Pelican Point (Bachelors of Blueberry Cove) (8 page)

He didn’t say any of that, suddenly realizing there had been a cost to that approach, after all.

“So maybe we start with the house, invest a bit of what we’ve got while leaving enough behind to earn us more capital over time,” Fergus suggested. “We get some manpower in there . . . and when that burden has been lifted somewhat, maybe dealing with the lighthouse won’t feel as daunting. Maybe we can tackle it in stages, or possibly find some solutions that won’t include giving up control over how it’s used. At the very least, it’s worth a discussion, isn’t it?”

“Yes, okay. But your timetable, the tricentennial—”

Fergus lifted a hand. “It was a leverage point, that’s all. I needed something—anything—to get you to pull your head out of your arse and look at the bigger picture, and not just the four walls and the roof falling down over your own head. With enough help, the house could be done inside twelve months, eighteen tops. Perhaps our gift to the town wouldn’t be a fully restored, operational tower, but the promise that the work has begun on it. We can consider it our gift to the Cove. And to our own legacy.”

“I’ll . . . think on it.”

Fergus pushed to a stand. “Why don’t you think on it down at the pub, say, seven o’clock?”

Logan’s gaze narrowed, and he realized he’d just been played by the master. “What’s happening at seven o’clock? I’m not facing some kind of impromptu town meeting, Fergus. I’ll discuss this with you, and I’ll work on it in my own time, but I’m not bringing in the town to pass judgment on what will or won’t be done, or give them so much as a single vote in this. It’s not their legacy, or their burden. It’s ours. And that burden is heavy enough without putting me at their mercy along with it. Your idea to present the restoration to the town as our personal gift is fine. After the fact.”

“Are ye quite done with yer bluster, Mr. Blowhard?”

Scowling, Logan restacked the folders on his desk, then finally pressed his hands against his thighs. How could family feel so . . . restorative, so bolstering one moment, and so incredibly infuriating the next? “I’m done for the next thirty seconds. Or as long as it takes for you to tell me what you’ve done now.”

“Ye need to trust me, lad. We need help organizing this operation, and we happen to have someone in town who can help us with that very thing.”

Logan lifted his gaze, brows narrowing. “I thought you said she stopped by on her way out of town. Alex MacFarland isn’t the solution. She’s gone. But I understand and agree it was the right idea. In general. We’ll have to look elsewhere for—”

“She did stop by, yes. And she was heading out, aye, mostly thanks to your complete lack of insight and imagination.” Fergus slapped broad palms to broader thighs, and there was far too much mischief in those blue eyes to bode at all well. “However, I might have persuaded her to stick around a bit longer. See if I could talk some sense into that hard head of yours, before scrapping the effort she’d already put into getting here. And don’t go saying a single word. It was almost as hard to talk her into staying as it’s been to get you to consider listening to what she has to say. I swear, you’re both too hardheaded and prideful for your own good. I figure you’ll either be the best team ever . . . or kill each other inside the first fortnight.”

Logan leveled a steady gaze at his uncle. “Sounds like the only one in danger of any bodily harm is standing in front of my desk.”

Fergus chuckled at that. “Och, I’ve faced down fiercer than you and lived to tell.” He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. “Take a few minutes over lunch and do a little look-see.” He tossed it on Logan’s desk. M
AC
F
ARLAND &
S
ONS
R
ESTORATION
was embossed across the front in black ink, with an engraved red and white striped lighthouse next to it and all the pertinent information printed below. “She’s the real deal. And she needs this as much as we need her.”

Logan looked from the card to Fergus. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the policeman. Do a little detective work.”

Visions of the previous night, of Alex’s state of mind, flashed through Logan’s mind. “Fergus, the last thing we need is someone with problems of her own—”

“The only thing we need is someone who is as passionate about making this happen and as dedicated to seeing it through as we are. I know it’s not a simple matter of throwing money at the problem. I know it will turn your life upside down for a wee bit. You’ll need someone who won’t walk when the going gets tough.”

