I stepped closer, close enough to touch her. “I don’t want to watch anymore. I want to be in this world withyou.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I thought I was just a fling. A warm body that fell into your life.”
“You were never a fling.” I cupped her face in my hands, wiping the tears away with my thumbs. “You were the first thing that made me want to come down from that mountain in years.”
I wasn’t good with words, but I forced a few more out. “You’re the first person who made me feel like maybe I wasn’t too much. Like maybe I was exactly enough.”
She let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I love you, you ridiculous man. I’ve loved you since you climbed through my window like a wild mountain beast.”
“You do?” My heart skipped a beat as a blur of emotions whipped around inside my chest.
She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, and it tasted like tears and forever.
When we finally broke apart, I told her breathlessly, “I l-love you too, Cassidy.”
It came out easier this time. Almost natural. “I think I loved you before I even met you. When you were just a light in the darkness.”
She nestled into my arms. “So what happens now?”
We were both covered in sawdust, working on an old home that should have been retired years ago.
I thought about my cabin on the mountain and her farmhouse here in the valley. The distance between them now felt like an obstacle. I didn’t care where I lived as long as it was with her.
So I told her, “We’ll figure it out.” I dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Together.”
“Together,” she agreed.
Then her face lit up into the most gorgeous smile I’d ever seen.
And sitting there in the wreckage of her old life, holding the woman who’d become my whole world, I finally understood what I’d been missing all those years alone on the mountain.
Cassidy.
She was what I’d been waiting for.
And now that I had her, I wasneverletting her go.
Epilogue
Hall
Six months later, I sat on my back deck watching the sun sink behind the mountains.
The air smelled like pine and woodsmoke, and somewhere in the trees a whippoorwill was starting its evening song.
It was the same view I’d looked at for years. And I was sitting in the same chair. And following the same evening ritual with a candy bar in my lap.
But everything else had changed.
I opened the Kit-Kat bar and broke off a chunk, savoring the familiar taste of chocolate and wafer.
Down in the valley, the farmhouse sat dark and quiet. The repairs were almost finished now. It had new wiring, a new kitchen, and fresh paint on the walls. It had taken months ofweekends and late nights, but we’d done the rest of the work ourselves.
Not that either of us planned to live there.
Cassidy had made that decision about three weeks after she’d moved back in with me. She’d been standing in my kitchen, humming while she burned my eggs, and she’d turned to me with that smile that still made my chest ache every time I saw it.
“I like it better up here,” she’d said. “With you.”
