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“It looks like Dallas is getting his first guest,” she said, but nodded toward the car.

Peyton, always quick on the uptake, held up her phone, zoomed in, and took a picture of the car as it finally, painfully passed.

Then she showed it to Jenny.

And neither one of them said anything. Not for that first moment as they looked at the Georgia license tag.

“Could be a rental,” Jenny said, because that was the reasonable thing to say.

“Not sure why a rental at this time of year would look that beat up, with nothing even remotely resembling a four-wheel drive or a set of chains,” Peyton replied.

They watched the taillights blink through the trees as the vehicle kept climbing up the hill. Peyton pressed her shoulder to Jenny’s, and Jenny pressed back, and they stayed like that until they couldn’t see the vehicle any longer.

“Still,” Jenny said then, since neither one of them had moved from the window, “we should reserve judgment.”

“We can reserve it.” Peyton’s voice was calm. Bland. So much of both that it ended up careful. “But that doesn’t delete it.”

“No,” Jenny agreed in the exact same voice. “It doesn’t.”

Because both of them knew exactly where Jenny had sent that brochure in the summer. To an address not far from Columbus and Fort Benning, the last known address of the wife Dallas had loved and lost.

And maybe it was just any old car with Georgia plates making its way up the hill to a lighthouse in Cowboy Point in this dark December. Cowboy Point was becoming more and more of a draw for tourists in the summers, but it was not exactly one of Montana’s hot spots at this time of year. Still, it was possible that this was just a coincidence. Or a rental car.

But Jenny had that little feeling deep inside of her. Like a spark, blooming into life.

And when she and Peyton sat down on the couch again, it seemed to her that her friend could feel it too.

So they said nothing more about it, because they would have to wait now and see what happened. How it all turned out.

Whether more drastic measures might have to be taken, if the car was random after all.

Jenny turned their movie back on. They both settled in beneath their cozy throws. But even though the movie was supposed to be a tearjerker, neither one of them stopped smiling for the rest of the night.

Chapter One

Dallas Lisle knew that it was Christmas season, which was never his favorite time of year at the best of times—whatever those were—but he still didn’t expect the ghost who walked into his newly opened bed-and-breakfast that night.

Maybe ghost wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t like he thought that she had died. He was sure, somehow, that he would have known it if she had died, but he was also well aware that he had been dead to her for a good long while.

Meaning that this was not generally how hauntings worked, in his limited experience.

Dallas had spent a long, long time—eight years—renovating the funny old lighthouse that had stood dark and ignored on a ridge above Cowboy Point for as long as anyone could remember. He’d been delighted to discover that the light itself was fully functional—it just needed a little tending to. The lighthouse itself and its attached buildings had been dusty and neglected, but were still standing proud on their foundations. He knew the story of the place, that it had been an over-the-top gift to a homesick bride, though no one ever talked about whether or not the gift had worked. Whether it had been enough to win the wife over to life in the mountains when she’d been raised by the sea, or make up for what she’d left behind. Maybe that was what Dallas had inherited. Maybe he was his generation’s patron saint of lost causes.

But he still hadn’t been expecting ghosts.

He’d opened the day after Thanksgiving, mostly just to say that he was open and to actually be open, because he knew too many people believed that he would never reach that particular milestone. Not that they were hoping he wouldn’t, necessarily. But there sure had been a lot of talk about that lost cause of a lighthouse, like Dallas had been building himself a personal mausoleum up there to molder away in.

It felt good to do what he’d said he was going to do.

He’d also advertised the Lisle Lighthouse Inn in all the recommended places, because yes, he’d actually researched how to function as a bed-and-breakfast, how to be its proprietor, and how to make it work long term. He already had a few reservations for later on in the season and he’d been pretty pleased with that. So pleased that he might have made a little noise about them when they’d come in, tucked away in the keeper’s house that was his home now.

But it hadn’t occurred to him that there would be walk-ins.

Much less this walk-in.

Dallas stared at her as she stood there in the doorway, looking around the lobby with wide eyes. His own eyes felt pretty damn wide themselves. And his heart did some fascinating acrobatics inside his chest, which was notable not only for the Olympic level of acrobatics involved, but because he would have sworn that that particular organ had died a long time ago.

About six months after he’d been honorably discharged, five months after he’d brought her here for the first and last time, and therefore right about the time he’d come crawling back to Cowboy Point, Montana, to see if he could salvage something from the mess he’d made of his life. The lighthouse had been a salvage operation. For him.