Chapter Eleven
He’d only been there once, in daylight, but Finn had no trouble finding the road into the canyon.
It was easy enough to follow it up, and up, winding away from Cowboy Point.
When they got to the same viewpoint where Dallas had seen his lighthouse, Kitty sighed a little from her place in the passenger seat.
Finn slowed so they could both look out over Cowboy Point at night. There were only a few lights on at this hour, but it was enough. It looked like some of the multitude of stars above them were falling to earth, and he felt that sense of rightness expand inside of him.
Like this really was the place he’d been looking for all his life.
And like it had taken losing the home he’d thought he had in Colorado to end up here, where he should have been all along.
Something he figured he’d explain to the woman who was the catalyst for this feeling before long.
He kept driving. And it should have been harrowing to follow such a winding, unmarked dirt road in the dark, but it wasn’t. It felt almost like a dream. Kitty was sitting beside him in his truck. There was country music on the radio, just mournful enough to suit the hour and the quiet.
And it was late. So late that he was pretty sure they’d get to see the sun rise before too long.
But the sky was so clear and the stars were so bright that it wasn’t as dark as it could have been when he drove to the end of that dirt road, up in that pretty canyon, and the headlights of his truck swept over the overgrown fields and the ramshackle farmhouse that had inspired him to say what he’d said to Kitty in the restaurant earlier.
Beside him, he heard Kitty let out a breath.
“This is your farm,” she said softly.
“That’s the thing,” he told her. He pulled up in front of the farmhouse again and turned the truck off, letting the quiet in.
“It’s not my farm. I’ve been spending months and months trying to find the right land to claim as mine, but nothing came together until I realized that I don’t want land. Not for me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked quietly.
And she’d told him she loved him. Something that hadn’t been easy for her—he’d seen that all over her as she’d stood there half in and half out of the bedroom. She’d shared herself with him in ways he’d imagined she might do years down the road, if ever.
Finn felt that he needed to meet her there.
He opened the door and swung out into the wee hour summer dark all around them. Then he went around the back of the truck and arranged a few things, leaving the tailgate down. Only then did he go around to Kitty’s side of the truck to pull her out.
And when he did, he held her against his body until he could see the heat in her eyes. He didn’t want to set her down on her own feet, but he did. Reluctantly.
Then he took her by the hand and led her around to the tailgate where he picked her up again and settled her there.
“I can walk,” she said, though she was missing her frown and her voice was a lot quieter than usual. A lot like she found all of this as hushed and holy as he did.
“You can,” he agreed. “But why should you?”
She looked flustered and he liked that. Maybe too much. Because as usual, just looking at her—even in the dark—set his whole body humming.
Her hair was up in that messy bun that she loved so much. She hadn’t changed out of her adorable pajamas, but she had thrown a big flannel shirt on top and had stuck her feet into a pair of clunky, deeply efficient sandals that could likely be used to climb mountains, herd cattle, and ford streams.
The contrast between the cuteness and the pragmatism made him want to get his mouth on her. All over her, the way it always did. Because he didn’t understand how any one woman could be that practical and that pretty all at once.
Or taste the way she did. Like sugar no matter how much she frowned at him.
He swung himself up and sat next to her on the tailgate. Then he swung his legs a little bit as they both looked out into the sweet stretch of darkness.
Kitty didn’t say anything. That was fine with Finn, because he knew it was his turn.
“When I met Jimmy Grant in Colorado, I saw my whole life laid out in front of me,” he found himself telling her.
“I learned everything there was to know about running that ranch, because I wanted to run it the way he did. Just the way he did, and I did that for years. I would have stayed there forever, don’t get me wrong.
I never had the slightest intention of leaving.
I probably wouldn’t have, if his sons hadn’t forced me out before his body was cold. ”
He didn’t like that memory any better than he ever had, but he found that telling her about it made it hurt a little less.
“Just as an aside,” Kitty whispered fiercely, “I hate them.”
That made it even better. Not that it was a cure—some things couldn’t be fixed, only carried—but it made it bearable, somehow. Finn had the sense that the more he shared with her, the better it all would be.
Because if both of them carried it, whatever it was, it couldn’t help but get lighter.
He felt her hand sneak across the tiny space between them and curl over his. And it was such a tiny thing, he thought. Just a touch of a hand out here in the mountains where no one could see them, no one was near, and no one would know.
But Finn knew that she loved him.
And to him, it felt like the world.