“What makes you think she’ll stick?”

“Because she needs this. Her reasons might be different from ours, but the outcome is all the same. We’ll both get what we want.”

 

By the time Logan walked into the Rusty Puffin that evening, he honestly didn’t know what he wanted.

His talk with Fergus had definitely sunk in. He agreed it was time for some changes to be made in how he was handling . . . well, everything. But he wanted time to think, consider, and do some research regarding what steps he wanted to take, how best to tackle them, and with whom. He needed to make certain the choices made and the steps taken were the ones best suited to get the desired results with the fewest risks. He understood, at core, it was really just his own foolish, egotistical way of saying he wanted to make the decisions, not have them shoved down his throat.

For that reason, and because he’d been honest in saying he was unsure about taking on someone who had her own issues to grapple with, he’d wanted to toss out the business card Fergus had pushed on him. But as the afternoon had worn on and he hadn’t been mercifully called away to deal with anything immediately pressing, the echoes of her nightmares, her matter-of-fact dealing with him that morning . . . and the tension he’d felt when she’d talked about wanting to see the lighthouse . . . all of that had continued to pop up in his thoughts until he finally caved and did some Internet searching of his own. The hope had been that finding out more about her would give him the perspective he needed to be objective. About her, about Fergus, about all of it.

He was going to take immediate steps to start work on the house on a broader scale. He knew how to go about hiring on subcontractors and didn’t need Alex for that. He also was going to stand steadfast against dealing with the lighthouse. For now. Heading into winter was not the time to be dealing with that. Maybe the following spring, or summer, when the house repairs were well underway, he could hire someone to come in and do a prospectus on what all would be required. It didn’t all have to happen at once. He was going to recommend that Alex find herself another restoration contract as they wouldn’t need her services, not for some time anyway.

At least that had been his plan before he’d gone and looked into her background. He’d been prepared to find something tragic involving her father, but he hadn’t been at all prepared to discover she’d been there with him on the tower the day he fell to his death. And that she’d been the one trying to save him . . . only to have him literally slip from her fingers.

He wished he couldn’t imagine that or what it would feel like. Except he could. All of it. Every harrowing second of it. His experience had been different only in that it had taken place on the water, and the fall had been from a boat. And it hadn’t been his father. It had been his fiancée.

In his case, there had been no photographs, and the news stories had been local and brief. It was sad, tragic, and had devastated every person in his small town. But it had been an accident, nothing nefarious or negligent. And since Blueberry Cove was still largely a fishing town, it wasn’t the first, or the last, sad loss at sea they’d experienced.

Alex hadn’t been so fortunate to be able to grieve privately. The accident had caused quite a stir. In the wake of the tragedy, the owners had had the gall to file a suit against Alex and her company, blaming them for cutting corners and being at fault for her father’s tragic death. Alex had claimed the exact opposite was true. In the end, after much litigation, there hadn’t been enough proof one way or the other, and the suit had been dismissed by the judge. But the protracted battle had tangled Alex in its grip, preventing her from moving forward, either with her business or her personal grieving.

He couldn’t believe she was as together as she was, seeing as the lawsuit had only begun a little more than a year ago and ended far more recently. He’d been some version of a zombie or a ghost, barely stumbling through the rest of that summer. The better part of his senior year in college was simply a blur to him, something he’d done by rote as grief and guilt consumed him.

He’d made choices that following summer, changing directions, deciding that feeling so helpless was simply unacceptable. He hadn’t been able to save Jessica, but he could be there to help someone else. Honor her, and work through his own doubts about himself, about his worth, and what was important, by dedicating himself to others. He’d come home . . . and joined the Blueberry Cove police department.

Part of what helped him decide were all the McCraes who had come before him, who had worked so hard to establish a legacy they could be proud of. Alex knew something of that. MacFarland & Sons had started over a century ago, and had continued on until it was just Alex and her father. And now . . . it was just her.

