Forgiving her first love, p.1
Forgiving Her First Love, page 1
Forgiving Her First Love
A Raven’s Cove Romance
Dani Collins
Forgiving Her First Love
Copyright© 2024 Dani Collins
EPUB Edition
The Tule Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Publication by Tule Publishing 2024
Cover design by Lee Hyat Designs
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AI was not used to create any part of this book and no part of this book may be used for generative training.
ISBN: 978-1-962707-26-8
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Dedication
To the amazing team at Tule Publishing for always making me feel like I’ve found the absolute best home for my stories.
Dear Reader
Thank you so much for the love you’ve been showing for the first book in my Raven’s Cove trilogy, Marrying the Nanny. I’m thrilled that you connected so closely with Reid, Emma and Storm.
Forgiving Her First Love can be read as a standalone. While Reid and Emma are in this story, it focuses on Reid’s brother, Logan as he mends fences with Sophie. She loved him her whole life—until he broke her heart. Their journey is funny and heartbreaking and healing, but there is also a loss. If you struggle with grief, you should be aware of that content before you continue.
Trystan’s story, Wanting a Family Man, will be out a few short months after this one. I won’t spoil the identity of his heroine, but some of you have already written to me with the correct guess. Want a sneak peek? Visit my website:
danicollins.com/books/wanting-a-family-man
Also, if you haven’t read the bonus epilogue to Marrying the Nanny, you can get it here:
danicollins.com/marrying-the-nanny-epilogue
Enjoy your visit to Raven’s Cove!
All my best,
Dani
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Dear Reader
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Raven’s Cove series
Acknowledgement
Excerpt from Wanting a Family Man
More Books by Dani Collins
About the Author
Prologue
April 2nd
As Logan Fraser stepped out into the overcast day, he wondered how he had thought getting pissed to the gills last night would help his situation. He was so hungover, he was liable to throw up in the weeds before he’d walked to the end of the driveway, let alone all the way to the marina.
Prior to crawling out of bed this morning, he had thought yesterday was the worst day of his life. The truth was, ‘worst days’ had been growing exponentially since he’d received the call three days ago that his father had been killed in a small plane crash.
Logan had immediately departed the sunny humidity of the Florida Keys to wake jet-lagged in the frigid damp of Victoria, BC. When he had arrived at the lawyer’s office yesterday, and met up with his two half brothers, Reid and Trystan, he’d had to let go of his dim hope that Wilf Fraser’s death was an April Fool’s Day prank. Their father’s death had become all too real, especially when they were introduced to their baby half sister.
Quarter sister? What did you call it when your father made a fourth child with yet another woman? No matter how they were related, Storm was literally a baby, one who had crapped all over a boardroom table and, metaphorically, all over their lives.
The reading of Wilf’s will had forced Logan to accept that his father was genuinely dead, and that he would never get to tell him what he really thought of him.
Maybe that was for the best, since what Logan thought kept changing. As the gravity of Dad’s finances had piled up, so had Logan’s acrimony. It had reached critical mass when they’d been forced to fly up here to Raven’s Cove, a tiny island among many in the middle of the BC coast.
Traipsing around the collection of buildings they had called home throughout their childhood, they had discovered things were far, far worse here than the lawyers and accountants in Victoria had warned. The house they’d grown up in was showing its age. Wilf’s almost wife, Tiffany, had started making updates, but the renovation had been halted mid-construction due to nonpayment of invoices.
It was the same story at the lodge where sports fishermen had always filled the utilitarian rooms, topping up the company coffers while they caught their limit. Tiffany had talked Wilf into upgrading the whole resort, hoping to draw higher-end visitors and ecotourism.
She was trying to gentrify a truck stop roadhouse on the otherwise desolate West Coast. Raven’s Cove was a place to gas up, restock the galley, or get an emergency repair. Plenty of summer traffic was leisure craft, sure, but they were headed to more populous places like Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii, and farther north to Alaska.
Raven’s Cove’s lifeblood was commercial fishing vessels or other working boats. No one flew this far for a family vacation that didn’t offer roller coasters or white sand beaches. There were more accessible places to go whale watching.
Tiffany seemed to have taken an “if you build it” attitude, but who knew what she had been thinking? She had lost her life in the same plane crash.
Logan and his brothers had flown here to Raven’s Cove expecting to use the days leading up to their father’s service to prepare this place for sale and extract an inheritance—not for themselves, but for their sister.
Wilf had given each of his sons money for school when they had left for university. They’d all used it wisely. Logan had expected Wilf to use his own money wisely, not throw it away on costly upgrades that left the whole place under water.
