Page 25 of Willow Embers
She stares at me. Tears spill down her cheeks, but she doesn’t try to hide them or wipe them away. She’s letting me see her pain, and it’s a dagger straight to my heart.
Nixie gives her head a little shake. “It would be so much easier to hate you right now.”
“I know.”
She closes her eyes for a beat, and when she opens them, it’s like my whole world expands around her.
The tentative hope.
The vulnerability.
It says so much more than words.
“Give me another chance, Nixie. I swear, I will never let you down again.”
Her gaze searches mine. “How would that even work? We have completely different lives.”
“We’ll make it work. You can move here, or I can move to the city. Or I heard of a job opening in Storm Canyon near Denver, somewhere that’s completely new to both of us. I really don’t care about the where… I justwantyou and to bewithyou.”
“Beauden,” she whispers my name, fresh tears spilling down her flushed cheeks. She tips her face to the sky, and for one gut-wrenching second, I’m sure she’s going to say no.
But then she looks at me with fire in her eyes and takes that last step, closing the distance between us.
“One chance,” is all she says.
Excitement explodes in my chest, and I can’t stop myself. I cradle her face in my hands, and just before I kiss her, I say the words I’ve been dying to say to her for years, “I never stopped loving you, Nixie.”
The kiss is nothing like the one in the cabin. It’s still raw, still aching, but there’s nothing frantic about it. No clashing teeth. No biting lips. Just understanding.
Behind us, the guys on my crew start hollering and honking their horns like the menaces they are.
Nixie pulls back with a watery laugh, then buries her face in my chest. “I love you too.”
EPILOGUE
NIXIE
One Year Later
I twist my engagement ring around my finger, staring blankly at my computer screen. My brain doesn’t care about work right now. All it cares about is that it’s been two weeks since I’ve seen Beauden, and today is the day he’s coming home.
At first, I thought his firefighting deployments would be these long stretches where I wouldn’t hear from him at all, and I braced for the radio silence despite his promise that he would call every chance he got.
I wanted to believe him, but that flicker of doubt still lived inside me.
Then he called every day of his first deployment after we got back together. And he called every day of the next one. And the next. Until the doubt finally fell silent and my heart was certain that every time he walked out the door, he would come back to me.
A year ago, I never thought I would call Black Timber Peak home again. Now? I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
When I hear Tiberius barking at the front door, a familiar flutter flares to life low in my belly because I know what that excited bark means.
I shove away from my desk and run down the hall. The hardwood is cool against my bare feet, and when I see Beauden coming through the front door, my heart clenches in my chest.
How can this man still have this effect on me after a year together?
“Hey,” he says, and his warm smile is a balm to my soul.
Tiberius is on him before I can respond, bouncing around him like he’s still a puppy as Beauden sets his bags down. Like always, he crouches to say hello, nuzzling Tiberius’s head and scratching behind his ears. We’ve learned that if he doesn’t greet Tiberius first, that little mongrel won’t give us an inch of space. So, I wait, smiling like a love-sick fool at the way Beauden is with him.
