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He stood there for a long moment, her taste still on his lips, his heart still beating an unsteady rhythm.

Kodiak huffed and resettled on the floor, as if reminding him that at least someone in the room still had sense.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face.

He finally turned off the lamp and headed for his own room, each step feeling heavier than the last. Tomorrow, they had hours of driving ahead of them. A hospital visit. Two kids to keep entertained. A fragile truce to maintain.

After that?

He exhaled slowly, staring at the unfamiliar shadows on the ceiling.

After that, he would do his best to stay away from her. He was almost done with his grandfather’s house. He would stay to finish the job and try to enjoy the holidays with his family, then he would pack up his dog, get in his truck and drive back to the life he knew how to manage.

The one where he didn’t fall asleep with the feel of the only woman he had ever loved still burning on his skin.

Chapter 25

She was still in love with him.

As Hannah climbed into her queen bed next to the one holding both sleeping children, the realization settled into her bones like cold air slithering through a window gap.

All this time, she had told herself she was over him. She had been so very proud of herself for moving on with her life.

Yes, she had grieved when he left. She remembered going back to school after that horrible Christmas break feeling as if she might shatter into pieces if anyone so much as looked at her too closely. She’d sat in the back row of lectures, barely hearing a word, and cried herself to sleep in her narrow dorm bed night after night.

It seemed melodramatic now, in her thirties. But back then, she had been young and an unrepentant romantic, and she had loved him with every bit of her idealistic heart.

She told herself she understood his reasons. His family falling apart, the fear and guilt and chaos after his parents were shot. She knew he had been barely hanging on.

Understanding hadn’t made it hurt less.

What had hurt most had been the way he shut her out completely. No phone calls. No late-night texts. One day she had been his confidante, his best friend. The next, she had been no one to him.

But she had plowed through. She had dated. She had built a successful practice.

She had poured herself into friendships and community and her patients. She had just bought a house of her own, with a mortgage and peeling paint and a kitchen she loved.

She had moved on.

And here he was, back in town, scraping open all the scars she had so carefully stitched together.

One impulsive, devastating kiss in a hotel sitting room, and he sucked her right back in.

She could not do this again. Not with everything else in her life. Her work, Morgan’s illness, the children depending on her.

She especially could not do this again with a man who had made it clear he was only in Shelter Springs for a short time.

He would leave. That was who he was. She refused to be left behind again.

She lay there in the dim room, listening to the soft exhale of Riley’s breath, the occasional sleepy sigh from Carter, and made herself a quiet promise.

She would guard her heart. She would be polite, friendly, grateful. She would not let herself fall any deeper than she already had.

There could be nothing more between them.

“I wish you didn’t have to go.”

Sandwiched between her two children, Morgan sat on the sofa in the same small consult room where they had seen her the day before. She wore the new robe over soft knit pants, her dark hair pulled into a loose knot, the IV tubing tucked discreetly beneath the fabric.