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“I know. But I was scared. I wanted to know what we had was real, that while you loved your mother and wanted to give her what she needed, and that I wasn’t just a means to an end.”
I shake my head. “No, you were never—”
She puts out a hand and touches me on the arm, and it’s then that I remember that I was cutting wood shirtless like some cliché mountain man.
Sophia smiles. “I was in the beginning,” she says. “You didn’t even know me when I first came here. And you were an escape for me at first, but then you became so much more. And now I need to know if it’s the same for you.”
I want to tell her.
I want to tell her everything I’ve smothered over the last few months, but words fail me, and instead, I take her in my arms and kiss her. Her hands work through my hair, and her body clings to me, and our mouths work together until we both need to come up for air.
“I love you,” I tell her. “I meant it the first time I said it, and I mean it now. It killed me to let you go, but I didn’t want to be an obligation. I didn’t think I could offer you anything that would even compare to what you had back home, and—”
“Dummy,” she says, shaking her head, a smile playing at her lips. “You’re everything I could ever want and more.”
I stare at her, unable to understand how that could possibly be. “I don’t want you to give all that up just for me,” I say.
Sophia puts a hand on her hip. “Well, I don’t want to give you up for all of that.”
I break into a grin. Cocoa carries the rawhide bone in her mouth and trots in circles around us as I lift Sophia off the ground and spin her around and around. We leave her bags in the car and float up the stairs to my room—our room. I whisper how much I’ve missed her as she runs her fingers tenderly along my jaw, and she whispers back that she loves me. I feel like I’ve fallen into a dream, where our clothes fall away, and heat builds between us, arching gloriously and then releasing in a burst of light.
And as we hold each other after, I run my fingers through the tangles of her curls. “Never leave me,” I say.
Sophia looks up at me with an expression of absolute bliss, and I know I’m mirroring it back at her. “No,” she agrees. “Never again.”
Epilogue
SOPHIA
FOUR AND A HALF YEARS LATER
“Finn!” I call into the woods, scanning the trees for my son who’s romping around in the brush just moments before, and has suddenly gone perfectly still. “Finn, are you hiding from me?”
A giggle echoes.
I smile and shake my head. “I can’t climb over those logs to come get you, Finnie,” I call to him. “You’re going to have to come back.”
Finn giggles again, and then tears out from behind a large tree and does a swan dive right over the logs in question, landing on his head about three inches from a large thistle.
But not on it. Never on it. That child is trouble but also has incredible luck. He shrieks again as Gus, our puppy, comes bounding over and covers his face in sloppy kisses.
“Ew! No, Gus. I already washed my face.”
This may be true, but he’s still got a large dirt stain down his cheek, and a gooey substance I’m hoping is pinesap globed in his red hair.
I rest my hands on my swollen belly. Three months ago I would’ve stomped right off into the brush to scoop him up, but he seems to be getting more capable just as I’m getting less. When his sister is born, she’s going to have a lot to keep up with, and I’m going to have my hands even more full.
I glance up at Hunter’s office window and see him standing there, watching us. He waves at me, and I wave back, but there’s something else in his eyes, an expression I see more often on Finn than on Hunter, though they wear it very much the same.
Mischief.
What is he up to?
“Come on, mister,” I call to Finn. “You’re father’s done with work, and it’s time for dinner.”
Nothing gets Finn running toward the house faster than hearing it’s time for Daddy to join us. He shrieks at the top of his lungs as a tiny brown and white fur ball nips at his heels, stumbles, and rolls past him, pausing to engaging in mortal combat with a rogue twig from the aspen tree. I manage to bend over enough to tear it away from him and throw it, and Gus runs in circles around it, but he doesn’t bring it back.
I raise an eyebrow at him. “You have a lot to learn about fetch.”
