Epilogue
ZARA
SIX MONTHS LATER
The flannel shirt doesn't smell like cedar anymore. It smells like both of us.
I'm wearing it in the kitchen of our cabin because somewhere around month three I stopped calling it his cabin and he stopped pretending he wanted me to.
My coffee mug sits next to his on the counter.
My running shoes are by the door next to his hiking boots.
My nursing license renewal paperwork is stacked on the kitchen table next to his survey maps and a half finished sketch of a great horned owl he spotted last Tuesday.
Our lives have tangled together like the roots of mountain trees, slowly and then all at once, until pulling them apart would damage both systems beyond repair.
"You're going to be late," Ronan says from the bedroom doorway, and I look up from my coffee to find him leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and that look on his face.
The one that started as a ghost smile in the Ember Lounge and has evolved into something full and warm and aimed exclusively at me.
"I'm the head nurse. I can't be late. I set the schedule."
"You set the schedule and then ignore it. Sage texted you twenty minutes ago asking where you are."
He's right. The Bean & Bloom Saturday morning breakfast has become a fixture in my life that I didn't know I needed until I had it.
Sage and Luna and Venus and Nadia crowd into the corner booth and drink too much coffee and talk about everything from men to medicine to the particular challenges of being Black women building lives in a mountain town that didn't expect us but has no idea what it would do without us.
Nadia is the one who gets it most. Not just the military thing, though she understands that too in the way that anyone who's loved a soldier does.
She gets the part about showing up in a new place and falling for a Ridge brother and wondering if you've lost your mind or finally found it.
We compared notes over whiskey at The Velvet Antler two months ago and by the end of the night we were laughing so hard that Callum and Ronan exchanged the specific look of men who know they're being discussed and have wisely decided not to ask.
"Tell Sage I'll be there in fifteen." I take one more sip. "And tell your brother to stop teaching you how to manage me. Callum's technique doesn't work on Montgomery women."
"Callum's technique doesn't work on anyone. That's what makes it entertaining."
He crosses the kitchen and kisses me. Not a quick morning peck.
A real kiss, slow and thorough, his hand sliding under the flannel to rest against my bare hip.
Six months in and the chemistry between us hasn't dimmed by a single degree.
If anything it's sharper now because every touch is layered with history.
With the memory of how we started and the knowledge of what we've built since.
"I have something for you," he says against my mouth. "But it can wait until tonight."
"You can't say that to me and expect me to function for the next twelve hours."
"I can. And I do." He pulls back and the look in his eyes is pure dominant calm. Patient. Controlled. Devastating. "Think of it as an exercise in anticipation."
"Think of it as an exercise in me plotting your demise over pancakes."
He smiles. The real one. And six months in, I still haven't gotten used to the way that smile transforms his face from serious and guarded into something so open it makes my chest ache.
I leave for breakfast and the drive into town takes me past the ridge road where I pulled over and cried in my rental car the morning I found out his real name.
I don't flinch when I pass it anymore. I don't even slow down.
But I remember. I think it's important to remember the moment you almost walked away from the best thing that ever happened to you, because it keeps you honest about what it cost to stay.
Sage has already ordered my latte when I slide into the booth.
Luna is reading something on her phone that's making her smirk in a way that suggests her secret pen name has gotten another five star review.
Venus is braiding Nadia's hair while Nadia argues with Callum via text about something that is either deeply serious or completely ridiculous, and with those two it could go either way.
"Late again," Sage says, sliding my mug across the table. "Let me guess. The mountain man distracted you."
"The mountain man made me coffee and kissed me and told me he has a surprise for tonight and then told me to think of the waiting as an exercise in anticipation."
Venus whistles low. "Dominant energy before breakfast. That man doesn't take a day off."
"Ridge men don't have an off switch," Nadia says without looking up from her phone. "They have a low setting and a you're in trouble setting and absolutely nothing in between."
Luna flips her phone face down. "Speaking of trouble. The romance I'm writing has a mountain man hero who's loosely, very loosely, inspired by a certain furniture maker."
"Jabari is going to kill you," Sage says cheerfully.
"Jabari will never know because he doesn't read romance. And if he finds out, I'll blame Venus."
"I accept this responsibility," Venus says, tying off Nadia's braid.
This is my life now. Saturday breakfasts with women who became family.
A job at the Crimson Hollow medical clinic that lets me use every skill the Army gave me without the parts that broke me.
A cabin on a mountain with a man who draws my face in his sketchbook and binds my wrists with red rope and tells me I'm extraordinary with the same certainty he uses for watershed data.
It's not what I planned. None of it is what I planned. Six months ago I was a woman who downloaded a questionable app and drove to a sex club to meet a stranger because I was tired of being in control and didn't know how to put the weight down any other way.
I found a different stranger instead. One who lied about his name and told the truth about everything else.
One who sat in a snowstorm drawing my sleeping face because he couldn't get me out of his head.
One who said everyone has limits even the ones they haven't found yet and then spent six months helping me find mine.
Not just in the bedroom, though God knows we've explored that thoroughly.
In life. In trust. In the particular art of letting someone love you without requiring them to prove every single day that they won't leave.
He still proves it anyway. That's just who he is.
I drive home as the sun drops behind the mountains and the sky turns that shade of amber that makes Crimson Hollow look like it's lit from the inside. When I pull up to the cabin, Ronan's truck is in the driveway and smoke is rising from the chimney and the porch light is on.
He's waiting inside. The cabin smells like the mushroom risotto from the Ember Lounge.
He made it from scratch because three months ago he charmed the recipe out of the Club Crimson kitchen staff and has been perfecting it ever since.
The table is set for two with candles and a bottle of Iron Vine Estate red.
"You made risotto," I say from the doorway.
"You once told me you'd hold me personally responsible if it was bad."
"That was the first night."
"I remember everything about the first night."
On the table next to my plate is a small box. Not a ring box. Longer. I open it and inside is a silver key on a chain. Simple and elegant, and the weight of it in my palm sends a shiver through me that has nothing to do with temperature.
"It's for the new playroom," he says. "Flynn designed it. Declan built the framing. It's in the basement. Finished it this afternoon."
I look up at him. This man who built me a room of my own in our home.
A space designed for the part of us that most people will never see and don't need to.
A space where I can kneel and surrender and say yes Sir and know that the man holding the rope earned every inch of my trust through patience and honesty and the daily, unglamorous work of being present.
"Take me downstairs," I say.
"Eat your risotto first."
"Ronan."
"Zara." His voice drops into that register.
The one that still makes my spine liquid after six months.
"We have all night. And I've spent three months on that recipe.
You're going to sit down and eat it and tell me it's good and then I'm going to take you downstairs and make you forget how to speak. "
I sit. I eat the risotto. It's incredible.
And then he takes me downstairs.
And I forget how to speak.
And much later, wrapped in his arms on the new bed he built with his own hands in the room he made for us, I think about the woman who pulled over on the ridge road and cried because she thought she'd been deceived.
She was right. She was deceived.
But the man who deceived her spent every day after earning the right to be the one she trusts most in the world.
And the woman who almost drove away in a snowstorm is lying in a cabin on a mountain wearing a silver key and a flannel shirt that smells like both of them, and she has never been more whole.
Not whole because of him. Whole because she chose to stay.
And he made damn sure she never regretted it.
Ronan and Zara continue on to have such an emotional HEA, and I bet you’d love a sneak peek. Don’t worry I’ve got you. Simply Click Here for your exclusive bonus epilogue.
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