KEIRA SPREAD GRANDMA’S fabric swatches out on the dining room table and helped herself to Grandma’s sewing machine, too. As the afternoon wore on, she started sewing together her favorite swatches, following the instructions Grandma June had given her so long ago now that it felt as if the knowledge was in her fingers. A part of her.
And she knew that the more pieces she put together, the closer she was to the sort of quilt that lay on the master bed upstairs, in the room Keira had barely touched. The room that still smelled like her grandmother’s face cream and the bath salts she nestled in with what she’d called her unmentionables.
Keira didn’t hear the truck pull up outside. Or the footsteps on the porch that Remy had fixed, good as new, weeks ago now, so no one would ever know her father had gone straight through it.
But when she glanced up and found Remy standing there before her, she only smiled.
And hoped he couldn’t see the way her heart leaped inside her chest.
“I hear you had some things to say to my mother,” Remy said with no preamble, his beautiful face stern and his mouth an unsmiling line.
Keira kept her hands flat on the swatches of fabric before her, as if they could give her strength. As if they were Grandma June, holding on to her.
She kept her gaze steady on the big man standing there in her grandmother’s sweetly fussy dining room, looking out of place and absolutely perfect all at once. “I was hoping you wouldn’t hear about that.”
“You know my brothers. Especially Browning. He’s the biggest gossip I ever met.”
“If you’re going to be a hermit, Remy, you really ought to be one.” Keira made a tsking sound. “That means no gossip sessions with your brothers.”
“I’m trying to understand why you would rush to my defense like that.”
Keira felt something shudder through her. Because obviously, Remy wasn’t going to let her wave this away as something lighthearted. Or joke her way out of it.
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t come to your defense?” she asked lightly, because that was safer, surely, than any conversation they tried to have about real things. Raw things.
“What made you think I need defending?” Remy asked.
Keira let her palm brush over the swatch directly in front of her. Fred’s old winter coat, the note on the back read. His favorite, despite the holes.
It felt like her grandparents’ entire relationship in one note, pinned to the back of an old scrap from a long-ago discarded wool coat.
“I take full responsibility,” Keira said, which was as close as she planned to get to an apology—because she wasn’t sorry. “I could have simply nodded my head, walked on and continued minding my own business.”
“What I want to know is why.”
There was something in his voice, then. Some edge that made her think of the way he drove into her when he was braced above her, when everything between them was tense and taut.
And much more raw and real than they ever talked about afterward.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I think you do.”
Remy’s voice was mesmerizing. Keira wanted to sink into it. He took his hat off his head and ran his fingers through his hair, but he didn’t put down his hat. He held it to him, like his Stetson was a shield. Or a bouquet of flowers. He was a cowboy through and through, so really, it was both.
“I understand if this isn’t what you signed up for, Keira. But I think it’s time to clarify a few things.”
She had half a mind to run upstairs and barricade herself in one of the bedrooms, the way she’d done when she was little and hadn’t wanted to go home with her parents. Anything to keep him from saying the serious things she could see he wanted to say.
Anything to keep him from ending this.
Because as it turned out, she still wasn’t ready, no matter what she’d told herself in town the other day.
But it was as if the house heard her, because the bedroom door upstairs slammed shut.
Okay, Grandma June, she said fiercely inside her head. You want me to have this conversation? Then I will.
She pushed herself up to her feet and met his gaze. She hadn’t done that much the last time they’d broken up.
“I’m not sure clarification has ever led me anywhere I wanted to go,” she said softly when she was facing him. “Not with you.”
“Tough.” Remy belted the word out.
She blinked at that, but he didn’t take it back.
Instead, he looked at her. Really looked at her, until she wished she’d done something with her hair after her shower, or had bothered to wear something other than her favorite old jeans. He looked at her like he was trying to memorize her. He made her feel...so many things at once she didn’t think she could process them all. Or even name them.
It was all a single great and mighty storm, wild and intense.
It was all Remy.
He let out a breath, but she felt it like a blow. “The thing is, Keira, I can’t stop loving you. I don’t know how.”
He sounded rough. Raw.
As if he was confessing something terrible.
And the look on his face was so intense, so beautiful, it made her eyes fill with tears.
She had never seen this man—this big, tough cowboy, who had always been like a mountain to her, made of granite and certainty even when she’d been that silly, needy girl his mother hadn’t liked very much—vulnerable before. She’d seen him mad. She’d understood that he was hurt, that she’d hurt him.
But she’d never seen him look at her as if his heart was right there, wide-open and on his face.
And Keira wasn’t sure she had ever felt more humbled.
“The truth is, it kills me that you left me,” he told her. “I’m not over it. I’m never going to be over it.”
“Remy—” she began.
But he wasn’t finished. “And I know you will again. You’re going to leave me the same way you did five years ago. I keep telling myself it’s fine. That I handled it once and I will again. But I’ll be honest with you, Keira. It’s going to kill me. All over again.”
She shook where she stood, aware on some level that her tears were making tracks down her cheeks. And that she couldn’t seem to speak, or move, or even breathe very well.
“I wanted to be your husband,” Remy said. “In my whole life, I’ve never wanted anyone else. And it kills me that I’m just some guy you knew. Just your old boyfriend. Just—”
But Keira was moving then, rounding the table where so much of her family’s past was laid out like a patchwork of memories, not fabric. And it was as if she could see, suddenly, every little swatch that made up her life with Remy.
That shy, first smile she’d sent him without looking away.
Their first kiss.
The way she’d looped her hands around his neck one afternoon as he’d slowly, haltingly taught her how to dance because he’d learned so she could dance with him at her senior prom.
