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Jenny didn’t drop her gaze from his. “I was thinking that was your job.”

Dallas didn’t know if this was something that could be fixed. But he wasn’t going to share that with his mother. He wasn’t sure he wanted to think too much on it himself.

“I never thought I would see her again,” he said instead, keeping his voice low. Kind, he hoped, but still firm. “So if you don’t mind, I’m going to bask in the fact that she’s here. I’m not going to make it any more than it is. And we’re all going to be just fine with that, one way or another. Okay?”

He thought his mother would balk at that. Or recoil. Possibly even show a little temper and insist that they jump in and analyze all of this when Dallas was probably the person in this family who’d talked about Ruthie the least over the past years.

Instead, Jenny’s eyes looked faintly glassy. He thought she looked something like proud of him.

But he didn’t know what that meant.

And he thought once everyone had finished eating and helping with the cleanup that they would all wrap this up quickly, but instead, Tennessee threw another log on the fire. And Peyton pulled out the board games.

That meant it was getting late when he and Ruthie finally left his mother’s house, walking outside onto the wide porch and blowing out a breath when the deep, deep cold hit them.

“Wow,” Ruthie said, with a shivery sort of laugh. “Every time I think it can’t possibly get colder, it does.”

“And this isn’t even all that cold.” Dallas rubbed his hands together. “Why don’t I just take you up to the lighthouse in my truck? We can get your RAV4 tomorrow. I think the road up at the top might be a little icy.”

He thought she would argue with that, but she didn’t seem to care at all, and that was…concerning. For his stability, anyway. She just smiled at him, and smiled wider when he opened the passenger door for her, and that was another thing he didn’t need to focus on.

Because nothing had changed from earlier. She couldn’t remember why she’d left and made no attempt to reach out again, so he couldn’t let himself take advantage of that. It was pretty black and white as far as Dallas was concerned.

Black and fucking white, he reminded himself tersely as they drove up the hill. Alone. In the dark.

When they got to the top of the hill, and climbed out of the truck, she stopped for a minute and looked out into the darkness. It was a clear night and the wind was high. The stars pressed down from above. And off in the distance, beyond Copper Mountain, was a smudge of light.

“That’s Marietta,” Dallas told her. “You must have driven through it on your way up here.”

Ruthie nodded. “Very pretty little town. Pretty far away though, isn’t it?”

“Ten miles down the mountain,” Dallas said. “But it only closes a couple times over the winter. We all had to go to high school down there, so anyone who grew up in Cowboy Point had to spend a lot of time on that road.”

That made her shudder. “I’m surprised you didn’t skid off the side of the mountain.”

“People do, from time to time.” When she turned and widened her eyes at him, he laughed. “Usually, they’re drunk. But it happens.”

“How cheery,” she replied.

He didn’t know if she moved first or he did. But they walked together toward the front doors and he opened them so that they could walk into the lobby. He’d left the lights on, though the fire was out. And when he turned to see if Ruthie maybe wanted to sit here for a while, he found her looking at him in a manner that shot straight through him, like a shot of good whiskey, straight to the gut.

And lower still.

“Do you need anything before you head to your room for the night?” he asked her, maybe a little more formal than necessary.

Ruthie’s smile was both a memory and a fantasy in one. “I can think of a couple things that I might need.”

And he was such a weak man. That was the only thing he could think as she moved toward him. She hadn’t even bothered to unwrap herself from the scarf she wore, or shrug out of that parka. Ruthie just walked straight toward him.

He couldn’t tell if it was muscle memory, or just part of her. She walked straight into him, not stopping, until she collided with the wall of his chest. The way she always had. And he knew that when his hands came up, automatically, he should push her away. He knew that he should maintain the boundaries that he’d already insisted upon earlier.

But he didn’t. His hands found her shoulders. He held on to her.

He definitely didn’t push her away. Maybe he didn’t have it in him to create more space between them when he’d never wanted that space to begin with.

“Ruthie,” he began, but his voice did not come out stern and serious, the way it should have.

“Dallas,” she replied, but her mouth was twitching and there was laughter in her eyes. Laughter that turned them green and blue tonight.