than she had any right to expect. “Unless you hadn’t really wanted me to see all this, either.”
Logan’s gaze softened, and a smile tickled the corners of his lips. “Nah. It’s okay.”
There was something so tender in the look that her breath caught, then he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“I was really proud of that Lego instruction manual... I gotta say,” he said. “I worked on it every spare minute for weeks.”
“It’s impressive, Logan.”
“I always was an engineer at heart,” he said, then he glanced around the room. “I can see your touch around this house, too, you know.”
“Can you? I didn’t have time to do much. We stayed for a couple of months, and I’d add a piece of furniture here or there, but the kids were so hard on furniture back then...”
They’d destroyed her efforts just by being kids—shoes on silk pillows, fingerprints on upholstered seats, chip fragments ground into a throw rug.
“I remember trying to keep a garden the same year that Graham decided to start building roads for all his toy cars...” Logan smiled to himself, then glanced over at her again. “They wreck everything within reach, but you can’t imagine life without them.”
“Yeah...” That summed it up rather nicely. “She still seems to be at it.”
He smiled sadly, and then he reached out and took her hand. “Why didn’t life get easier?”
“I don’t know...” She shrugged. “We asked that question twenty-three years ago, didn’t we? When you were getting ready to leave for college, and I was going to miss you so much.”
And it was like those years between had folded up like a paper fan, and she could have been that teenage girl again, looking at the boy who held her heart and knowing that it wouldn’t last...it couldn’t. Being with Logan required being right there next to him, reading his nuances. He wasn’t going to open up in emails or phone calls...and yet she’d been so determined to try.
“I’d say you were better off without me, but Adam wasn’t much of a catch,” Logan said.
Melanie laughed softly. “But you have nothing to regret. You met a woman you loved, started a family... You did good, Logan.”
“I tried hard,” he said.
“I did, too.” She felt the emotion simmering close to the surface in spite of her efforts to cap them. “I just wanted to be enough for them...”
She swallowed, not finishing the thought aloud. She’d wanted to be the kind of woman who could love her family so well that the fact that she was the stepmother wouldn’t matter. She’d wanted to be the love of her husband’s life... Trying hadn’t been anywhere near enough—for any of them. It had seemed like either a woman was enough or she wasn’t. But it was based on something that she had no control over. Being good, thoughtful, considerate and dedicated wasn’t all there was to it. Hard work didn’t cut it with Adam, or with Logan.
Logan seemed to see the complicated emotions on her face, because he stood up, and tugged her hand. “Come here.”
“What?” She rose with him, and he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her in close. He tipped his head to rest his cheek on the top of her head—a familiar position now. It had all happened rather quickly, and she stood there, his strong arms enveloping her with such gentleness, and her heart beating so that she could feel it in her stomach. Being next to Logan, close enough to feel his heartbeat, had always made everything feel possible between them. But she’d been a naive girl back then.
“I’m glad I got to see who you grew up to be,” he said, his voice reverberating in his chest against her ear.
“Me, too, with you,” she said.
She wrapped her arms around his waist, enjoying the feeling of his breath against her hair and his hand moving slowly over her back. She pulled back to look up at him, and she found his dark gaze locked on hers.
“I’m not the same person I used to be,” she breathed.
“Me neither.”
“I spent fifteen years trying my hardest to be who my family needed—being mom enough, being wife enough, being woman enough—and I’m done trying, Logan. I don’t feel like doing that anymore.”
“Woman enough?” He reached up and touched her chin with the pad of his thumb. “Mel, you’re woman enough. Trust me on that.”
She parted her lips to answer, but the words evaporated. All she seemed able to focus on was that dark intense gaze moving over her face. Years ago, she’d known what his kisses felt like, but it was different now. She let her eyes fall shut just before his lips covered hers.
His kiss started out firm, then softened as he pulled her into him. It was the kiss of a man who knew what he wanted, and knew how to get it. But she felt his self-restraint—his hands stopping at her back, the kiss filled with longing, and yet respectful.
Logan pulled back. “You were too good for him, Mel. You’re probably too good for the likes of me, too,” he said, his voice deep and soft.
She couldn’t help but wonder what his kiss would be
