Mitch’s jaw shifted. One muscle jumping, then settling. “Why couldn’t you have done this at a reasonable hour?”
“I got on the first available flight.”
“There were no daytime flights?”
“I didn’t look for daytime flights.”
That landed. I watched it land—the slight change in his posture, the way his arms uncrossed and recrossed like he wasrecalibrating. Mitch hearing the truth delivered without armor was a thing I had been collecting since the first week, and it hadn’t gotten less valuable.
He tilted his head toward the open door. “You’d better come in then.”
I took the steps in three strides. The door closed behind me.
At once, I was against the wall. Mitch’s hand flat against my chest, his body crowding mine into the wood paneling, nose to nose, pressing weeks of waiting into four square inches of hallway.
His eyes were warm and a little wrecked and completely certain. “If you leave this long again,” he said, low and clear, “I will personally feed your hat to the goats.”
“You threatened that in a text.”
“I meant it.”
“The threat predates the text.”
“I have a consistent position on the hat.”
“The hat is fine.”
“I know the hat is fine.” Mitch’s mouth did the thing—the corner lifting, smug and warm at the same time. “I’ve held it hostage since the day you left. It’s in excellent condition. That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“You.” His hand came up to my jaw, warm through the stubble. “The point is you.”
Then he kissed me.
It was not a gentle welcome-home kiss. It was the kind that had been accumulating since the truck vanished down that gravel road months ago and hadn’t lost momentum in transit.
His mouth was warm and insistent and exactly as confident as advertised, and I gripped the front of his shirt with both hands because my balance had checked out for the evening and Mitch Pruitt standing this close was its own kind of vertigo.
I’d told myself somewhere over Nebraska that I might have built this up in my head. The way Mitch’s thumb traced my jawline. The smell of him—pine soap and something warmer underneath, the scent that lived in the muscle and didn’t apologize.
The new-house smell coming through the open door behind us: beeswax and fresh lumber and whatever Caleb had baked earlier, something with cinnamon that made my stomach do something complicated that had nothing to do with hunger.
I had not built it up. If anything, I’d undersold it.
The cold night air was still on my jacket, and Mitch’s hands were warm on my face, and the contradiction of it—cold outside, warm inside, me surrendering to both at once—short-circuited something in my nervous system that I wasn’t going to examine while being kissed in a hallway at two in the morning.
Mitch pulled back. His eyes were warm and a little wrecked and extremely smug—the most Mitch combination possible, delivered with the precision of a man who had been planning this moment for months and was extremely pleased with how it had turned out.
“Caleb’s upstairs,” he said. His thumb was still tracing my jaw. “He’s been waiting for weeks. Cried twice. Blamed the pregnancy hormones both times. I did not say a single word about it.”
“That was decent of you.”
“I know. I’m a very decent person.” He shoved me toward the stairs, his hand warm between my shoulder blades. “Go wake him up.”
I went.
The stairs creaked under my boots the way new stairs creak—predictably, apologetically, like they were still getting used to the idea of being walked on. I took them slow. One hand on the rail, which was smooth under my palm, the kind of smooth thatcame from sanding and not from time, and the difference was measurable.
