Page 12 of The Lightkeeper

I went to hang my jacket, but her waders had claimed the hook. Empty jars lined the edge of the kitchen counter just waiting to be filled with some hocus-pocus-named creature or another. And my office… I strode to my desk chair, but the seat was stacked with textbooks and notebooks, all tabbed with colored Post-It notes along the edges. I reached out, my fingers splaying over the one on top,tempted to open it just to see what her handwriting was like.

In the hospital—the second time—writing was how everyone communicated with me until my hearing came back. I hated being back in that bed with nothing to focus on except all the tiniest details of being stuck there—and one of those details was handwriting. From my nurse Nikki’s loopy, bubbly cursive to Jamie’s strong but sloppy scrawl. And the twins… Frankie’s bold print and Lou’s thoughtful strokes; sometimes it was hard to believe that two people who were so genetically similar could be so different. And now, I wondered how Aurora wrote. I lifted the edge of the notebook, imagining stocky, block letters. Efficient and emboldened, but with softened, rounded corners.

Gritting my teeth, I let the cover—and the thought—go and instead reached in the drawer for my log book, closing the drawer hard enough to make the desk rock, and then made my way to the spiral stairs.

The staircase wound up the center of the tower like an artery straight to the heart of the lighthouse. Some towers were big enough to house entire rooms at different points along the ascent; the Friendship Lighthouse wasn’t that big, but at eighty feet tall, it was big enough. Just before the top, there was a small landing with the mechanical and electrical components that operated the light, so I stopped there first to check all the indicators, noting all the levels in my leather notebook.

Log books were a thing of the past when lighthouse keepers needed to track the conditions of the sea and sky on a daily basis—something that modern navigation and meteorology made obsolete. I kept a log though. Not so much for the lighthouse, but for me.

The therapist I’d seen for a year after being released from the hospital had suggested a daily journal. Something about connecting with routines to find a way back to normal. She’d also wanted me to track every time I had a nightmare. Every time I had a panic attack. When they occurred. Where. If somethingtriggered them.She’d wanted me to track every time I was reminded of my reality.

And I couldn’t do that.

Instead, I’d compromised with this. A daily log as the lightkeeper. The top corner of the page noted with the date. Below it, I recorded all the information from the mechanical room each day, including the battery levels. I noted the weather each morning and the forecast for the day. And then I went back to the previous page and marked if I’d done any repairs or if anything of note happened.

There was rarely anything put in that spot because rarely did anything happen. Until yesterday.

I flipped back to the nearly empty page, staring at the faint lines for a long moment before I scribbled in the space:Aurora arrived.

My pen hesitated.Why hadn’t I written Miss Cross?I should cross it out and fix it, but for some reason, I couldn’t. The notebook slapped shut, and I took the stairs two at a time to the lantern room, the automated light beaming out in steady, measured bursts.

“Mr. Kinkade?”

I spun with a low curse, the burst of adrenaline in my veins making me see stars. I barely wiped the pained shock off my face before Aurora’s head poked into the lantern room, her curls loose and wild around her face. My fingers tightened around my pen, itching to know if her hair was as soft as it looked. I didn’t deal with soft things. The scars and calluses on my hands were a testament to the roughness of my work: manual labor and repairs, most days outside and in inclement weather. But Aurora—Miss Cross—was made of layers of soft temptation, the kind of thing a hard, broken man like me could only ever dream of feeling.

Warm eyes found mine as she stepped fully into the tiny room, wearing another pair of black leggings and a similar long-sleeve black shirt. This time, I was close enough to see that her clothes were a kind of cold gear to help keep her warm in the waders; unfortunately, all that meant to me was that they clung to her lush body like a second skin, making my dick so hard, so fast, I had to shift my weight to stop my jeans from pinching.

“Miss Cross,” I growled, prepared to order her out of the tower in another second when her attention was stolen by the sea.

“Wow.” She faced the panoramic views, her jaw dropping, those full lips of hers rounding around the “o” in a way that was dangerously erotic.

Miles of sea stretched like a banquet of beauty all the way to the horizon. It was breathtaking. Every morning, rain or shine, snow or storm, the sight steadied me. Comforted me.

Until now. Now, the only thing I felt was uncomfortable. She was in my space—my haven. And with her back to me, the view I had was of her wide hips and full ass. I could just imagine sinking my fingers into her warm flesh, holding her steady while I marked her with all my hard, sharp edges.

“You shouldn’t be up here,” I said low, tearing my gaze away as lust blared like a warning siren through my veins. This was one more reason I shouldn’t be around people. Years without sex—without intimacy—turned me into a snarling caveman around a woman who looked like a raven-haired Venus rising from Botticelli’s sea.

“I saw your things but couldn’t find you…”

“You don’t need to find me to do your research,” I said, and then added even more harshly, “I’m not one of your specimens.”

Her shoulders slumped, but I knew better than to hope she’d give up and leave me alone. “What do you do up here?” she asked, reaching behind her and holding onto the railing that circled the room. “As the lighthouse keeper, I mean?”

I forced myself to look away from her. This room was far toodamn small for the two of us when my body reacted to her the way it did.

“I make sure the light is working properly. That the battery and generator are functioning optimally. Make sure the windows and lens are cleaned. And then take care of the whole keep. Patches. Repairs. Anything it needs…”

“You write that all down?” She pointed to my notebook and instinctively, I clutched it tighter.

“Most of it. I note the weather each day. Precipitation levels. Quality of the ocean.” I didn’t know why I was even answering her. I wasn’t the one being studied here, but for some reason, it felt like not answering her would only make her curiosity even worse. The last thing I needed was her snooping around the damn house and finding all my art supplies or—worse—evidence that I actually lived here.

“It’s comforting, isn’t it?”Her smile came out of nowhere, so bright I thought for a second that I’d stared directly into the beam of the light.

I started. “Excuse me?”

“Cataloging—tracking the environment each day,” she clarified with a contented sigh. “I do the same thing. Not for the lighthouse, obviously. But for my research, I keep track of a lot of similar things about the environment so I can see any trends and if they affect the animals I’m studying.”

I grunted.

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