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“I won’t pretend it doesn’t scare me,” she whispered, pulling back just enough, then. “But I want that too, Finn. I want everything. And I don’t care if we don’t have a plan.” She swallowed after she said that, but kept going. “Maybe this is the one thing we can figure out as it goes along.”

“It’s okay if you have a plan, Kitty,” Finn said, grinning there against her mouth. “I just want to be a part of it. A critical part of it.”

“I don’t think that I can imagine any plan worth making that didn’t have you in the middle of it,” she told him, solemnly, but then she smiled.

“I love you,” he told her, gruffly, and watched her smile get even wider. “And I don’t intend to stop.”

“That works for me,” she said, and her eyes were damp. And the way she kissed him tasted salty and sweet. “Because I’m going to figure out how to love you better than anyone’s ever been loved before. Just wait.”

“We can call it a competition,” Finn said, his hands moving beneath that flannel shirt and under her pajama top to find the smooth line of her back. “Eighty years from now, let’s see who won.”

“Deal,” Kitty said, melting into his arms.

They conducted their first experiment on happy ever after right there, in the bed of his truck. When they were breathless and limp from all that joy, lying next to each other on the blanket he’d spread out to hold them, Finn held her close and they watched the stars up above them bleed gently into a new dawn.

And when the sun came up over the hills at last, it danced all over the little farm’s overgrown fields and made the farmhouse look like a Montana jewel that needed only a little bit of polishing.

“Beautiful,” Kitty whispered, cuddled there at his side.

And Finn could tell by the way that Kitty let her eyes go watery and her smile go big, that somehow, despite everything, they’d found their way home.

Epilogue

Peyton and Jenny were having lunch on the patio at Mountain Mama’s later that summer, basking both in the warm weather and the happy sight of Finn and Kitty holding hands over the counter inside, then stealing kisses when they thought no one was looking.

Truly, Peyton thought, the best ending she could possibly have imagined for her firstborn son.

Finn and Kitty radiated happiness. To the point that it should have been obnoxious, but it wasn’t. It was cute.

It was so cute Peyton found herself wondering if maybe she needed to pay attention to the state of her own heart, too—though that was hard to imagine.

The kind of number Patrick had done on her wasn’t easily washed away.

But that wasn’t something Peyton cared to think about. Not on a day like this, with the Rocky Mountains showing off and that Montana big sky proving once again that it truly was the last, best place.

Kitty herself delivered their lunch, a shared small pizza piled high with an eclectic selection of fresh ingredients from the Farm & Craft Market, and that now common smile on Kitty’s face.

Because these days, it seemed she reserved her famous frowns for her husband, who seemed to have a different read on them than everyone else.

It was widely understood that Finn loved them.

“You seem to be in a happy sort of mood today,” Jenny said to Kitty.

Kitty laughed. “It’s the funniest thing,” she said. “I talked to Izzy today—” She stopped and considered that, then clarified. “The Milans are our landlords, but we’ve been working on a rent-to-own deal with them. And today Izzy told me that we’re well on the path. We should own the restaurant and the houses here by Christmas.”

“That’s wonderful,” Jenny said, and Peyton actually applauded, and it wasn’t until Kitty went back inside the restaurant that the two women exchanged a knowing smile of their own.

“Izzy told me that Kitty completely forgot to tell her that she and Finn were married,” Jenny said after a few moments, when it was clear no one was wandering up to their table. “It apparently slipped her mind.”

“I can’t imagine what could have claimed her attention,” Peyton said with a laugh, and when she saw her son looking out at them from inside, she gave him a happy little wave. “You really knew what you were doing when you suggested we put that marriage idea in Izzy’s head.”

“You don’t know Izzy well enough yet,” Jenny told her. “But she was only too happy to help. She has daughters of her own, you see. All of them headstrong in much the same way, and none of them living here, either.”

Peyton laughed and clinked her glass to Jenny’s.

“Diabolical,” she said. Admiringly.

Then they spent their lunch happily discussing all the rest of their children, and everyone else in Cowboy Point, and it was more and more clear to Peyton that she’d never had a better friend than Jenny Lisle.