The difference was, when his parents had died, Logan had had his grandfather and his sisters, and later, when tragedy had struck again, he’d had his siblings and Fergus. For that matter, he’d had the entire population of the Cove holding him up, supporting him, believing in him. He’d always had a foundation of love and support throughout his life, through tragedy and triumph. When Alex had lost her father, she’d had . . . no one.

Part of him wanted to know what in the hell she thought she was doing, essentially moving herself lock, stock, and trailer to some small coastal village in Maine, taking on a job the size of Pelican Point alone. But another part understood the need to reconnect . . . to bury herself in the one thing she knew and understood as a way to heal, to get beyond, to find, fix, move forward. He couldn’t rightly blame her for taking the first thing that had come her way.

It left him exactly . . . where? He honestly didn’t know. Fergus waved him over to the bar. He nodded, but took a moment to scan the pub interior, looking for Alex. He said his hellos and patted arms, nodded, and otherwise acknowledged every person he passed on his way over to Gus. He liked the sense of community, the warmth and security of feeling so connected. But there were times when he really wished he could just be a guy walking into a bar for a cold beer where no one knew his name or tracked his every movement. Tonight qualified as one of those times.

“She didn’t stick around?” Logan asked as he reached the end of the bar. What he should have felt was relief. So, it didn’t help much when he felt quite the opposite.

Fergus slid a tall glass of ale across the bar. “She stuck. She got held up is all.”

“Held up where? The only people she knows here are you and me.”

“That might have been true this morning, but you know how the Cove can be.”

There was no retort for that, because Logan did indeed know. He just hadn’t thought of Alex as the type who would easily fit into new environments. He pictured her telling him very directly, politely, that he could take his offer to house her while she scrambled for more work and shove it. She was memorable, he’d give her that. Maybe even the kind that would grow on a person over time, but inside a single day . . . he didn’t really see that.

“So, where, exactly, did she get hung up?”

“Boathouse. Talking to young Monaghan about something or other.”

“She’s with Brodie?”

Fergus raised a brow at the edge in Logan’s tone, but kept wiping down the bar. “I heard something about him discussing some ideas he had on a remodel, but that’s all I know.” He spared a glance at his nephew. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll put your concerns first.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I fired her, remember?” Logan didn’t get into the part about how he wasn’t planning on hiring her back. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might stick around the Cove, anyway. Her business was in lighthouse restoration. And he was the only one with a lighthouse. So what the hell was she doing with Monaghan? And why did it piss him off?

He sipped his ale and tried not to look at his uncle, who had a knack for mind-reading. Logan was fairly convinced that’s how he knew what he knew. Logan recalled Fergus’s comments about Alex and him needing help. He’d initially assumed Fergus had meant she needed the work and Logan needed work to get done. But now that he knew about her father, and that, as far as he could tell, she hadn’t worked a restoration project since his death . . . that would mean her first time back on a tower would be Pelican Point. Was that why she’d wanted to go out and just look at it? Was she even ready to get back on the horse, as it were? Would she ever be? Her nightmares suggested otherwise. As did the fragile condition she’d let herself get into. She was still grieving. She’d barely had time to bury the man and set his estate to rights, much less deal with the legal woes she’d faced in British Columbia.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced Logan became that his initial plan to let her move on was still the right decision. He set his glass back on the bar. “Might be a better choice for her, anyway. MacFarland’s experience isn’t just with the lighthouses; they’ve done almost as many keeper’s cottages and the like. She’d be able to manage pretty much any kind of restoration project, I’d imagine.”
Or would be able to if her head were screwed on straight.

“So, you looked her up then.” Fergus tucked the bar rag in his apron pocket and gave Logan a considering look. “If it’s pity you’re feeling, don’t let that guide ye. You wouldn’t have stood for that after Jessica died. I imagine Alex feels much the same.”