“I’ve had half a year to wander around different plots of ranch land, looking for something that felt the way it did when I was eighteen,” he told her, letting the weight and warmth of her hand steady him as he talked about this thing he hadn’t wanted to talk about.
Not with anyone else. “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to find it, because it’s taken me too long to realize that the thing that mattered when I was eighteen was that a good man who didn’t know me from a can of paint took me in and treated me like I was family.
” He flipped his hand so he could hold hers.
“I can’t tell you what that meant to me, back then, as a kid with a father who’d never wanted anything to do with him, to meet a man who acted like I was his son from the start. ”
He shook his head, because he hadn’t said something like that out loud. Not in a long time. Not since Jimmy had died. Beside him, Kitty made a low sort of noise that sounded to him like encouragement.
So he kept going. “And it wasn’t until you came barreling into me right there on the main road that I began to understand what it was that I was missing,” he told her. “It’s not only the land that I love. It’s not the ranching, or all the fences that need fixing, as you like to put it.”
“I’m sure it’s more involved,” she murmured, but fell silent when he turned to look at her directly.
“It’s about family, Kitty. I couldn’t find anything that works for me, because I knew that I wasn’t looking for anyone but myself and that’s just not enough to make it to the winters, and the terrible seasons, in a thousand ways that anything that depends on weather and luck can break you.
” He searched her face, softer in the dark but no less distinct to him.
“If you’re not building something that can last, that can feed the people you love and matter to those who come after you, then what are you doing? ”
He pulled her closer then, but it wasn’t close enough. So he dealt with that by picking her up and pulling her over him until she was kneeling astride him. And she settled into place, gazing down at him with those hazel eyes gleaming.
And Finn thought the dark didn’t matter at all, because he would be perfectly able to see her if he was blindfolded.
She was the same beacon of light she’d always been.
She had caught his attention six months ago simply by stepping out of the kitchen and into the light behind the counter in her restaurant, and that hadn’t changed.
If anything, she’d only gotten brighter the better he got to know her.
He figured by the time they were old and rickety—and he intended to get old and rickety right here beside her—she’d outshine the sun.
“I don’t know what the hell love is,” he told her in a fierce whisper, pressing a kiss to her forehead, her cheek. “You don’t either. How would we?”
She smiled, and then he felt her hands move to stroke their way along his jaw. “I can’t help thinking that at least one of us should. For safety reasons, if nothing else.”
“We’re going to be just fine,” he told her, and he was aware that his words came out sounding a whole lot more like vows.
Far above them, the summer stars stood as witness, bright in the sky yet not nearly as luminous as Kitty was.
“We can work together to make this whatever we want it to be. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, it only matters that we make sure it’s what we want.
Exactly how we want. Are you ready for that? ”
He kissed her once, then again, and held her close. “Because I have to tell you, Kitty, I can’t think of anything I’d like to do more than build a whole life. With you.”
“I won’t pretend it doesn’t scare me,” she whispered, pulling back just enough, then. “But I want that too, Finn. I want everything. And I don’t care if we don’t have a plan.” She swallowed after she said that, but kept going. “Maybe this is the one thing we can figure out as it goes along.”
“It’s okay if you have a plan, Kitty,” Finn said, grinning there against her mouth. “I just want to be a part of it. A critical part of it.”
“I don’t think that I can imagine any plan worth making that didn’t have you in the middle of it,” she told him, solemnly, but then she smiled.
“I love you,” he told her, gruffly, and watched her smile get even wider. “And I don’t intend to stop.”
“That works for me,” she said, and her eyes were damp. And the way she kissed him tasted salty and sweet. “Because I’m going to figure out how to love you better than anyone’s ever been loved before. Just wait.”
“We can call it a competition,” Finn said, his hands moving beneath that flannel shirt and under her pajama top to find the smooth line of her back. “Eighty years from now, let’s see who won.”
“Deal,” Kitty said, melting into his arms.
They conducted their first experiment on happy ever after right there, in the bed of his truck.
When they were breathless and limp from all that joy, lying next to each other on the blanket he’d spread out to hold them, Finn held her close and they watched the stars up above them bleed gently into a new dawn.
And when the sun came up over the hills at last, it danced all over the little farm’s overgrown fields and made the farmhouse look like a Montana jewel that needed only a little bit of polishing.
“Beautiful,” Kitty whispered, cuddled there at his side.
And Finn could tell by the way that Kitty let her eyes go watery and her smile go big, that somehow, despite everything, they’d found their way home.