Read Online The Summer Cottage by Lily Everett - Free Book Online

around his lean waist and press her hot face to his back.
     Logan’s muscles were granite under her touch, but she didn’t let go.
    “It sounds to me,” she murmured urgently, “like Dylan isn’t the one who hates you
     for leaving him. It sounds like you hate yourself. But Logan—your parents had just
     died, tragically and suddenly, and your world was spinning off its axis. You handled
     it the only way you knew how. Please, please don’t hate yourself for that.”
    “Dylan was only a kid. He needed me, and I could’ve stayed. I chose to leave, I chose
     college over taking care of my baby brother.”
    “You were a kid, too.” Jessica snugged up as close to Logan as she could, until she
     couldn’t tell her own heartbeat from his. “So young. What were you, sixteen?”
    Logan cleared his throat. “Fourteen. I’d already skipped a couple grades.”
    Squeezing her eyes shut against the burn of tears, Jessica mouthed a quick, fervent
     kiss against the body-warm cotton of his T-shirt. “Only a baby yourself. Logan—”
    “I should have stayed. But what could I have done? I don’t know the first thing about
     comforting someone else, or making them feel better. All I knew was that I was in
     raw, screaming pain, and I had to escape it any way I could—which was by throwing
     myself completely into my work.”
    “That’s not true.” She tightened her arms around him. “That you’re bad at comforting
     people. No matter what we talk about, or how emotional I get, you always make me feel
     like it’s okay. You listen. That’s all anyone can do.”
    He slumped another inch over the table, hanging his shaggy head between his stiff
     arms. “So I should have stayed and listened to Dylan have nightmares and cry for Mom
     and Dad.”
    “That’s not what I’m saying. You did what you needed to at the time, to cope with
     your own grief.” Although she was starting to suspect that he hadn’t coped with that
     grief at all; instead, he’d grabbed onto the challenges of college at fourteen years
     old to avoid facing it. How had he put it? That he escaped completely into his work.
    But no one could outrun a loss like that forever. Jessica was very much afraid that
     Logan could never truly be healthy and well-adjusted until he dealt with the pain
     of the past.
    “I should have listened to him,” Logan repeated, like a looped recording, and Jessica
     let out a shaky breath.
    “It’s too late to help your eight-year-old brother,” she said, as firmly and gently
     as she could. “You can’t go back in time. You have to let it go … and realize that
     you’ve been blessed with a second chance.”
    “What do you mean?” His wrecked voice came from deep inside his chest.
    “You can listen to Dylan now.” She kissed him once between his shoulder blades, then
     again because she couldn’t help herself, before glancing at the digital clock on the
     stove. “Come on. Let’s go wild and skip dinner, head straight for dessert. Last one
     up the garden path to the big house has to wash the dishes.”
    Logan straightened slowly, as if his bones ached, but when she finally got a look
     at his face, there was a small smile curving his mouth. “Dessert for dinner? Doesn’t
     sound very healthy to me.”
    “It’s okay to let yourself enjoy life sometimes,” Jessica said, brushing a tentative
     hand over his jaw.
    He turned his head to plant a kiss that left her palm tingling. Meeting her gaze directly,
     he admitted, “That’s not the easiest thing for me. But I’ll try. I want to do better.”
    Joy lifted Jessica’s heart into her throat. She’d never felt closer to anyone than
     she did to Logan in that moment. “That’s good. Because you’re a Harrington—and what
     you boys want, you usually get.”
    But as they left the summer cottage and walked up the winding path through the twilight
     garden, Jessica’s happiness was tempered by the fact that if Logan was truly improving
     so