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The snowball fight was officially on.

The rules of the battle were unclear and changed constantly depending on who was winning.

Emily had been recruited within the first thirty seconds by two eight-year-olds, one named Gracie and the other named Finnegan or Penguin. She hadn’t quite caught it, and it wasn’t any clearer when he’d repeated it.

Emily readily agreed to join. It wasn’t every day she got to pelt Cole Alders with snow.

“You have to pack it tighter,” she told Gracie, demonstrating. “Like this. Otherwise, it falls apart.”

Cole had ended up with the larger team. The five children, including the boy with the red hat, were confident that they were on the winning side.

They used the playground to their advantage, climbing high to throw the snowballs down. Only, you had to keep moving, lest you run out of snowballs.

Emily launched a snowball that caught him on the arm.

He turned and looked at her across the battlefield with a look that said: Noted.

She grinned.

What followed was not dignified. It was not particularly strategic, despite both Cole and Emily’s best efforts. It was twenty minutes of chaos and laughter and children appearing from unexpected angles and the occasional accidental hit on an innocent bystander.

Cole was good at this. That was the thing Emily hadn’t expected and couldn’t stop noticing. Not the throwing—though his aim was unreasonably accurate for a man in a heavy coat—but everything around it.

He moved easily through the snow, broad shoulders cutting an unmistakable path through the swarm of children. Snow clung to the dark hair at his temples and dusted the shoulders of his coat. His cheeks had gone ruddy from the cold, his usual stern expression replaced by a grin that made him look younger. Less like Fire Chief Alders and more like the boy she remembered daring her to climb higher, run faster, jump farther.

When the smallest child on his team, a little girl in purple mittens named Kayla, got overwhelmed by a volley from Emily’s side, Cole stepped in front of her, took the hits, and murmured something to the girl that made her stand up straighter and throw the next one herself.

He noticed a boy hanging back near the fence, watching the action unfold with a smile on his face, yet keeping his distance. Cole walked over in that relaxed way of his, and within moments, the boy was throwing a snowball at Emily’s team, wearing a grin that took up his whole face.

Then there was the boy in the red hat, who was getting a little overzealous and someone was going to get hurt if he didn’t intervene.

It took only a word or two from Cole, and the young boy took it easy.

Cole didn’t make a production of any of it. He just did whatever he needed to do, quietly and without acknowledgment, because it was the right thing to do.

Emily stood in the middle of the battlefield with a snowball she’d forgotten to throw and watched him.

Watched the snow catch in his dark hair. The powerful line of his shoulders as he shielded a child from the next attack. The flash of his smile when one of the girls on the other team landed a direct hit against his chest.

And the thought came so suddenly, with such startling certainty, that it stole the breath from her lungs.

This is a man I could build a life with.

She thought it clearly and completely—I should tell him that—and then the red-hat boy threw a snowball that caught her on the side of the head, and the moment left just as quickly.

The ceasefire was declared by mutual exhaustion twenty minutes after it started.

The children were flushed and triumphant regardless of which side they’d been on, faces beaming from simply playing. Cole was covered in snow. Emily had snow down the back of her neck that she was doing her best to ignore.

Cole was crouched down talking to the red-hat boy—she couldn’t hear what they were saying, just the low rumble of Cole’s voice and the boy’s serious, considered responses—when Gracie appeared at Emily’s elbow with something cupped carefully in both mittened hands.

“This is for him,” Gracie said. “It’s a trophy.”

Emily looked at what Gracie was holding. It was a snowball, roughly spherical, with a twig stuck in the top and what appeared to be a small pine cone wedged into the side. It was, objectively, the finest trophy she had ever seen.

“He’ll love it. I’ll make sure he gets it,” Emily said.

She carried it across the playground to Cole, who was straightening up from his conversation with the red-hat boy.