While we ate in the living room, he filled me in on all the personalities at the fire station, including Keanu, the cat they had adopted who liked to sleep in the coiled-up hoses.
By the warmth in his voice, it was clear he enjoyed his work and loved this town.
“Make it make sense,” I said, waving an Oreo at him. We’d raided my secret snack stash and were sitting on the couch, waiting for Vincent to wake for his late-night feeding. “It seems so dumb to me. They killed themselves.”
I could not for the life of me figure out why everyone in this town was obsessed with a couple of dumbass teenagers who’d lived here centuries ago.
“Because though they were on opposing sides of the war, they couldn’t live without one another. And they probably would have been killed anyway.”
“Flinging oneself off the top of a waterfall at nineteen years old is the definition of dumb.”
“Wow,” he huffed. “Didn’t figure you for such a romantic.”
With a slow blink, I gave him an unimpressed look.
“True love? It’s worth dying for.” To punctuate the sentence, he shoved an entire Oreo into his mouth.
“Nope.” I shook my head. “That’s where you’re wrong. Love is about living. Fighting and surviving and making it work.”
Though my tone was sharp, he grinned at me.
Somehow, we’d managed to inch closer together on the couch. Unintentionally, of course. But I couldn’t help but angle myself toward him as I argued.
“Why is this town so obsessed?”
He blinked, genuinely surprised by the question. “With Nathaniel and Cora? First, the Revolutionary War is kind of a big deal around here.”
“Okay.”
“No, really. It’s not like Mass or Connecticut. Vermont was its own country for years before joining the United States. that’s why we were the fourteenth state, despite the rest of New England being most of the first.”
He dove deeper into the story, clearly relishing the opportunity to teach me something.
“And everyone knows the Green Mountain boys, an independent militia, helped win the war.”
I cocked a brow. “Oh, really?”
“Yes. That’s the thing about Vermont. We’re weird. We do our own thing. We don’t handle authority well. The state’s history is filled with stories about people who went against the grain. So Cora and Nathaniel mean a lot to us. Her father wouldhave killed him first, and when she was discovered to be a spy, she would have been done for too. So they took the leap.”
“And they were never found?”
“Nope. Never. They got to be together forever. And we got our waterfall legend.”
“Dumbasses,” I muttered.
“Romantics,” he countered, his voice low and his green eyes dark.
My heart thudded heavily under his scrutiny, my skin prickling with awareness.
When had he slung his arm along the back of the couch? At what point did our thighs begin touching?
I opened my mouth, wanting to break the tension, but no words came out.
Instead, the air crackled around us.
Finally, feeling a bit dizzy, I forced myself to speak. “I don’t think love should hurt that much.”
He leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine. “Sometimes it’s supposed to.”
