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“Yes,” she said. “You’ve mentioned that.”

Something shifted on his face, and he took a step closer, but he didn’t come all the way over to where she was sitting. Almost like he didn’t dare risk it.

“This isn’t a game to me,” he bit out, low and even more intense than before. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twenty years old. Losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me. You walking through that door last night was like a light shining down after eight years of darkness, except it isn’t, is it?” He shook his head, like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “You can’t remember the things that I do, and I don’t mean all the shitty things. You can’t remember us. And I’m not prepared to forget us just so I can have some part of you. I just…I can’t do it.”

Ruthie had no smart reply for that. She felt chastised, but still not embarrassed. But she didn’t proposition him again.

Dallas muttered something about getting his work done, then walked over to the long, granite counter on the far wall and disappeared into the room behind it.

She could follow him in there. She thought about it.

But it took her a little too long to get her breath back. It took her longer than that to feel that riot of sensation settle down a little bit, though it didn’t entirely go away. What it did was allow her to feel like herself again. Not insatiable.

And the longer she sat with that, the more she felt something a lot like… shame.

Because it wasn’t fair for her to come here, knowing nothing about who he was or who he was to her, and then act like this. It was true that she thought the story he’d told her was a little too heavy on him being the villain, but he was right. She didn’t remember any of it independently.

And she needed to think a little bit more about the fact that she couldn’t remember all the various traumas that had made her who she was.

Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that she couldn’t remember what had happened to her parents. Or, to be more precise, that she only knew them as a story. She didn’t feel it. She didn’t find herself thinking about them as something she’d lost, or something she’d survived. When she thought of them, she thought only of the facts of their lives, not her emotions about them.

Ruthie felt the same way about her grandmother. She remembered their life together, but the accident was a blank. It was as if the woman who died two weeks later, whose hospital bed she’d sat beside, was far more distant to her than the woman who’d raised her.

Maybe that was a blessing.

But here, with this man who she’d clearly had a deeply intimate relationship with, she couldn’t quite get there. She couldn’t remember him at all and she didn’t feel distant from him in his presence.

She believed that the way she felt about him involved climbing him like a tree—something her body clearly knew how to do and wanted to demonstrate—and she wasn’t sure that was healthy or wise under the circumstances.

Not that she would have stopped it of her own volition.

It was one thing to think about the word insatiable and wonder if that kind of ferocity was really still inside her. That kiss had told her that yes, probably, it was. But it was something else to remember that he wasn’t operating from that same place. He wasn’t discovering that impossibly intense need the way she was.

He had loved her. And they’d been apart.

Maybe, she thought, you should try being a little more respectful of that.

But she could still taste him in her mouth, and that made her… restless. The third time she found herself eyeing his office door, she decided it was enough. That she would take herself back down to Cowboy Point proper and immerse herself in…something else.

Something that didn’t have to do with Dallas at all.

Or that’s what she told herself, piously, as she marched back out into the cold, fired up the RAV4, and basically sledded all the way down the side of the hill until she ended up on the main road once more. She thought about getting out and walking, but the walk from the front door of the lobby into her car had been a lot and Ruthie wasn’t used to this weather. It was good that she was wrapped up well, but the wind had felt like knives against the exposed skin of her cheeks.

So instead, she drove around by herself, and quickly realized that the very last thing she was going to do on this little exploration of hers was find something that didn’t remind her of Dallas. Not that she recognized anything he hadn’t shown her himself, earlier today.

But this was the place he’d been determined to escape. And then, years later, it was the place he’d brought her to meet his family when he was involved in a different kind of escape. That time when he’d also felt panicked. Defeated, he’d said.

And yet despite that, this was the place he’d come back to when he’d left Georgia. This was where he’d been ever since. And this was where he’d built himself that beautiful inn, which suggested that he had no intention of leaving.

This was his home, she understood. And wondered if he understood that too.

She didn’t trust her car on the winding dirt roads. Some had tire tracks already gouged out into the snow and others that looked undisturbed, but she wasn’t used to driving in wintry conditions. So she drove loops instead, trying to get a sense of such a tiny, remote place.

It was funny to think that she’d found Columbus confining at times, when it was a bustling metropolis in comparison to Cowboy Point. But this was a place where folks shoveled off the sidewalks in front of their buildings. She watched as the locals lifted their hands to each other as they passed in their trucks or pulled to a stop so they could talk to each other out their driver’s windows. This was a place that must feel so different in the summer, when it was freer to walk around, and also, if she’d understood Dallas’s sister right, filled with a whole lot more tourists.

She wondered if the locals greeted them, too. Or if they knew who really belonged here and saved their waves for them.

On her third or fourth lap, she realized that one of the old buildings that she’d driven by was actually a kind of shop, and it was open. She slowed down, and saw to her delight that it was a yarn store. HIGH GULLY YARN read the sign over the door.