“Goodbye, Emma Carter,” he said slowly.
Emma stared at the dwindling fire.
“Goodbye, Logan Beckett. I hope you find that paragon of a woman and marry her and live happily ever after. But I bet she’ll never love you as much as I do. As much as I did.”
She corrected herself. Without waiting another minute, she headed for the stairs. Tears blinded her, but she could make out the general shape of the stone steps. Once she reached the first one, she climbed them easily.
Emma almost ran across the yard, into the kitchen. Lily sat in the living room, soft music playing in the background as she leafed through a magazine. She raised her head as Emma came into view.
“I saw you had company, so I didn’t come back down,” she said.
“It might have been better if you had,” Emma said without slowing.
She ran lightly up the stairs. In only seconds she was in her bedroom, the bright light almost hurting her eyes after the darkness at the beach.
She sat on the bed and rubbed her eyes. She had been an idiot from the get-go and had no one but herself to blame. But, it hurt. She loved him. She hadn’t meant to fall in love, but there it was. And not a thing she could do about it. The fault lay entirely with her.
“You two didn’t patch things up, I take it,” Lily asked from the door.
“No. He said goodbye for good tonight. I guess while he rang my chimes, I didn’t ring his.”
She lay back, her arm over her eyes.
“Well, no one ever said men were the smartest creatures God ever created. Now what?”
Emma gave a wistful smile.
“I don’t know. I ran from Virginia to get away from David. Now do I run from California to get away from Logan?”
“We could take a few days to see some of the state. You haven’t seen much of anything since you’ve been here and we have a lot to offer here on the West Coast. What do you say?”
Emma sat up and nodded, new found determination shining from her eyes.
“I say that sounds like a good idea. Let’s cram every day so full I won’t have time to think about some arrogant prig of a guy that...that I’m crazy about.”
Tears threatened again, but she swallowed them.
“Tomorrow, I want to go to Disneyland.”
Lily laughed and joined her twin on the bed, hugging her hard.
“Disneyland it is. After that we can drive up to Napa and spend a day or two tasting all the wine they make there, then go up to Lake Tahoe and spend a few days at Stateline and thecasinos. Catch a few shows. You haven’t seen San Francisco, that’s a jewel of a city.”
“I only have two weeks left,” Emma said, suddenly daunted by the activities Lily rattled off.
“What we don’t get to this trip, we can see on another one. This doesn’t have to be your only venture to the West Coast, right?”
“Right.”
But in her heart Emma knew she wouldn’t come back as long as Lily’s next-door neighbor lived there. The memories and might-have-beens would be too strong, too painful. She had to see everything in the next few days and then return home.
Like Logan had said goodbye, maybe with a few regrets but no looking back.
Chapter Twenty
“I’m too tired to dress up,” Emma complained as she lay across her sister’s bed eleven days later and watched as Lily carefully put on her makeup.
“No, you’re not. You had a nap this afternoon and we did nothing all day but drive home and rest. Come on, get up and get dressed. Wear something of mine. If we had been thinking, we could have bought look-alike dresses.”