Selling Raven’s Cove it wouldn’t cover it’s debts. No, they had to bring this place back into the black so they could sell it at a profit or there would be nothing for Storm’s upbringing and head start as an adult. There was no one to physically look after her, either. Aside from the three of them, she had a nanny who trembled more than a Chihuahua on a frosty morning, and an absent aunt who may or may not be in trouble with the law.
Logan didn’t know how they would turn this place around and find her a guardian, only that it had to be done. That overwhelming reality was sitting like radioactive waste in his stomach.
Of course, that curdled sensation might also be the cheap scotch and IPA chasers he’d downed last night. Or the guilt baked into hating a man who was beloved by all the people who had stuck around and spent time with him.
Logan passed Moody, the short order cook, heading into the pub. He also looked worse for wear after last night, stubbled and heavy-lidded, but he smiled and waved. Last night, Moody had told Logan that Wilf had paid for him to go to Rupert for some much-needed dental work last year. Quinley, one of the servers, said Wilf had covered the consultation fee for a divorce lawyer, when her ex-husband had tried to move their kids to Nova Scotia.
Umi was coming out of the coffee shop as Logan passed it.
“Morning.” She waved and turned into the first door on the marina building, heading up the stairs inside to the resort office where she ran accounting. She had told them that Wilf had paid her salary without interruption, even when her pregnancy complications had forced her onto bedrest.
Randy, the apprentice marine mechanic, was opening the hardware store that fronted the machine shop. He had screwed up his dates and missed an exam, nearly putting his certification back a semester. Wilf had paid the fee to write the makeup test and arranged for him to get back to Nanaimo to do it.
Everyone seemed to have a story like that, and they had all been eager to share them with Logan and his brothers. Maybe they had thought it would help with the grief, but mostly they left Logan feeling more infuriated with his father than ever.
Wilf had always been a spendthrift. He had wanted to be loved, so he had purchased affection. How could they not see that? If he was so compassionate, how had he been so stupidly thoughtless so many times to the people he was supposed to love?
As he rounded the corner of the mar
Oh Christ. He wasn’t going to make it upstairs to the marina office. He’d only had coffee, but it refused to stay down. Better to lose it out here, rather than inside.
He hurried behind the brick building and leaned a hand against a tree trunk while he retched out all sorts of poor life decisions.
Above him, where the road rose up the bank toward the one-room schoolhouse, a young voice asked, “Are you okay?”
This was why he loathed this town. It wasn’t even a town. It was a hundred and fifty people living cheek by jowl in a cluster of houses around a marina. The military had built this place on First Nations land during World War II, to service the navy. It was still the only place to repair a boat within a day’s sail from anywhere. Nobody wanted to be here. If your boat broke down, you were stuck here. It shouldn’t be a sentence, but for most it was.
Not him, though. Nope. No way. He was giving it one week. That’s all.
Please let it only be one week.
“I’m fine,” he lied, spitting and straightening to look up at the boy of seven or eight. He wore a blue raincoat with dinosaur skeletons on it, rubber boots, and a red backpack.
“My mom gives me ginger ale when I’m sick. Do you want some?”
“You got some in your backpack?” Something in the kid’s big, earnest eyes tickled a memory in Logan’s chest.
“No.” He chuckled. “I can go to the store for you.”
“Thanks, but I’m not sick. I’m suffering the consequences of my actions.” A cold ginger ale sounded amazing, though.
“I thought you were having a hangover.”
“I do have a hangover. How do you know what a hangover is?”
“My grandpa has one. Mom is really mad.”
Oh shit. Now he was going to retch for an entirely different reason.
Those eyes. He knew those eyes way too well. And that helpful personality, the one that wanted to take care of him. His entire youth and a very hot angry week in his early twenties had been cushioned by big brown eyes exactly like those ones.
A piledriver had arrived to pound the knowledge into the back of his screaming skull, reminding him that yesterday was not the worst day of his life. That would be today, but he still asked with faint hope, “Who’s your grandpa, little man?”
“Arthur Marshall.”
“Thought so. I was drinking his scotch last night.” He regretted it even more now.
“Is that like butterscotch? Is it good?”
“Not really. Your mom is Sophie Hughes?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He nodded his head inside the hood of his raincoat.
“How old are you?” Logan was doing math that he’d done several times. The first time had been eight years ago, when his mother had told him Sophie was pregnant. He’d run the same figures four years later, when he’d seen her at his mother’s wedding. Sophie had been there with another man and a preschooler who had disappeared after an hour. She had ignored Logan the entire evening.