The night she’d driven down from Eugene through the snow just to feel his arms around her. And the exquisite joy when she finally did.
A hundred memories and sensations that altogether added up to him. To Remy.
To this.
Them.
Then she was before him, reaching out to him, because how could she do anything but put her hands on him?
“No, Remy,” she managed to say. “No. You’re not ‘some guy.’ You’re the only guy.”
“You were away for five years,” he ground out, looking down at her. “I accept reality. I want you to know that. I might feel however I feel about it, but I’m never going to mention it again.”
She understood then that he would forgive her anything. That he already had. She felt light-headed.
“Remy...”
But he was pulling her closer to him, his eyes dark with emotion. With this storm that was only and ever theirs.
“I want what I’ve always wanted,” he said, his voice like gravel. “You, Keira. I only want you.”
He reached into the inside of his hat and pulled out something. She knew what it was before it gleamed in the afternoon light. She knew exactly what it was before he held it there in the palm of his hand.
The last time he’d offered her this ring, with the pretty solitaire that seemed to catch the sun and hold it, he’d done it on one knee.
“I want you to marry me,” he said. “That hasn’t changed. It’s not going to change. I’m not going to fight with you if you need to leave. But I’ll be here when you come back. I can wait. I will.”
She could barely see. She wiped at her eyes, and then she surged up on her toes to hold his hard, square jaw in her hands.
“Listen to me,” she said. “There has only ever been you.”
His gaze darkened, but she kept going.
“I broke up with you because I was terrified that if I didn’t, I would end up like my mother. You get offended when I say that, but I’m not comparing you to my father. I didn’t know how to make sure I wouldn’t disappear like my mother does whenever he’s around.”
He started to say something, but Keira shook her head.
“I thought I would go out there and do all the things my father refused to let my mother do. And I did. I got a degree. And a great job. I had a whole life, and it was fine. But it wasn’t this. It wasn’t us.”
“I told you, I accept that you had to do that. I understand. I do.”
“And that makes me love you even more,” she whispered fiercely. “But there’s nothing to accept but the years. And I can’t regret them. Because I needed to figure out how to stand on my own two feet before I could stand here in front of you and say this. Say it and really, truly mean it, the way I couldn’t when I was still so scared of what-ifs.”
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Remy told her. “I didn’t want to hear that I had anything to do with our breakup, but I know I did. You were right. I wanted it my way. I thought I’d waited long enough. I should have thought more about what you needed, and less about how it made me feel.”
Every time she thought she already loved him too much, he made her love him more. Something in her told her that he always would. That this was what a lifetime with Remy would be like. Loving him more, letting it deepen and finding new ways to love him even more than that.
Keira was up to the challenge.
“This is what I need to say,” she told him. “I love you. I’ve never loved anyone else. I’ve never touched anyone else. I didn’t leave you because I wanted experiences with other men. I left you because I wanted to be the kind of woman who could stand tall on her own.” She pulled in a breath. “Like your mother.”
“My mother?” He sounded stunned. “The one you yelled at in the street?”
“Your mother is tough as nails,” Keira said. “She’s your father’s partner in everything. Everyone knows she can ride any horse alive, drink any man under the table and, in her spare time, run a ranch and raise five boys. I wanted so desperately for her to like me when I was younger, but why would she? I was one more burden for you to carry. Of course she wanted better for her son.”
Remy blinked. “I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about my mother that way.”
“I love you, Remy,” Keira told him. “And I didn’t understand until now that I spent every moment of those five years away learning how to be not the seventeen-year-old girl who meant well, but a grown woman who can be your partner. Grandma June wanted you and me to work this land together. She didn’t want her granddaughter flailing around, crying and not knowing what she felt about anything. I thought she encouraged me to go because she knew this place was wrong for me. But now I think she knew I had to go because when I came back, it would be to stay.”
She reached down to his other hand, the one he’d closed around the ring, and opened it.
She had the rest of her life to show him all the ways she’d trained to become his partner, never realizing that was what she’d been doing. The business courses she’d taken in college. The experience she’d had in her corporate job, learning how to sell, how to negotiate. All things that would serve her well on a ranch.
With a coffee truck on the side—because everyone needed a hobby away from the cows.
And together she and Remy would figure out how to be husband and wife, year after year, until they were finishing each other’s sentences and doddering around in wool coats with holes in them.
“I love you,” she said again. “I’ve always loved you and I always will. And I can’t think of anything I’d rather be than your wife.”
She went to pick up the ring, but Remy took it from her and sank down on his knees before her the way he had once before.
“Keira,” he said, his voice a rumble and his eyes a great storm. “Princess. I love you. Marry me this time. Stay with me forever.”
“Remy,” she whispered, “it would be my very great honor to do both of those things.”
And she couldn’t help the sob that escaped her as he took her hand and finally slid that ring where it belonged.
Some people had to fight for their forever. And she and Remy would never forget those long, lonely years apart. But as the love of her life pulled her into his arms Keira caught a dizzy flash of color out of the corner of her eye.
“Look,” she whispered.
Outside, the dogwood tree had finally burst into a riot of pink blossoms, so bright and happy that it made Keira tear up.
Spring’s blessings came in blustery, hard and sometimes painful, but after the storm came the sunshine. The marvelous green.
Because everything bloomed in its time.
“Beautiful,” Remy said, his mouth at Keira’s ear. “But not as beautiful as you.”
And Keira was sure she could hear Grandma June laughing in delight as Remy spun her around and around in the farmhouse’s front rooms, dancing to the music they’d made across all these years.
Dancing for their future. Dancing for their past.
Dancing and dancing, the way he’d taught her long ago, because they’d finally found their way back home.