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Dallas had been twenty-five. He’d hated himself on every possible level. And he’d never thought he’d see her again.

He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

The entry to the lighthouse had been a personal project of his that went above and beyond the rest of the place that he’d made into the small, niche bed-and-breakfast affair it was now. He’d wanted the lobby to be inviting no matter what time of year a guest arrived here, and a place people could hang out if they liked.

He thought he’d gotten it right, striking that balance between cozy and too modern. Making the most of the space but making sure that the fire burned bright in the big fireplace on one end of the room and that the couches that he liked to come and sit in of an evening himself were always comfortable.

A good place to weather pretty much anything, he’d thought. It was why he came and spent time out here when he had a living room of his own in the keeper’s house. Maybe it had all been going so well that, really, he should have expected ghosts.

Dallas stood up and noted kind of distantly that his tablet sort of fell off his lap onto the cushion beside him. But he couldn’t care about that the way he probably should because Ruthie Mathis was standing right here, in the same room as him for the first time in eight years, and he wasn’t sure that he could breathe.

Ruthie, who he’d last seen in Georgia on a night he’d replayed a thousand times in his head and still couldn’t take back. Ruthie, who he knew full well hated his guts now, and rightly so. He’d expected that she would spend the rest of her days spitting on the ground when his name was mentioned and he couldn’t complain about that, because he’d earned it.

Once again, he tried to say something, but nothing came out.

She looked adorable, the way she always did. She wore a parka—and it occurred to him that in the five years they’d been together, he’d never seen her dressed for the cold like this. Why would he? They’d lived in Georgia, where cold was more a state of mind than a reality. Ruthie was wearing that parka over jeans and sturdy-enough-looking boots. She had snow melting all over her, and Dallas thought that it was entirely possible that the fact of her being here, standing in his presence, was crushing him. He could feel the weight of it, like his ribs were caving in.

She pushed the hood back off her head and her gaze finally landed on him.

And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her recently, because he had. Just not in person. Dallas was pretty sure he dreamed about her every night, and by pretty sure, he meant he did. Every night. Without fail. He’d locked away the pictures he’d kept of her, because they didn’t help anything, but that didn’t do much to alter his memory.

He’d always had far too good a memory for his own good.

Now she was here, and he thought she looked exactly the same, like the eight years that had wrecked him in a hundred different ways hadn’t touched her at all—and he was glad of that. He told himself she deserved that much, at the very least. Her hair was still that soft, pretty brown that liked to make its own waves that she despaired of in the Georgia humidity. It fell around her shoulders now, longer than she’d worn it when they’d been together. Her eyes were the same bright, fascinating hazel they’d always been, changing colors depending on what she was wearing. He knew that her pretty face fit perfectly between his palms. Just like he knew exactly what she could do with that sweet mouth of hers, that she never dressed up in lipstick or gloss, because she didn’t have to mess around with things like that to glow. She did that naturally.

Ruthie would always say that she’d never learned how to put on makeup right, but he knew that she was always the prettiest girl in the room without it. So why worry about mascara or eyeshadow when she didn’t need either of those things—or anything else?

For the third time, he ordered himself to say something, for God’s sake.

But it was like he was frozen in place, locked into this silent reaction that hurt more than it probably should have, and he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Not one damn useful thing, but at least that was continuing the same old pattern that had broken them up eight years ago. Good to know he still had that going for him.

“Hi,” she said.

And of all the things Dallas might have imagined that Ruthie would say if she ever laid eyes on him again, it wasn’t…that.

He coughed, because it was that or maybe asphyxiate on his own intense and unhelpful reaction here, but at least that made a sound. It helped. He recovered and tried to look…

Well, hell. He had no idea what expression was on his face. Ruthie had always had the unique ability of getting beneath the defenses the Army had taught him so well. He’d often joked that they should hire her on to do a little intelligence work, since she could crack him like an egg. That had always been her superpower.

Though he doubted very much she thought about it like that anymore. He would have bet everything he had that she didn’t think about him anymore either, so there was only one reason she would come all this way to find him.

“Did you bring papers or something?” he asked, and he could hear that his voice sounded… surly. Defensive, maybe.

It had been such a long time. Eight whole years. He’d been expecting someone to show up with divorce papers, sooner or later. Or maybe he’d been hoping that someone would—this particular someone, maybe, though that had been the pipe dream—instead of just delivering them by mail.

Either way, he knew he should have received them by now and he couldn’t think of any other reason she’d be here.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ruthie said. She wrinkled up her nose in that cute way of hers that had always completely disarmed him. And still did.

She made him feel… not weak. He’d been an Army Ranger. He wasn’t weak. But still, this woman could make him feel and he hadn’t done that in longer than he wanted to admit.

“I didn’t make a reservation,” she was saying. “I know I should have, especially at this time of year. I don’t know. I just started driving, and I wanted to stay here, and I didn’t think it through.” She shook her head. “Sorry if that’s garbled. What I’m asking is, do you have any rooms open?”

Then she smiled at him.

And Dallas couldn’t think of a single reason that Ruthie Mathis would show him a smile like that. He hadn’t believed he would ever see her smile again, more to the point, certainly not in person, and it did things to him that he thought might need urgent medical attention. Soon.

The last time he’d seen her, there’d been tears on her face that he’d put there. There’d been misery in those beautiful eyes of hers that, again, he was responsible for. He hadn’t seen her smile in some while at that point. The only smiles he ever saw of hers were in dreams he had, and then woke up from, so he could experience losing her all over again when he realized it had only been in his head.