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He lifted her onto his lap. “I love you too, Tessa.”
His hands moved under her shirt again, but she pulled back with a smile. “My turn.”
“Good. I definitely want to hear your fantasies.”
With another laugh, she shifted enough to pull her phone up between them. “It appears we’re all about using our phones for gifts this year. I’ll drop yours.”
A folder popped onto his phone and he opened it. “A family tree.” He knew he was grinning like he had when he got his own saddle.
“I know how important your family is to you, and I thought you’d like to know who came before and what jobs they held.”
He enlarged the screen to follow one of the branches.
Tessa pointed at one block. “You’ll be able to see it better on a larger screen. The ones marked in green are connected to ranching and horses. You come by your rodeo skills honestly.”
He zoomed back out to see green scattered all over the tree. “Very cool. What about the blue blocks?”
“Law enforcement.”
“Seriously?” He hadn’t known any of his ancestors were in law enforcement.
She nodded and pointed. “A Texas Ranger, a few sheriffs, and even one of the first female US Marshals way back in the 1890s.”
“That’s amazing.”
Tessa tapped the block and it brought up a pop-up, giving Flynn a grainy photo and brief biography of the woman. He clicked around several of the blocks, skimming snippets of Walker family history.
Then he put down the phone and cupped Tessa’s face. “It’s perfect, absolutely perfect. Thank you. But enough about history. I’d like to focus on the present for a little while.”
Tessa giggled. “That was a present.”
He rolled his eyes as he laughed with her. “I’m thinking more about this kind of present.”
And then he kissed her because she was his present.
And his future.
Ten weeks later
Tessa was glad she’d worn gloves. It might be spring, but Vermont hadn’t read the memo. The ice was breaking up over Midnight Lake and Tessa wanted to collect data on her turtles. She’d worried about them over the winter, which had been colder than average.
“Looks like we’re coming up on your first location.” Flynn said from the back of the canoe. “Hang on.”
He back paddled and then used the paddle to keep them in place. “Do your magic.”
She laughed. “It’s hardly magic.”
“Not yet. But with the data you collect, you always create magic.”
He said the most amazing things. And she’d learned he was always serious when he said them. He believed in her. The months since Christmas had brought them closer and more in love than ever before. What else would bring the man out in a canoe when the wind chill had temperatures hovering around twenty?
She checked the app to get as close to the original location as possible and used her stick to take measurements. She input the distance to the first point of resistance, then reached further to find a hard substance. Her turtle. “He’s still there.”
“I’m glad I’m not a turtle. That’s a hell of a way to spend the winter.”
For the next few hours, they drifted along the lake. In almost all of her locations, she found what she assumed were turtles. The few spots she didn’t find anything, she hoped the turtles had moved on after she’d taken the measurements.
Finally, they reached the far end of the lake and Flynn steered them toward the dock of the cabin where they’d first talked all those months ago. “Been a while since we were here.”
