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Instead, Ruthie just looked at Dallas after waking up in his arms, feeling safe and sound for the first time in eight long years, and she knew.

She knew.

She knew everything.

Her heart kicked at her then, and it was hard to keep her breathing in check, because there was no easing into it. There had been none of him, no memories of their before, and now he was everywhere.

Wrapped in and around so many moments and years and parts of her that she couldn’t imagine how it was possible that he’d ever been filtered out.

Dallas was sleeping hard beside her, and Ruthie remembered so many other mornings waking up to look at him, just like this. Like all those mornings, she traced her fingers over the soft arch of his eyebrow. Then she traced that stunning, sculpted line of his jaw.

He was perfect. He was familiar.

First, after they’d met in that bar, they’d been dazzled by each other. It had been like something out of a story, something she never would have believed if it hadn’t happened to her. They had locked eyes and that was that. They’d been drawn to each other like magnets, and once they met, they were stuck tight together.

They had stumbled out to her car because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other enough to wait to find a bed, and even there, in the breathless aftermath, she had traced his features.

Because she couldn’t believe that anyone that beautiful was looking at her the same way she was looking at him. That he was feeling the same things she felt.

Then she’d felt the same exact way about her husband.

The man she’d married in a rush that her grandmother had staunchly disapproved of.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure, her grandmother had warned her. Repeatedly. It’s a saying for a reason.

But that wasn’t what they liked to do in their leisure time, Ruthie had thought.

They hadn’t repented at all. They’d moved into military housing and glutted themselves on each other like they could never get enough. Insatiable barely began to cover it.

She had marveled at him, this impossibly beautiful man who somehow wanted her as badly as she wanted him. She had learned his body better than she knew her own. They had been limitless and experimental, up for any idea that popped up—

And it turned out they both had a whole lot of ideas.

They had the kind of wildfire connection that made people around them uncomfortable, and Ruthie kind of thought that was funny. She’d felt sorry for the uncomfortable people, because what were their lives like, that they didn’t have this? Maybe they were the ones who should have been embarrassed, she’d thought. They claimed to be in love, married, lifelong partners, whatever—and yet they didn’t know how difficult it was to exist in the same room as their person without touching them.

No thank you, she’d thought. She’d been very sure that what she and Dallas had was deeper. Hotter.

Better.

She remembered all of those years now. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had friends. It was just that she couldn’t maintain those friendships the way people wanted her to.

Because when Dallas was home, she just wanted to be with him.

She thought differently about all of that later. After that terrible night, when they’d fought bitterly and he’d said mean things to her—but she had yelled meaner things right back.

Ruthie had been absolutely right to question her behavior.

That night she had pulled her rings off her hand and thrown them at him. And told him that she never wanted to see him again. Screamed it, in fact.

She’d had years to think about that, because, of course, Dallas had taken her at her word.

And the more time had passed, the more Ruthie had come to the miserable conclusion, that he didn’t want to come back. She’d come to the miserable conclusion that this thing between them was more toxic than not. Wasn’t that what everyone told them?

All the things she’d thought had made them better than the other relationships she saw around her, she discovered, were probably what made them toxic. And she was pretty sure that they matched each other pretty well on that.

Her trouble was, she hated living without him.

She’d vowed that when he came back, she’d do better. And she’d make him do better too. There were so many things they could do, together, to make their relationship healthy. She worked out, she read, she plotted—and she was convinced that they could do it. They could heal the toxic things they’d let consume them, and they could be better.