“I’m seven.”
“And who’s your dad?”
“Nolan Yantz. Do you want to know my name?”
“Brian?” Logan recollected vaguely.
“Everyone thinks that. No. It’s Biyen. Bye-En,” he pronounced slowly. “My dad picked it.” In the distance, the school bell rang. He looked up the hill. “I should go or I’ll be marked late.”
“Okay. Seeya later.” I’m going to stand here and lose a little bit more of the guts your mother hates.
Sophie wouldn’t have lied to him about something as important as whether he was the father of her kid. He had to believe that. She wouldn’t have lied to her mother or his. Not to her grandfather, either. Or her own kid.
Which meant she really had leapt from his bed into another man’s, despite a crush on him that had lasted a decade. A crush he had crushed beneath his Nike runners on his way to the ferry slip.
He had no right to be hurt or disgusted or even curious about her life or her son. He was the one who had left. He would do it again inside of a week.
Whatever had been between him and Sophie back in the day was very much over.
But his belly twisted with one more spasm. He had another spit before he rallied himself to walk inside and face her.
Chapter One
Two and a half months later…
Like everything these days, Sophie was late putting in the potatoes. She should have been turning this soil three weeks ago, but the weather had been nothing but rain and work at the marina had been an equal deluge.
Today, however, she finally had dry weather and a full day off.
It wasn’t the worst way to spend it. She liked physical work. It was satisfying and gave her time to think. Or not. As she jumped on the shovel and levered the clumps out, the noise in her head faded. She absorbed the smell of the earth while a breeze meandered off the water down at the eastern edge of Gramps’s property, floating up the sun-warmed hill to caress her arms and legs. A raven squawked as it commuted overhead and bees buzzed into the nearby chives that came up all on their own.
“Hey, Soph.”
“No,” she said reflexively. Belligerently, because she didn’t have to look to know who had spoken. Much to her chagrin, she had been reacting to Logan Fraser from the time he had picked up her sweater on the first day of school and brushed the grass from it before handing it back to her.
“It’s my day off,” she added, even though her irritation was more about the fact he’d caught her in cut-off bib overalls with only a faded tank top beneath. She was wearing gloves and heavy boots and hadn’t made any effort to tame her hair before rolling it into a messy topknot.
Why did she care? She had never been a girly girl, didn’t wear makeup, and he saw her in shapeless coveralls every day at work.
Also, he didn’t care. He’d made that so clear, so many times.
“I promised Gramps I’d get the potatoes in.” She jumped on the blade of her shovel again.
“It’s not work. It’s something else.”
“Then definitely no. I only talk to you about work.” At twenty-six, she was finally learning how to set clear boundaries.
“I need to stay here.”
The dirt rolled off the blade of her shovel. She held the handle in her lax hand as she turned to look at him.
He was annoyingly sexy, of course, wearing a striped button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up his forearms. His linen trousers had a knife-sharp crease pressed into them and were rolled up to reveal his naked ankles in deck shoes. Being summer, he only allowed his stubble to grow in for a few days before shaving it off. This morning it was a light coat of glinting bronze, tidily precise down the slope of his cheeks and clean on his neck and under his jaw. His blue eyes were not the least bit apologetic or even entreating as he met her affronted gaze.
“This isn’t a B and B anymore.” Her mother had run it as one on and off, but that had been years ago. Much as Sophie would greedily accept extra cash working overtime at the marina, she didn’t have the bandwidth for cooking and cleaning up after strangers or making the necessary chitchat.
“There’s nowhere else. Not at this time of year. The lodge is buried in renovations, the completed rooms are booked. Anything else has to be used for contractors so they can stay and finish the rest.”
“Is this because Reid and Emma are married now? Are they asking for privacy or something?” She glanced up the hill toward the house on the bluff where the Fraser boys had grown up.
Logan’s older brother had married Sophie’s best friend, Emma, a month ago. Initially they’d been trying to turn Emma from Storm’s nanny into her stepmother, but they’d fallen in love, and good for Emma. She deserved to be loved by someone great. Reid was uptight and wore a resting-glower face, but he seemed to think Em was the cat’s pajamas so that’s all that mattered to Sophie.
“I wish they’d start giving a shit about privacy,” Logan muttered.
Sophie bit back a smirk. She had noticed the pair locked lips a lot, no longer caring if they had an audience. Reid couldn’t seem to walk by his new wife without rubbing her ass like it was a magic lantern, and Emma had taken to wearing low-cut tops and lip gloss on her way to see him at the office.
