“Darlin'.” The word comes out rough, like he's been saving it since this morning. “There you are.”
I go to him because I want to, because some part of me still can't quite believe I get to. He drops his gear bag and meets me halfway, arms wrapping around me, lifting me clean off the floor the way he did that very first night, except this time there's no fear in it anywhere, just two people who fought hard to end up exactly here.
“Long day?” I ask against his jaw.
“Long enough.” He sets me down but doesn't let go, one hand finding the small, faded scar along his forearm out of old habit, the one I patched up myself in a line shack the night everything nearly went wrong. I still trace it sometimes without quite meaning to. He lets me. “Missed you. Missed this.”
“I finished the painting,” I tell him, tipping my head toward the easel. “Come see.”
He studies it a long moment, the two of us on that trail, mountain adventurers, and something moves across his face that I've learned to recognize as the particular kind of quiet that means he's feeling something too big to say plainly. “That's us,” he says finally.
“That's us,” I agree. “Exactly like I first drew it. Except now I actually know how the story goes.”
He kisses me then, slow and certain, no urgency in it, just the simple fact of two people choosing each other again on an ordinary evening because that's what love turns into once the danger's actually over. What follows is unhurried and entirely ours, the fire popping low in the stove, snow falling soft outside, and I won't pretend the details are anybody's business but ours. I'll only say that when he finally pulls back to look at me, easy in a way he almost never let himself be those first frantic days in this cabin, I think I love this version of him every bit as much as the watchful stranger who pulled me out of a wrecked car. Both of them, really. All the versions I've gotten to know since.
We eat dinner late, stew I made that morning, bread I sliced while he watched me with that particular warmth he still hasn't learned to hide from me even when he tries. He tells me about his day, mostly paperwork, a lead on a smaller case that might keep him local for a while. I tell him about the onlineshop I'm finally building for my prints, the moose strips people apparently can't get enough of, the mountain adventurer series that's already got more preorders than I know what to do with.
“Jax wants a print of Biscuit,” he says, mouth twitching. “Says his dog deserves to be immortalized properly, not just described secondhand to a woman who's never even met him.”
“I like Jax already, and I haven't even met him yet.”
“You'll meet all of them soon. Mason's talking about a team dinner once the weather breaks properly. Brock included, if we can talk him into it.” Something softens in his voice on that last part, the particular carefulness he still uses whenever Brock comes up. “It'd be good for him. Good for all of us, honestly, having something to celebrate instead of just something to survive.”
I like the sound of that more than I can easily say, a found family stretching itself wide enough to make room for me in it too.
Later, tangled together on the bed with the fire burned down low, I trace the line of his collarbone and think about how far we've actually come. From that first terrified night in this same bed to the mansion and the rescue and a line shack with its own narrow mattress, to now, safe, settled, ridiculously happy in a way I used to think only happened in the panels I drew for other people's better lives.
“I love you,” I say into the quiet. “Even when you're impossible and bossy and come home smelling like snow and stubbornness. Especially then, probably.”
He kisses the top of my head. “Love you too, Nora. More than these mountains. More than the job.” His hand settles light over my stomach, and something in his voice goes careful in adifferent way now, more hopeful than cautious. “One day I want this rounder. With our kid inside it. If that's something you want too.”
My heart does a full, undignified somersault. I lift my head to look at him properly. “You've been thinking about that?”
“Thinking about forever with you. Every version of it.” He meets my eyes, steady under everything else he is. “The cabin. The art. The mornings you're in my shirt and nothing else. The days I come home and you're actually here waiting instead of me just hoping you will be.”
“I want that too,” I tell him, and mean every word of it completely. “All of it. The someday kid. The forever. This exact life, just more of it, for as long as we get.”
He laughs, low and warm enough to fill the whole cabin, and pulls me closer under the quilt. We don't say anything else for a while. We don't need to. The fire pops. The snow keeps falling, soft and steady, burying the world in white the way it did the first night I ever met him, except this time there's nothing outside these walls I'm afraid of anymore.
I listen to his breathing even out toward sleep, his arm heavy and certain around me, and think about everything that brought us here. The crash. The one bed. The danger. The rescue I helped earn instead of just waited for. The way he claimed me in that shack and never once let go since.
I wouldn't change a single second, not even the frightening ones. Maybe especially not those.
Colt stirs and pulls me closer, murmuring something low in his sleep that sounds like mine even half unconscious.
I smile into the dark. “Yours,” I whisper back. “Always.”
Somewhere out ahead of us I can already see the shape of it, a baby, maybe, someday, a ring I suspect is coming sooner than he thinks I've noticed him considering, years of ordinary mornings and found family dinners and quiet afternoons painting while he watches over both of us like the protector he was always going to become, one way or another, mountain or no mountain.
For now, this is enough.
This is everything I didn't know I was driving toward the night my car went off that icy road and into the rest of my life.
I close my eyes and let sleep take me, wrapped in his arms, exactly where I was always going to end up, even if neither of us knew it yet the first time he found me.
Bonus Epilogue
Colt
