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But again—the scowling. This was clearly an experience she was having alone.

Ruthie realized she hadn’t asked him about food and she probably should have, because she hadn’t eaten in a while. She supposed she could go down and see if he was around somewhere to ask now, but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled the KitKat she’d gotten somewhere south out of her bag and treated herself to a much-needed chocolate indulgence.

She sat there on the darling curved bed, watched the snow dance against her big glass window, and wondered exactly what she was doing here. In Montana, almost two-thousand miles away from home. In a lighthouse run by a very grumpy man who had clearly taken against her on sight.

But it was late. She was tired. And there was nothing that she could possibly do tonight that she couldn’t do better with some sleep.

Ruthie took a shower when the last of the KitKat was gone. She brushed her teeth and did a few stretches after all that time in her car. Then she crawled into her impossibly cozy bed and dreamed about Dallas Lisle’s dark, scowling, unfairly beautiful face all night long.

In the morning, she woke up to light beaming in her window. When she got up and went to look out she found a beautiful blue sky overhead, the sun beaming down, and a kind of snow-covered fairy tale laid out before her.

She’d driven through the clearly very cute Marietta, Montana, last night, before ten miles of gut-wrenching terror up the side of Copper Mountain. And she’d studied the maps before coming here. She knew that the mountain was what she saw to the right. What she was looking at was Cowboy Point itself, a small valley on the backside of Copper Mountain that was laid out to cluster around an iced-over river that branched off here and there, with houses built into the ridge across from her and what had to be the main—and only—road winding its way through the center.

It looked perfect, and nothing like back home in Georgia. It was like a winter wonderland. Houses were settled into the snow with smoke coming from their chimneys and light in their windows. It felt festive, and happy, like she’d woken up in a Christmas card.

She pressed her hands against the cold window, and almost pressed her nose against it too. Ruthie told herself that there was absolutely no way that she wouldn’t find the answers she was after here.

Because her whole life was a question these days. She knew the facts. That she and Grandma had gotten into a car accident six months ago. And maybe the accident was a blessing in disguise, little as Ruthie liked to think that. But it was true that while her grandmother had never recovered from the accident and had died a couple of weeks after it, they’d been coming back from a doctor’s appointment that day.

And the doctor had made it very clear that Grandma was going to deteriorate whether she liked it or not and would likely suffer her way to the end of her life, without much in the way of the dignity she had always prized.

Deanna Rae Mathis had wanted no part of that. As sad as Ruthie was to lose her, she knew that it was better this way. Grandma could only be remembered as she was, entirely undiminished. And Ruthie, having lived, had done her very best to live up to her grandmother’s wishes.

She’d gone through all of her things and that was when she began to find all of these references to Cowboy Point, Montana, in her grandmother’s possessions. When she knew perfectly well that the farthest her grandmother had ever gone was Florida, which, as she’d liked to say, she’d visited once as a girl and had never felt the call to return.

Ruthie couldn’t imagine what it was that had inspired her grandmother to fixate on this place. It was pretty, sure, but Grandma didn’t like the cold. She didn’t like dramatic mountains, always cluttering up the sky and making a person—she meant her—claustrophobic. And Deanna Rae Mathis certainly didn’t like anywhere that wasn’t Columbus, Georgia, where she’d been born and bred and had always intended to die.

And despite her cousins claiming that she’d been knocked on the head herself and couldn’t be expected to know her ass from her elbow—when they weren’t insisting that she was some kind of nefarious mastermind and was trying to steal her grandmother’s possessions, to what end she could not imagine—Ruthie couldn’t understand why, if Cowboy Point had factored in her grandmother’s life, she wouldn’t know about that.

She’d barely seen her cousins, growing up. They’d showed up while Grandma was in the hospital after the accident, acting like they’d been around the whole time, and at first that had seemed like another blessing. They’d sorted out the memorial service that Grandma had wanted for all the folks she’d known her whole life, and their families, and what seemed like half of the state of Georgia. They’d helped with the arrangements for the interment.

It was them acting like they knew anything about Grandma’s life, when Ruthie couldn’t remember them showing up at all in her own, that had bugged her.

That’s because you’re the only one that Grandma took in, one of her cousins, or second cousins, had told her at some point. Your mother was always the favorite.

That had not been stated as if it was a compliment.

Especially since the reason Grandma had taken Ruthie in was because her parents had drowned in the Chattahoochee River when Ruthie was five. She wasn’t sure favoritism had been in play there.

Here in her fairy tale new start of Cowboy Point—or at least her for now place that had nothing to do with her past—Ruthie dressed for another cold day. She’d discovered pretty quickly on the drive that her Georgia wardrobe was no match for these northern climates. She pulled on her jeans and thick wool socks that she’d never wear down south, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and one of her hand-knitted sweaters.

She padded down the spiral staircase and when she got down to the farmhouse area, found that she could smell bacon. That immediately got her feeling less jumbled up inside, because she’d always been of the opinion that bacon was medicinal.

Ruthie followed her nose through the lobby that was even prettier with all the sunshine coming in, to the open-arched doorway that stood behind the fireplace. When she walked through to the next room, she could see that the fireplace was two-sided and this space had a bunch of tables, a games area in one corner, a line of comfortable chairs to look off down the hillside, and an open kitchen on one end.

It was an open kitchen, and while she wasn’t surprised to see that Dallas was there, she was still…

She had no idea what her body was doing. It was wild.

“I can make you anything you like for breakfast,” he said in that same dark, almost affronted voice, without even looking up.

And the morning sun didn’t do anything to soften the blow of how outrageously attractive he was. It was worse, in fact. Because he was wearing a pair of jeans with a flannel shirt that did nothing to disguise all that sculpture, and he was scowling at his stove, and then at her, and Lord above but she was just a girl.

Ruthie felt fluttery. And silly. And entirely too flushed and shivery and—

For God’s sake, say something before the man thinks you’ve lapsed into a coma, she told herself, in a voice that sounded a good deal like her grandmother’s starchiest tones.

“Oh, I think…” She could barely speak. Her tongue was thick and strange in her mouth.