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As Dav and I make our way back to the truck, I turn the concept over in my mind, testing the mettle of shared dinners and dirt beneath our fingernails. Of Aras and his fascination with every plant and creature on the farm. Of waking in Oscar’s arms and learning the earthy rhythm of his voice.

It hasn’t been long enough.

Has it?

Maybe not if this had started the day I moved to Porth Luck. But it didn’t. It started the first time I lost myself in cinnamon-warm eyes on a balmy summer evening and kissed a stranger I never expected to see again. It started when he left and I couldn’t forget him.

It started when he nearly died last winter and the news sank into my soul like a stone in deep water.

I told myself I came to Cornwall for Folk. That I needed my brother. And I did—I do.

But Folk doesn’t live in Porth Luck. He lives in Devon where there were cheaper farms for sale, better ones close enough to see him most days if that had been my true goal.

Instead I chose mine.

Perhaps because my heart knew something my head can’t admit just yet.

You love him.

Yeah. I think I do.

16 OSCAR

I am a logical person. In a life ruled by mental arithmetic, I have to be. That doesn’t mean I dismiss things I can’t explain, though. I was raised to respect the elements. To find comfort in old songs and lucky charms, and the quiet certainty that sometimes people find me in this life for reasons my heart understands long before I do.

Yet, I cannot make sense of how I feel when I steer the Sirona into port to find Poet waiting on the shore for me. He’s in the shadows, which seems to fit. And he wears the expression of the friendships that survive because I don’t look too closely at things I shouldn’t see.

But if I have learned anything over the past however long, it is that Poet Whitlock isn’t my friend.

Or at least, that I don’t want him to be.

I want more.

A fact that spools around my heart as I moor the boat and catch the rope Poet tosses me as though I have come home to him a thousand times before.

It is late.

Or early, actually. Again, we are together before dawn. Except this time, I am not asleep while he slips out of my bed and into the night. I’m wide awake and too aware he hasn’t been on his farm all day and most of the evening before the sea called me to her.

Poet ties the Sirona in.

I know I do not have to check his knots.

But I do it anyway before I allow myself to truly look at him and see the lines on his face I saw only moments ago have been smoothed away.

On purpose.

I come ashore. Mal is a heartbeat behind me, but he doesn’t linger, too eager to be with Skylar, and he nods at Poet before he ghosts away.

“No Sol?”

Poet has a nice voice. As I find myself stepping into his arms with little conscious thought, I wonder if anyone has ever told him. If he knew before he couldn’t hear it anymore. Meandering thoughts that let me know I’m still at the mercy of the heat that kept Sol at home with Jack tonight. “It has been hot and Jack’s epilepsy is not so good right now.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have epilepsy.”

Poet studies me a moment, his shower-damp hair curling around his ears. Then he slowly reaches for my wrist and checks my watch screen, brows raising at the peaks and troughs that have kept me on my toes all night. “What do you need?”