Page 18 of Rugged Mountain Man

She smiled. “A slice of my apple pie?”

I shook my head. Nothing in the world was better than my wife’s apple pie. Her customers might argue with me on that—they seemed to love her bear claws and apple fritters more than anything—but apple pie was my favorite, and my wife knew it.

“No way are you baking tonight. I’m thinking about a basket of wings from the ski lodge.”

She frowned, then brightened. “Oh yeah, it’s still open.”

They were starting to attract tourists year round. Not as many as they hoped, but it was growing. A couple more years from now, Seduction Summit would be the year-round vacation destination they’d planned for it to be when they started doing all this development.

But for now, we’d enjoy that we could stop by and grab some to-go wings and take them back to our new home without a long wait time. Once home, we’d eat them at our kitchen table and talk about our future. The one where we had two highchairs at the table and two cribs in the nursery.

This was my life. I never would have imagined it a couple of years ago, but I also never would have imagined a woman like Willow existed. She was straight out of my dreams. And this was one dream I’d never wake up from.

It was hard to imagine there had been a time when I’d preferred being alone. But now I knew I just hadn’t met that person who got me. The one I connected with.

“If it hadn’t been for the baking competition, we never would have met,” I said as we exited our cabin for the final time.

“I know,” she said. “Well, I like to think I would have ended up staying here anyway, and we would have met somehow.”

“At the bar, probably,” I said. “I would have bought you a drink and tried to get you back to my place.”

“And I would have told you I don’t do one-night stands. But you probably would have talked me into going back to your place.”

“And I never would have let you leave,” I said.

And that was exactly what had happened. Well, of course, I would have let her leave if she wanted to. But she’d chosen to stay.

As we climbed into our SUV—the one we’d bought to accommodate our growing family—I gave my cabin one last look. So many good memories, but they’d all started the day she walked into my life.

And now that she was here, I realized home wasn’t a building. My home was wherever she was. My home was with Willow.