“You named a horse after a baseball pitcher?”
“Seemed fitting.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “The high school asked me to help coach their baseball team this spring. I said yes before I even thought about it. I’m still under contract for modeling and endorsements, but they’ve all agreed to me flying in twice a year to do the shoots all at once.”
Ally’s chest felt tight. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I choose this.” Colton gestured at the inn, the mountains, the town beyond. “I choose Blueberry Hill. I choose mornings that smell clean and evenings on the lake and watching kids learn to love baseball the way I used to. I choose a life that actually means something.”
The wind picked up, sending a swirl of crimson leaves across the porch. One landed on Ally’s shoulder, and she brushed it away with trembling fingers.
“And what about us?” The words came out rougher than she had intended. “You left. You said you needed space, and I gave it to you, and then you were just—gone. For months. Do you know what that was like?”
“I know I hurt you.”
“You broke my heart.” She hadn’t meant to say it so plainly, but there it was, hanging in the October air between them. “I understood why you needed to go. I even supported it. But watching you leave, not knowing if you’d come back, not knowing if I was foolish for hoping?—”
Her voice cracked, and she stopped. Took a breath. The cider had gone lukewarm in her hands.
“I loved you too much to ask you to be someone you’re not.” The words she’d said to her mother months ago, the ones that had felt like accepting defeat. “And I thought you loved that life too much to give it up, even for love.”
Colton went still. “You really believed that?”
“What was I supposed to believe? You were gone. Back to New York, back to the parties and the spotlight and everything I couldn’t compete with.”
“There was never any competition.” Colton’s voice was quiet, stripped of all the charm and confidence she’d first fallen for. This was the real him—the man beneath the headlines, beneath the career, beneath the easy smile. “I was just too stupid to realize it until I’d already left.”
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it. His palm was warm and rough, callused in new places she didn’t recognize.
“Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
They walked back to his house. Ally stared. The house looked lived in—not staged for sale, not empty and waiting. There were rocking chairs on the porch, firewood stacked neatly by the door, and a wreath made of dried lavender hanging from the knocker.
“You decorated.”
“I tried.” He was watching her face, gauging her reaction. “I hired someone to help with the inside, but the porch stuff I did myself. Including the lavender, which I may have stolen from your greenhouse.”
“You didn’t steal it. I gave you those cuttings.”
“Same thing.” He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and meant it.
“There’s more.” Colton took her hand again, leading her around the side of the house. “Close your eyes.”
“Colton—”
“Humor me.”
She closed her eyes, letting him guide her across the grass. She could feel the ground change from lawn to something harder—flagstones, maybe—and hear the soft clucking sounds before they stopped walking.
“Okay.” His voice was close to her ear. “Open them.”
Ally opened her eyes and felt her breath catch.
It was a chicken coop. But not just any chicken coop—the fanciest chicken coop she’d ever seen. A proper little house with a peaked roof and window boxes planted with herbs, a wire run that stretched across a generous patch of yard, and inside, a dozen hens in shades of brown and red and speckled gray, scratching contentedly at the ground.
“You built this?” Her voice came out strange, thick with something she couldn’t name.
“I had help. Will showed me how to frame it out, and Ryan helped me paint.” Colton was watching her face again, with that careful hope in his expression. “I remembered you saying once that you wanted chickens. That it was the kind of life you’d always imagined—bees and chickens and a garden you could actually eat from.”
