“I thought if I stayed, I’d never leave these mountains,” she continued. “Never do anything bigger. Never become someone.”
“And now?”
Rowan smiled through the sadness pressing against her ribs. “Now I think maybe I confused bigger with better.”
Something shifted in Wes’s expression. It wasn’t triumph or satisfaction. Perhaps it was just sadness for all the years sitting between them.
Neither of them spoke a moment. But in the space between where their gazes met, hundreds of small memories and future possibilities seemed to play like a projector playing a movie in the air.
She couldn’t look away. Didn’t want to look away.
No, what she wanted was to go back in time. To feel Wes’s arms around her again. To feel his lips against hers.
Her throat burned at the thought.
She’d tried so hard to leave all that behind her.
She’d failed.
“Rowan . . .” Wes leaned closer.
“Yes?”
Then Remington rose, instantly alert. His ears pointed forward, and his attention fixed beyond the pasture toward the woods bordering the property.
Wes tensed beside her.
Something was wrong.
Wes checked the perimeter of the property twice.
The first pass had been fast and tactical.
The second had been slower, more instinct than procedure.
Remington stayed close beside him the entire time, moving silently through the dark pasture and along the trees bordering the woods. Twice the dog stopped and listened into the darkness hard enough to tighten something low in Wes’s chest.
But nothing moved.
There were no footsteps. No flashlights. No shifting shadows between the trees.
He wished he believed that was true.
But he knew it wasn’t.
When he stepped back into the screened-in porch, he paused when he saw Rowan waiting for him there with wide eyes.
Something in his chest eased before he could stop it. The moment they’d shared before this . . . it had nearly left him undone. Because for a moment, he’d seen the truth in her eyes. He’d seen the truth that she still had feelings for him.
That was the very thing he’d been praying about for years. He hadn’t wanted to pray for it. He’d wanted to forget her.
But he couldn’t.
Rowan sat up straighter. “Did you find anything?”
He shoved his earlier thoughts aside. “No. Nothing.”
She studied his face. “You don’t sound relieved.”
