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“My mother gave me an intense lecture on making good choices,” Finn said, and there was something about his tone that made her think that it really had been a lecture, and not necessarily a kind one. “But then Jenny Lisle started talking about you.”

“Me?” Kitty knew Jenny, of course. And had always liked her. But it felt strange to hear that she’d had anything to say about her.

“She’s a big fan,” Finn assured her. “Mostly, I think she was telling my mother that even if I was acting foolishly, you never would. So we have that to build on.”

Kitty felt oddly deflated and pleased at once. Another set of conflicting messages inside her own body that she did not like at all. She blew out a breath, and shifted back, away from the door. There was just a little landing, there at the top of the stairs, and she made herself take a deep breath because her heart was doing things she didn’t understand.

It was almost July. The sky was bright and endlessly blue. The sun beat down and the pine trees smelled like light, sweet and happy.

Finn stood just about a foot away from her, wearing jeans low on his hips, a T-shirt, and bare feet.

It felt shockingly intimate to her.

Kitty could feel her whole body react to that in a kind of jumble, as if it couldn’t decide which part of this her nervous system should react to first. Or maybe it was simply short-circuiting. She couldn’t tell.

“What do you do all day?” she asked.

A smile flashed over his face, and he looked down, as if he was hiding a laugh. “What do you think I do all day?”

“I have no idea. Maybe you’re retired? I’m sure someone told me that.”

“That would be a very early retirement,” he pointed out. “Sometimes I help my sister out in the morning. My brother has started spending time out on Colton Dean’s Lost River Ranch, because Raleigh likes a problematic horse. I spend most of my time looking at land.”

“Oh,” Kitty said. “To ranch.”

“Originally, yes.” Finn agreed with her, but there was something else there, she thought. “Nothing fancy. More artisan. I have some money saved and I’ll be honest with you, if it hadn’t been the dead of winter when I came here, I probably would have jumped on something by now. Just to keep things familiar.”

“Familiar isn’t always good,” Kitty said.

He nodded. “No, it’s not, but it took me a minute to figure that out. And in the meantime, I’ve had a chance to see a few more Montana seasons. It changes the conversation.”

“Where are you looking at land?” she asked. “Back in Colorado?”

He shook his head. “No, Kitty. I know you’ve decided I’m leaving, but I haven’t. I like Montana.”

She waved that away. Literally waved her hand in the air between them. But she didn’t say anything. There weren’t too many empty plots of decent ranchland just lying around in the mountains here. If there were, people would have snatched them up ages ago.

He might not know that he was leaving, but she was sure he would. Especially if he’d been spending all this time not finding the land he wanted.

“People are very funny about land here,” she said. “Maybe it’s from growing up in the West. People have a connection to land that I don’t understand.”

“You want to buy the land the restaurant sits on,” Finn pointed out. “You must understand part of it.”

“That’s a different kind of land,” she said, and frowned at him. “I’m not going to be tending cattle back behind the restaurant. I won’t require stables and machinery to keep it all in shape. There aren’t any fences to fix, either.”

He was watching her closely. Too closely, she thought. She didn’t understand why it was that when he did things like that, she could feel it everywhere.

“Working the land feels like an honor, some days,” he told her, and there was something so… intense about the way he was looking at her. And the way his words sounded.

Her pulse was a jagged thing inside her. She couldn’t seem to look away.

He kept going. “Other days it’s a chore, but the honor usually outweighs that. It feels good to be outside, beneath the sky with my feet in the dirt. I think mountains help, and besides, it feels like I’m a part of something bigger than me. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think they do,” she replied, though she didn’t want to. She liked the way he talked about a life she knew she would never want.

“That’s funny, Kitty,” Finn said, more quietly than before. “As I think marriage is the same thing.”

That hit her so hard that she could feel the prickle of emotion at the back of her eyes, which was completely unlike her. She made herself stand a little straighter. And she blinked the offending emotion away.