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This relationship. Their own family.

He had gone from being infatuated with this woman from afar, to marrying her because she wanted a fake husband, to this.

Or maybe, he acknowledged a little ruefully, he hadn’t gone all that far at all. Maybe he’d pretty much been right here all along, just waiting for an excuse to tell her how he felt.

How he really felt.

Either way, he knew what he was doing now.

It had all become astonishingly clear to him today.

He leaned over the counter again so he could put his face directly in hers, like they were entirely alone in this restaurant. To him, they were. He couldn’t see anything but her.

“Here’s the thing,” he told her, keeping his eyes intent on hers. “I’m going to buy a farm here, Kitty. I don’t think I’m going anywhere. I like it here. I like you, too.” She blinked. He didn’t. He reached over and tilted up her chin. “And while we’re on the topic of that? I can tell you right now that I don’t want a divorce, either. Not in a year. Probably not ever.”

Chapter Ten

Kitty didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

She stared at him, fully aware that her jaw was hanging open, but she was saved from actually having to respond to such lunacy by her sisters appearing, commandeering the pizza she’d put out, and bringing the clamor of the restaurant all around them back to her.

And she was far more grateful for that than she probably should have been.

But she could also tell that Finn wasn’t kidding and didn’t intend to drop it. He looked at her with that level blue gaze like a fire burning deep into her, into the places she refused to admit were there, and she felt certain that he intended to pick up this discussion as soon as she got off work.

So she went back into the kitchen and she did her best to express her feelings through her cooking.

When Flannery came in and did a double take at whatever expression was on her face—something feral, she was certain—she made herself give her sister a soft smile.

“I’m just thinking about whether or not we need to think about some more changes,” she said before Flannery could accuse her of… anything. “You can tell that the Starks finally opened up the lodge, can’t you? Suddenly we have a different class of person in here every night, don’t we? Asking the kinds of things the locals never do.”

Like where was the pepperoni sourced from and were there gluten-free and keto options and why weren’t there dairy alternatives and what about putting nutritional information on the menus to allow more informed consumer choices… to which Kitty usually responded with a hearty welcome to Crawford County, Montana.

The this isn’t Los Angeles was implied.

Flannery laughed. She looked off as if she was looking into the distance, though Kitty knew she was looking in the approximate direction of where the old Cowboy Point Lodge sat up on the hill on the far end of the valley. The Starks had been renting out the many cabins on that hill to individuals and businesses for a while, but the lodge actually—finally—opening had only happened at the start of summer.

Something Kitty might have paid more attention to had she not decided to shake up her own life so intensely at the same time.

Still, it had been impossible not to notice the difference in town, and therefore in the restaurant, too. A fancy lodge in the middle of nowhere was always going to aim for a different sort of clientele, and Cowboy Point had been chasing its own glow up for quite a few years now—the new Crowded Table restaurant being a shining example of that.

Then again, Kitty and her sisters had been an integral part of it too.

“That’s the trouble, isn’t it?” Flannery said, and she would know, since the Farm & Craft Market had been little more than a few farmers with some cardboard boxes outside the General Store before she’d made it a much bigger part of summers here. “Everyone who lives here wants to improve the town because they love it. Then when they do, all these other people flock to it, and sooner or later it turns into something you don’t recognize anymore.” She sighed, but she was smiling. “Until winter, anyway. The winter will always be ours.”

Kitty made herself laugh at that, because she should have wanted to laugh at that. “Winters separate the residents from the regretful,” she agreed.

She knew she couldn’t let Flannery know that she didn’t particularly feel like laughing about anything tonight. She couldn’t let her sister see that inside, she could feel something that she was fairly sure was panic.

Sheer, unadulterated panic, because Finn was not supposed to want to stay.

That was not the plan. That was not what she’d outlined to him or what either of them had signed up for.

And yet she wasn’t at all surprised to find him waiting for her when she stormed out of the restaurant much later that night. She was the last to leave, as usual, and stopped short when she saw him.

Finn was standing out in front of the restaurant, one booted foot on the wall of the building, as if he’d been there for hours and could stay there forever, if necessary.

She did not like the way her heart thudded, hard, in her chest. She did not like how nervous this man made her.