“What happened?”
“I got busy surviving.”She looked at the valley below them, the mountains going dark against the fading sky.“Being a single parent, having to hold everything together by myself doesn’t leave a lot of room for curiosity.Or for ...”
She stopped.Started again.“Nobody’s done anything like this for me in a long time.Nobody’s planned an outing just to make me happy.I’ve been the person who plans things, who manages things, who thinks ahead so nothing goes wrong.But you’ve got me beat by a mile in that department.You brought three thermoses and scouted the sunset.”Her voice wavered slightly, and she pressed her lips together.
“Bonnie.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be fine around me.”
“I know I don’t.That’s the problem.”She set down her fork.“You keep making it so easy to not be fine, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
He reached over and pulled a cloth handkerchief from the cooler.She took it and laughed, a watery, knowing laugh.“A handkerchief.Of course you planned for the contingency of me crying.”
“I planned for every contingency.”
“Except the mud.”
He sighed theatrically.“Except the mud.”He paused.“And I didn’t plan for this next part either.”
She looked at him.
He kissed her.Not the way she’d kissed him in the parking lot, which had been sudden and brave.A declaration.
This was slower.His hand came up to the side of her face the way it had before, his thumb resting along her jaw, but this time he didn’t let himself be careful.He kissed her with the full, unguarded weight of what he’d been feeling since their first kiss.
Since he’d driven home after kissing her in the dusty chinook wind and realized he was in love with her.That he’d been in love with her for weeks.That every spreadsheet and star chart and contingency plan was his way of saying what he hadn’t had the words for yet.
Bonnie went still for one heartbeat as if she heard his thoughts.Who knew?Maybe she did.Or maybe she just felt what he was trying to convey to her.Either way, she gripped the front of his jacket in her fist and she pulled him closer.And just like that, the kiss stopped being something tender and became something else entirely.
Their kiss before had been good.Better than good.It had rearranged his fundamental understanding of what physical contact could mean.Of how different it was to kiss a woman you loved and one you only liked.But that kiss had happened in a parking lot in broad daylight with Ruth Sanger approximately forty feet away.There had been limits to that kiss.
There were no limits here.
There was only Bonnie’s mouth, warm and insistent against his, and the sound she made when his hand slid into her hair, half sigh, half surrender.The sound knocked every rational thought out of his head and replaced it with a single, overwhelming certainty that this woman was it.
She was the answer.She was the reason he’d been building himself into someone indispensable for thirty years, not so people would need him, but so when he finally found her, he would have something worth offering her.
They pulled apart breathing harder than the altitude accounted for.His hand was still in her hair and her hand was still gripping his jacket and neither of them moved.They stared at each other in wordless wonder.
“That was ...”Bonnie’s voice was unsteady.Her eyes were enormous.“That was significantly better than the parking lot.”
“The parking lot had time, location, and audience constraints.”
“Ruth Sanger.”
“Ruth Sanger.”
She laughed, soft and shaky.She was looking at him the way she’d looked at the evidence wall in the fire station—as if she was seeing the full picture for the first time and it was bigger and more terrifying and more real than she’d ever imagined.
But this picture wasn’t a crime.It was him.And the terror in her eyes was threaded through with something luminous and reckless and brave.
“Do that again,” she said.
He did it again.
The second kiss lasted longer and went deeper and left them both quiet afterward as if something important had been settled.She leaned against his shoulder and he put his arm around her and they sat in the truck bed watching the sunset’s full color display until the first stars started to appear.
