Snow crunched as his dad reappeared, clapping his hands together against the cold. “Dishwasher’s fixed. Your mother’s convinced it’s possessed.” He glanced between his three sons—shoulder to shoulder in the floodlight.
Ty dangled a key in between his fingers. “Come on, let me show you what she sounds like.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Then after, there’s cake left if Ellie hasn’t destroyed it.”
Wyatt exhaled.
The cold didn’t bite as hard anymore.
He didn’t have a plan or a strategy. And for the first time in his adult life, there was no operational framework for what came next.
He just knew.
He wanted her. All of it—the way she looked at him like he was a man worth staying for.
He wasn’t ready. He might never be ready.
But he was done pretending he hadn’t already chosen.
38
Jen driedplates because her hands needed something to do.
Because every time she looked out the window and saw Wyatt standing in the shed with his brothers, something in her chest tipped dangerously toward wanting.
She hadn’t known this version of him.
She’d seen him in darkness. Gunfire. Cold ocean water.
She hadn’t seen him here. And this version was worse.
Sophie’s kitchen ran on quiet systems—foil pressed over leftovers, containers stacked by size, the dishwasher humming after Ty had come in and thumped the back panel like that counted as maintenance.
Jen put a plate in the wrong cupboard.
Twice.
Sophie gently nudged her hand toward the right one without comment.
She’d never had this. Growing up an only child in a house that ran on silence and good grades, she understood family dinners like blueprints—orderly, theoretical, not something you stood inside and belonged to.
This was flour on the counter. Ellie’s chocolate fingerprints still smeared on the table. Conversation spilling through the open kitchen door.
Through the window above the sink, floodlights lit the equipment shed in hard white. Ty was revving the snowmobile engine while Ryder leaned on the trailer. Caleb pointed at something underneath the cowling.
And Wyatt.
Hands in his pockets. Dark hair. Shoulders braced against the cold. The shape of him did something low and dangerous in her chest. Like her body had already voted.
“Jen?”
She spun, dish towel in one hand and a glass in the other.
Sophie’s smile was knowing. “He watches you the same way. When you’re not looking.”
Heat climbed Jen’s neck. She folded the dish towel with more precision than it required. “It’s… we’re still figuring things out.”
Sophie nodded slowly, the way people do when they hear what you’re saying and also what you’re not. She set a container in the fridge, closed the door, and leaned her hip against the counter. “Can I tell you something I learned the hard way?”
Jen fiddled with a ragged thread on the corner of the dish towel. “Sure.”
