Free I'll Be Waiting (San Juan Island Stories Book 6) by Wendy Lynn Clark

I’LL BE WAITING
    Skylar Robinson knocked on the darkened marina office window, ignoring the business hours printed on the glass. This was too important. Warm June air ruffled the new highlights in her hair and her mother-of-pearl faced wristwatch confirmed what she already knew: The cruise ship was supposed to have arrived over half an hour ago.
    Well, ships were late sometimes.
    Except, the port was so empty. Empty of five-year reunion cruises, and empty of her former high school classmates. She just knew she had screwed up. Again.
    She dug into her messenger bag for the invitation, jamming her pink polished nails against spiral notebooks, a box of crayons, an emergency lesson plan and glitter-glue. The bag, holding her shiny new laptop, weighed heavily on her thin shoulder.
    The computer was a gift from her store manager boyfriend for completing her teacher’s certificate. Teaching was not the exotic career she’d once dreamed for herself but a practical one she’d thought out carefully in a change from her usual live-for-today-not-for-tomorrow outlook. Her boyfriend had hinted he planned to give her something “even more important” during a “very, very important celebratory dinner” with both their families. She had postponed the party. The reason she had put him off was waiting for her at this reunion. Waiting for her like the one-line emails that unfolded in her inbox, beguiling Skylar into her computer chair every day and every night, filling her with aching dreams.
    Congratulate me - today I finished basic.
    Afghanistan is hot except where it’s cold.
    Your cookies taste like home .
    Meet me on the boat if you remember our promise.
    She did remember her promise. For a few hours before he had to go back, Luke would be home. For a few hours today, she could see him. She could see them together. And just, well, see.
    So, the boat had to be here. It had to be here.
    Ah. Finally her fingers found the smooth cardstock. She yanked the invitation out of her bag. WELCOME, CLASS OF THE MILLENNIUM, the invitation card read, BOARD AT SLIP NUMBER 4-04. Skylar looked up at the posting area. She was standing at slip number 40-4.
    Oh. She was off by 36 slips.
    But, wait. She stood in the middle of the abandoned Anacortes ferry terminal. The instructions clearly directed her to Bellingham’s Fairhaven Marina.
    Her stomach dropped. Forty miles away? No. Impossible. Her invitation began to tremble. By now the cruise ship must have lifted its anchor in Bellingham. It was already gone. He was already gone. She was too late. Five years of promises curled up into a ball and—
    No. She couldn’t be too late.
    Skylar ran for her old Hyundai and shoved the keys in the engine, killing her car twice before she calmed enough to stomp down the clutch and squeal out of the private lot. She had to reach him. He couldn’t give up on her. She could still reach him somehow. He wouldn’t disappear, not even if five years ago they had sworn that if one of them didn’t arrive, their love wasn’t meant to be.
    Oh, why had this happened? She was different now. She paid attention. She’d planned this drive out so carefully, arrived early, raced from her graduation ceremony and please-please-please let there still be time to keep her promise. Because she had kept it, a secret ember burning within her closed heart, for five long years.
    As she drove she let her thoughts drift back five years to the day her attention had wandered away from volleyball practice and across the high school gym to where the hot seniors were wrestling. She’d turned as her teammate screamed, “SKYEEE!” in the horrified way you scream at someone who is about to be a big, fat idiot.
    The volleyball smacked her right in the face.
    Hard leather slapped her nose and cheeks with the same sound as the distracting wrestler on the opposite side of the gym slamming his opponent into the mat. Skylar fell backwards and landed on the hard gym floor, on her butt. Her cheeks