Page 24

"I did," she admits, and the smile that follows that is the one she cannot fully control, the one that gets into her eyes before she decides whether to allow it on her mouth. She has a collection of smiles. I have catalogued all of them over the years with the same attention I once used to catalogue threats. "I must have been temporarily impaired."

"You were perfectly lucid."

"I was also very warm and it was a good dinner." She pushes off the railing and crosses the porch toward me. "Don't read too much into it."

I set my glass on the small table beside the chair and look up at her when she stops in front of me, close enough that the hem of the flannel brushes my knee.

She has her hair down, slightly damp from the shower she took an hour ago, and she smells like the soap from our bathroom and the cold air she has been standing in for the last two minutes, and the combination of those two things is still, years in, one of my preferred things in the world.

"Sit down," I say.

"There's one chair."

"I know."

She gives me the look that means she is deciding whether to be difficult about this for the entertainment value, and then she swings one leg over and settles into my lap with the ease of someone who has done it so many times it requires no thought.

Her weight settles warm and familiar against my thighs, her back against my chest, and she reaches back and steals my glass again without turning around.

"You're a liability with that ring," I tell her, getting my arm around her waist.

"You bought the ring." She sips my drink. "You created the liability."

"I stand by it."

"Of course you do." She tips her head back against my shoulder and looks up at me, and in this light, with the snow drifting past the edge of the porch roof and the town glowing quietly below, she looks so completely at home in this space that I sometimes forget there was ever a version of this porch without her on it. "What were you out here thinking about?"

"Nothing."

She turns slightly to read my face. She is extremely good at that. Better than most people I have known for much longer. "Hansen..."

"I was watching the snow."

"That's not nothing, that's your thinking face."

"I don't have a thinking face."

"You absolutely have a thinking face! You've had it since the night we met. It's the one where your jaw does this." She reaches up and touches the side of my jaw briefly with her free hand, fingertips light, and even after all this time that specific casual contact still does something to my attention. "Like you're deciding something."

"I'm not deciding anything."

"Good," she says, settling back against me. "You've earned a night of not deciding anything."

She is not wrong about that.

Leah turns her head and kisses the side of my jaw lightly, which tells me she knows I am still thinking and has decided to redirect my attention with her preferred method.

"Stop," she says against my skin.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're brooding." She shifts to face me more fully, one knee hooked over the arm of the chair, and puts her hand flat on my chest. "It's a beautiful night. The snow is doing that nice thing it does. Your fiancée is sitting in your lap, which is a situation most men would consider favorable."

"Most men don't know you as well as I do."

Her eyes narrow. "Excuse me?"

"Favorable is relative."