Page 5

In no world could there ever be a scenario in which she would walk into a place where he was and smile at him. It was impossible.

But she was still right here, in the lobby of his lighthouse, smiling at him.

“Yes,” he said stiffly, like it was a test. “We just opened, actually. All the rooms are available. You can take your pick.”

He didn’t know what he was doing. He was talking, which felt like an upgrade, but he still couldn’t move. He could feel his pulse ticking too loud, too hard, and definitely too fast in his neck. His temple. Like they were counting down the moments until he combusted, which, the way he was feeling, could be at any moment.

“That’s great.” She unzipped her parka. “I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, driving up here,” she said. “That road up the mountain—”

“We called it Desolation Drive when I was growing up,” he heard himself say in that same clipped voice. “It shuts down a lot when the snow gets bad.”

Her eyes actually sparkled at that, and he thought maybe he was dying. Why else would he be seeing things that couldn’t be real? “I can’t really imagine what bad snow is, then, because it wasn’t shut down tonight, and it was terrifying.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to arrive somewhere in my life. It was a lot of white knuckles, sitting up straight, and praying for deliverance, believe me.”

“The snow’s getting worse,” he said darkly. Defensively, maybe. “It’s December, so really, that could happen at any time.”

“Luckily, this lighthouse looks exactly as cozy as advertised,” Ruthie said, and his heart skipped a beat. Maybe two. Because she was using that encouraging tone that he remembered entirely too well. She’d wielded it so expertly with the other Army wives. It was part of her endless, impossible charm that he’d been drawn to like a moth to a flame. Except his version of a moth was significantly more suicidal, so maybe he shouldn’t be so surprised that he’d burnt himself to a crisp. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’m delighted.”

Dallas still stood there, unable to move. Or to stop staring at her.

The silence grew between them, and it was Ruthie who shifted from foot to foot as she stood there. “Is there a… check-in process?” she asked in that same bright voice of hers.

Once again, Dallas coughed a bit, because maybe there was some kind of constriction in his throat. He looked down, feeling clumsy and strange, and picked up his tablet from where it had landed on the couch cushion. He swiped through the necessary screens, noting that his hands did not feel entirely steady.

He was a goddamn combat veteran, and he was falling apart over checking someone into the bed-and-breakfast that he’d poured himself into for years now, dreaming of the day he would get to do this. He should have been elated. He should have been excited, at the very least, having imagined it so many times.

But at no point had he ever imagined that it would be Ruthie.

He beckoned her over to the couch. “You can fill this in,” he said. “And do you have luggage?”

“Oh, just a couple of bags in the car—”

“I’ll get them.” He said that too abruptly. That was obvious. She was eyeing him again, not with what he would call trepidation, necessarily, but like she was trying to figure him out. Meaning he was presenting as someone who required figuring. But also, as if she didn’t already know more than anyone should have to about him.

“It isn’t locked,” she said. After a moment.

Dallas nodded, and then he was moving before he thought better of it, skirting around her and where she was sitting on the couch by such a wide margin that he was sure she noticed. Then he pushed his way out of the front door and into the darkness.

It was a mild night, as December nights in Montana went, meaning the cold kicked at him hard but not like it would hurt him. Too badly, anyway. The snow was coming down, but it didn’t look as if it meant business. She’d parked that damned RAV4 of hers at an angle in the parking lot where only his truck stood, and the vehicle itself made his breath hitch for all kinds of reasons. Because he’d told her to get rid of that thing years ago. Because he’d ridden in it more times than he could count. Because he’d fixed the damn engine with his own hands and had tended to it in all kinds of ways, sometimes lavishing a kind of affection on the damn thing that he’d been only too aware he was failing to provide to the woman who owned it.

The vehicle was like a monument to memories he didn’t particularly want to revisit from his marriage, and he stood there in the cold for a good long breath or two, feeling winded.

He went around to the back to open up the hatch and pulled out two pieces of luggage that he also recognized. One was a duffel bag he’d left behind when he’d left. The other was a suitcase that he’d taken in and out of their garage more times than he could count, every time they had to go somewhere. Every time she needed it. Her favorite carry-on suitcase.

Dallas blew out a breath, then another. He closed the hatch and then headed back inside, stamping off the slight accumulation of snow from his boots just inside the big main doors. Ruthie was right where he’d left her, and wasn’t that a kick in the gut. Maybe some part of him really did believe it had been a dream. Or a severe lapse in his mental acuities. He walked in farther and set her bags at the end of the couch where she was sitting, typing into his tablet.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Ruthie said, not sounding like she was the least bit concerned about mental acuity or dreams of any kind, “but I’m leaving my stay open-ended. You tell me if you have other bookings. I don’t really know how long I’m going to stay here.”

He looked at her, then back down at that duffel bag that he’d originally brought back from basic training. One more thing he hadn’t thought about in years, but here it was, stirring up more memories he didn’t want.

You mean memories you don’t deserve, a voice inside him corrected him, firmly.

“I’ll take a look at the calendar,” he muttered.

This felt ridiculous. He felt like he was standing in a firing line, waiting for the gun to go off, but he didn’t know what else he should do. He certainly didn’t want to shove them right back into that dark, terrible swamp of their past right off the bat if it wasn’t what she wanted. Maybe she was just testing the water here, wanting to see if he’d fly off the handle. He figured the best thing he could do was demonstrate that he wasn’t the same shithead he’d been back then.

But he felt like he was performing in a play without knowing any of the lines.

She stood up and smiled at him again, and he thought that maybe she’d learned to be cruel in the past years. Maybe that’s what this was—showing him exactly what he’d lost, just to make sure that he stayed miserable.