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But even as he thought that, he knew that wasn’t Ruthie.

It wasn’t the Ruthie you met when you were both twenty and addled by attraction, that same asshole voice inside him chimed in. Though it might be the Ruthie you made her into.

That was a thought that settled like a bitterness deep in his gut.

Once again, they stared at each other. Or more precisely, she was gazing at him and he was such a fucking coward that he wasn’t quite meeting that gaze. He didn’t really think he could handle what he was afraid he’d see in her eyes.

Pretty much par for the course.

“Can I… see the rooms you have open?” she asked, once again sounding like she was doing her best to gently, and in a very friendly manner, lead a recalcitrant horse to drink.

Or in his case, likely a jackass.

Dallas still didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he nodded, took the tablet from her while making sure not to touch her at all, and started walking across the lobby to the door on the far side.

He heard her laugh slightly, almost under her breath, and then he heard her follow him. He led her out of the lobby into the farmhouse and stopped.

“These are the farmhouse rooms,” he said, nodding down the length of the hall that stretched ahead of them. And then he became his own brochure. “There are three on this floor and three on the floor above. They all have the same amenities. Queen beds, private bathrooms, beautiful views.”

“Do you have rooms in the lighthouse itself?” she asked.

“I do.” Dallas led her down the hall, where all the doors were open so she could peek inside as she went. He opened the door on the far side and showed her the spiral stair that wound up almost all the way to the top of the lighthouse. “Each one of the four lighthouse rooms is unique. You’ll have to look and see which one suits you best.”

He looked back at her then, and the strangest expression was on her face. He couldn’t define it. It wasn’t anything he thought he’d ever seen on her face before. Almost like she caught him looking, or didn’t want him looking, she flushed slightly and nodded.

“I’ll be in the lobby,” he said abruptly. “Just tell me what room you choose and I’ll bring up your bags.”

But he didn’t move. And they stood there with him standing in the doorway, half into the spiral staircase. She was a couple of feet away, still looking at him. Curiously, he thought.

And he’d spent so much time interrogating his own guilt. Asking himself what he could have done differently. Aside from everything. Dallas had never thought he’d have the chance to see her again, and he certainly hadn’t thought that if he did, he would stand here like such an idiot.

But she didn’t break. She just gazed at him, and eventually, when he didn’t move, she gestured toward the staircase behind him.

“Is it okay if I…?”

He made a low noise that sounded a lot like a grunt, though he did not think of himself as a grunting sort of person. He moved out of the way, and once again, went so far overboard to make sure he didn’t brush past her that he probably looked as if he was throwing himself against the far wall to avoid her. Awesome.

She did something with her mouth that made him think she thought it was equally strange, because it was, and then he removed himself from her vicinity.

Meaning that he was a goddamn supremely well-trained ex-Army Ranger, so he didn’t flee a scene, but he certainly got the hell out of there. Fast.

And then he stood in the middle of this lobby that he had painstakingly restored, taking season after season to lovingly go over every single detail, and couldn’t even see it. All he saw was the whole of his marriage, and before that, that night he’d seen her for the very first time, out in a bar off base that neither one of them should have been in. How he’d looked through the crowd to see her smiling, dancing, her hands in the air, and a look of pure joy on her face, and he thought—that’s mine.

How he felt the exact same way now, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Dallas forced himself to walk over, pick up the tablet, and look through the details she’d entered. He recognized the address. Her grandmother’s place in Columbus, where she’d lived when they’d met. And the reservation she made stretched to New Year’s, when he really couldn’t think of one good reason why she would want to spend the month of December here unless she’d decided that it was time to come and excavate the long-buried body of their marriage.

Something he was pretty sure he had no desire to do whatsoever, mostly because if there was a corpse to be unearthed, it was his. Ruthie had done nothing wrong. Dallas had been the problem from the start.

Unsurprising, really, given that he’d been raised by a man who he’d hated long before he’d learned that Patrick Lisle had gone out and created himself a whole second family. He’d hated Patrick all on his own merits. He’d hated the way Patrick had tried to father him and his older brother, Tennessee, but only when convenient. He’d hated the way Patrick was always dropping in to ruin everything and then disappearing again. He’d vowed at the tender age of ten, and then again every year since, that he would never allow himself to follow in his father’s footsteps.

And then he’d turned around and been exactly the kind of man his father would have recognized in the mirror.

He’d spent years trying to face that truth in his own mirror.

Dallas realized now that mirrors could lie. Because he’d just looked into the face of the woman he’d hurt the most, and he was pretty damn sure there was nothing he could say to make it better.

Maybe that was what she’d come here to tell him.