“No.” I shake my head. “You heard the sheriff. Roads go both ways.”
He studies me, hope flickering at the edges of his expression like a cautiously lit candle.
“You sure about that?” he asks.
I lean up and press a kiss to his mouth, slow and certain.
“Yeah,” I whisper against his lips. “Positive.”
Tomorrow, I’ve got to go back down the mountain.
But today?
Today, I’m going to film every cozy second, kiss Rhett Ryder stupid, and make sure the story we started up here doesn’t end when the snow on the road melts.
TWELVE
RHETT
The last night hits different.
All day I’ve felt it in the air, riding under the routine. We fed the horses, checked the fences, brought in wood. Ivy edited on the couch, thumb flying over her phone as she stitched together bells and quilts and snow into something that actually looks like magic.
But under everything, there’s this low thrum:tomorrow.
Tomorrow the plows finish the pass. Tomorrow she gets in her car and drives an hour and a half back to Saint Pierce, to deadlines and coffee shops and a life that doesn’t currently have a grumpy sleigh man in it.
Tonight is ours.
The fire is low and steady, stove humming. Wind’s quiet. Snow’s just a soft glow outside the windows instead of a threat. We’ve eaten, cleaned up, turned off all the lights except for the one lamp by the bed in the loft and the embers below.
“I finished the teaser,” she says, standing at the foot of the loft ladder, fingers twisting in the hem of her sweater. “Sent Margo a draft. She cried emoji’d me three times.”
“High praise,” I say.
“It is,” she says, but her eyes aren’t on her phone. They’re on me.
I can feel the shift in the room. It’s gentle, but it’s real. The same way you can feel a storm deciding to turn, I can feel something in her deciding,this.
“You tired?” I ask.
“Not really,” she says softly. “You?”
“Not really.”
Silence stretches, thick with everything we’re not saying. The fire pops. She takes a breath like she’s about to jump off something tall.
“Rhett,” she says. “Can we…not pretend this is just a snowed-in weekend in a few years when we look back?”
“If it was just that,” I say quietly, “I wouldn’t be this nervous.”
She smiles, small and bright. “You’re nervous?”
“Yeah,” I admit, surprising myself with how easy it is to say the truth with her. “Feels like if I touch you now, I’m crossing into something I’m not walking away from.”
Her eyes soften. “Maybe that’s the point.”
She climbs the ladder before I can say anything else, moving slowly, deliberately, like she’s giving me a chance to change my mind.
