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They could thrive.

He just needed to come back—but he didn’t.

Ruthie had waited and waited. She’d gotten the sort of jobs she’d always had before, while he was on active duty. A cashier here, a receptionist there, but every time they wanted to promote her into something more permanent, she quit.

Because she kept thinking that Dallas would come back. And she didn’t want to commit to a life she didn’t want if her real life might walk back in the door at any moment.

But he’d never come back.

Ruthie had started to think that the next time she heard from him, it would be in the form of divorce papers. Because someone like Dallas hadn’t spent these eight years alone. She couldn’t imagine it. There was no possible way that the man that beautiful could go unclaimed—and that meant, sooner or later, he would want to make something permanent with someone who wasn’t Ruthie.

It was inevitable.

She had tortured herself with images of Dallas with other women the way he’d been with her. She had ripped herself up about it. And all the while she had to pretend that she barely remembered him when her grandmother brought him up.

Not that she thought she’d fooled Deanna Rae any.

And she realized that it was true, what she’d told Dallas’s family. She really had been glad that she got the opportunity to care for her grandmother the way she did. To this day, she couldn’t be sure if she actually remembered her parents being swept away from their boat on the Chattahoochee that day. Or if she’d just filled in the memory she thought she ought to have from whatever stories she’d been told. She would never know.

But she’d always felt her parents’ absence.

Her grandmother had loved her. Doted on her. But that didn’t mean that she hadn’t rearranged her life to do it. And Ruthie knew that her grandmother didn’t consider her an imposition—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t one.

That was why, when it was her turn to give that kind of care and attention back, she didn’t view it as an imposition either.

And she really had thought, by that point, that maybe it was a good thing that she and Dallas were apart, because she didn’t see how she could possibly break that spell that they were always under and also care for her grandmother at the same time. It felt impossible.

She sat up in the bed now, feeling like herself for the first time in a long time and not just because she could remember everything. But because she could feel him, too. Beside her and inside her.

Ruthie was just a little bit sore. And her body smelled like his as much as hers. And that, she knew, was something she hadn’t felt in a long time—long before that accident. It made her feel like she was whole again.

Finally.

Outside the windows, dawn was breaking. That meant they’d slept in. The sun didn’t make it over the mountains until nearly nine a.m. at this time of year. And even though she was looking out to the west, she could see the creeping rosy light of the new day coming in all around her.

Ruthie thought about the gift of the weeks she’d spent here, in these short days and long nights in the run-up to Christmas. She hadn’t entirely meant it when she’d told him that she viewed the time they’d spent together here in the inn, here in Cowboy Point, as dating. She thought it counted as dating, sure.

But now she realized that what she’d done here was teach herself a new way to be with him.

Because she wasn’t the same girl she’d been at twenty. She knew now that it wasn’t necessarily unhealthy to want her husband that much, but that they could be more to each other than simply naked.

They could sit in the lobby in the evening and talk about books. She could sit next to him on one of the couches and guide his hands so that he could figure out how to knit a few stitches in a row without devolving into the physical.

Which wasn’t to say she didn’t feel him, always. That she didn’t want to touch him every hour of every day, because she’d felt that even when he’d been a stranger to her.

God, had she felt it. But he’d said no and she’d had to think about being friends while dreaming wildly erotic scenes starring him. Night after night.

Maybe, as sad as it made her now and had made her while it was happening, it was a good thing they’d had some time apart.

Because she still wanted him naked, like this. But she also wanted him as that friend she’d pretended he was.

The real truth was, she wanted everything.

Ruthie didn’t want to disturb him, but she felt restless, so she eased away from him and off the bed. Leaving all that heat behind her, which took some doing. She pulled on his flannel again and the pair of socks she’d knitted herself that she’d tossed somewhere on the floor.

Looking back at him, sprawled across the bed wearing almost nothing, made her melt. It made her want to crawl right back in that bed and wake him up the way she’d loved to do when he’d come back from his deployments, crawling down his body and helping herself—

But she had a whole life she’d forgotten. Ruthie had to take a moment to remember. To recalibrate.