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It went on so long and they laughed so hard that they ended up in tears.

Actual tears.

As if what had happened between him and Ruthie was a laughing matter. As if he’d spent all of these years paying his own kind of penance when all along, he could have laughed about it instead.

When he knew, deep down, that if she could remember it like he did, she wouldn’t laugh at all. It felt like some kind of betrayal of her that he didn’t stop her and explain, so she would know better than to treat it all this lightly.

But he couldn’t tell her that. Not now. Not when she didn’t seem to feel the weight of it at all. He wanted that for her. She deserved it.

And that meant all he could do was stand there, let it happen, and try not to clench his jaw so hard it cracked into pieces.

Chapter Four

The pizza place across the street from the General Store was deliciously cozy. That was the first thing that Ruthie felt when they walked inside. It was warm, smelling of dough and cheese, and the colors were bright and welcoming. It felt exactly like the sort of place that she’d like to sink into and spend some time in.

But sinking deep into the coziness was not really on the menu today, since this trip was apparently not going to be the winter wonderland Hallmark movie holiday montage scene she’d fantasized about on the long drive here.

She and Dallas Lisle, the gruff and surly and upsettingly gorgeous innkeeper who claimed that he was her husband, of all things, sat together at one of the tables. It wasn’t full-on lunchtime yet, but there were people at some of the tables in the main dining room already and upbeat music playing in the background. Ruthie could see past Dallas to the counter and the open kitchen behind it, where a trio of women with varying degrees of red hair bustled around, talking in a kind of shorthand that was either employee or family based. Hard to tell from a distance, but they were clearly used to working together.

Yet from the little Ruthie had seen outside, too, this kind of offhanded affinity was baked in deep to this mountain valley. Cowboy Point was the kind of place where everybody knew each other. That had been clear on the main road, where folks lifted a hand to each other as they passed in their trucks and hardy vehicles. It was clear here inside Mountain Mama Pizza, too, in the assessing, curious looks people were sending Dallas’s way.

And while Columbus, Georgia, might not qualify as a small town by any metric, the neighborhood Ruthie had lived in with her grandmother had sure felt like one. She knew how that kind of community worked. She knew that the fact that this man was sitting out in public with her would cause comment.

Ruthie wasn’t sure she necessarily minded causing comment, generally speaking. Her trouble was, she couldn’t quite believe the things that she’d been told about Dallas. Or this place. Or the people she’d met here.

It was all a little too fantastical, to her mind. Who randomly showed up at a whimsical inn only to discover it was run by her dangerously good-looking ex-husband who wasn’t really an ex and only found this out by chatting with his sister in a General Store that looked like it should be a Hollywood stand-in for all things Wild West?

That was a story. That wasn’t something that happened to normal people like Ruthie.

But here she was, entertaining this nonsense. It had been Dallas’s sister who’d suggested they come here to find something like neutral ground. And Ruthie might not have believed any of this, but she certainly wasn’t going to turn down neutral ground that came with pizzas that already smelled divine, baking in the back for someone else.

She took her time looking around the place, noticing the big doors that led outside to the snow-covered patio she’d seen when they walked over, with twinkling lights hung above it that threw a bit of sparkly joy all around. She took entirely too much time scrutinizing the art on the walls and the words and messages that were painted there, too, all of it clearly designed to make anyone who came in here feel happy.

And she would have taken more time with the scrutinizing, but she felt the silence between her and the man across from her—who was not looking around, because he was looking only at her—was getting ridiculous.

So, finally, she returned her attention to Dallas himself.

Sitting at a small table did not make him any less ridiculously attractive. She couldn’t imagine that anything would.

This was where the story they’d told her fell apart for her. Who, in their right mind, walked away from a man who looked like this? A man who, based on the evidence of the previous night and what little she’d read about the lighthouse before she’d come here, had renovated that entire place all by himself? Because apart from the hotness situation, those things suggested that he was a man of both vision and patience, who was capable of taking his time if that meant getting something right.

Who left that man?

Ruthie couldn’t come up with a good reason. But she also didn’t think that Dallas—Dallas and his sister, who both seemed otherwise perfectly sane—were lying. So.

“So,” she said brightly. “I guess you get to tell me the entire story of us.”

Dallas scowled. And it was something, she thought, that a man could scowl like that and still be so compelling that she had a very deep and serious urge to lean across the tabletop and lick that furrow between his brows with her own—

Well. Ruthie sat up straighter in her chair. That image told her some things about herself she hadn’t known. Though it did remind her of some of the dreams she’d had last night, now that she considered it.

But she tried to focus.

“I don’t think so,” Dallas was saying in that gruff, low voice of his. He studied her, a little too closely for her peace of mind. “I’m a little more concerned about your memory loss.”

This wasn’t something Ruthie had ever really talked about. Or had intended to talk about. And certainly not to Dallas Lisle, who looked at her with eyes so blue that it made her feel… silly.

If silly was a physical condition and was, possibly, warping her bones inside her limbs as she sat here in a pizza place in the snow, looking at painted daisies on bright orange walls—about as far away from Georgia as she’d ever been.