Page 97 of Hero for the Holidays

It never had been. They’d needed something no less than their daughter to bring them back to this point.

Or maybe there was nobackabout it. Maybe it was something wholly new. Wholly different and wonderful.

Maybe this was the first time they had ever been quite like this.

She looked up at him, at his sculpted face half illuminated by the firelight. They couldn’t move toward each other, not now.

But she could feel the pull to him.

And could feel him being drawn to her in return.

Lord, that man was everything. He just was.

He can’t be everything. He’s Landry. You already know how it goes.

Maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe this was their chance to heal as many things as they wanted. Maybe this was their chance to renew and reclaim. They had both admitted that other relationships hadn’t been able to happen for them. And she wondered how much of it was because they had both been trapped in the most difficult, traumatic time of their lives.

But now they had moved past it. They had made something new.

They had their daughter at the right time.

Maybe there would be a chance for them to...

She wasn’t silly enough to believe that they could do love and marriage. The simple truth was, she had never actually seen that work out. She knew he hadn’t either.

And she would never risk what they were building with Lila over dreams spun from fantasy and well-placed lies. You couldn’t count on having a double miracle. They were being given a second chance. In a deep and profound way few people could have ever expected. You couldn’t test the limits of something like that. You couldn’t test the limits of hope and faith and love when you had been gifted with more than any one person could expect.

But there was heat between them. And she did want to test the limits of that.

She had fantasized only last night about him pushing past her barriers.

About him pushing them both past the brink. Past sanity. And she knew that was childish. The behavior of somebody who couldn’t stand by their own decisions. She could.

In many ways she had always been able to trust herself. And only herself.

She knew what she had to do when it came to Lila. Even though she had wanted more. Even though she had wished that she could run away with Landry. She had known the right thing to do. And she had doubled down, turned inward, handled it all without ever including another person in those moves she’d made. Not after it had been clear Landry was going to oppose her.

She had known she could count on herself. So perhaps she needed to trust herself now. That was a tangled thing. A sharp thing. Because she had also always blamed herself for getting into the situation in the first place. And maybe that was where she needed to have more kindness for her past self. Because even her present self couldn’t reject this. Couldn’t say no to this. Even her present self felt swept off her feet.

Was it so wrong to miss that feeling?

She looked at the bonfire, just for a moment. And then back at him. A wildfire was deadly. Sweeping through the trees. But the bonfire was simply a good time. When they were teenagers, their desire had been a wildfire. Because it had no parameters. No boundaries. It had been only and ever a raging inferno. But they were older now.

The bonfire could stay put. Exactly where it was supposed to.

She swallowed hard and put her hand on his chest.

She watched his jaw firm. To anyone else, it only looked like they were dancing still. But she could tell that he felt the shift.

“Fia...”

“Landry,” she said. “Look at me.”

He did. His blue gaze hot and hooded. Filled with their own flame.

“My twenty-nine-year-old self thinks maybe we should try to approach this differently,” she whispered.

“My thirty-year-old self is wondering what you mean by that?” he asked huskily.

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