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Hannah blinked, lifting her head. For a second she looked adorably disoriented. “Where are we?”

“Just north of the Utah border,” he said, shifting into Park.

She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “I can’t believe I slept for two hours.”

“You must have needed it,” he said.

Something flashed across her expression and he suspected it was the same memory he had been wrestling with. The heat of their kiss. The way they had come together as if they had never been apart.

He wanted to curse himself for opening that door again, even accidentally.

He cleared his throat. “I need to walk Kodi. Do you guys want to wait in the truck? It’s a lot warmer here and you don’t have to throw your coats back on. I won’t go far, just around that park for a minute.”

“I want to take a walk!” Carter exclaimed, immediately wide-awake.

“Can we?” Riley asked, her cheeks still pink from sleep.

Wes glanced at Hannah.

She shrugged. “Sure. A walk would be good. My legs could use a stretch too.”

They bundled into coats and hats while he filled up the truck’s tank, then crunched through a thin layer of snow toward the small park just beyond the gas station.

The snow was steady but not fierce yet and the children lifted their faces to it, catching snowflakes on their tongues.

The park was bisected by a fast-moving creek. A narrow footbridge arched over it, charming and quaint. The children instinctively headed that way, racing each other through the snow.

He and Hannah followed at a slower pace, Kodi trotting ahead, nose to the ground.

“For a couple of kids going through a tough time right now, they seem remarkably resilient,” Wes said as they watched Carter drop a pine cone he had picked up along the way into the icy water on one side of the bridge. Both children scampered to the other side to watch it rush beneath them and disappear downstream.

“They are,” Hannah agreed, tucking her hands into her pockets against the chill. “They’re great kids who have been through so much.”

They were close enough to keep an eye on the children but far enough away that Riley and Carter couldn’t hear them over their own shrieks and the gurgle of the creek.

“I sincerely hope being temporarily separated from their mother is the worst thing they ever have to endure, next to their father dying, of course,” he said.

Hannah’s mouth tightened into a flat line as she watched the children play.

“Before we left the cancer center,” she murmured, “Morgan asked me to consider becoming guardian to the children if her treatment doesn’t work.”

He turned to her, startled. “What did you say?”

She sent him a sidelong look. “I didn’t even need to think about it. Of course I said yes. What else could I say?”

“That’s a huge commitment,” he said, though he already knew her answer in the affirmative was the only one she could have given.

“She’s my friend,” Hannah said simply. “I love her. And I love those kids.”

“That’s obvious,” he replied.

“If something happens to Morgan, God forbid, I could never put them into foster care. I don’t want them to have to start over in a strange place with people who don’t know them and love them like I do.”

He gazed at her, emotion thick in his chest. The wind lifted a strand of hair against her cheek and he didn’t think he had ever seen a more beautiful woman, inside and out.

“You’re remarkable,” he said.

She huffed a small laugh. “I’m really not. You know I’m not. I just want to do the right thing for the children.”