Page 35 of Kidnapped By the Mountain Man Bodyguard
"Anything. Something true about what comes next."
He was quiet for a moment, his thumb moving slow across my shoulder. "I came back to the cabin two weeks ago to check on the property," he said. "Stood on the porch and looked at thevalley and the whole place felt different than it ever had before. Fuller. Like something had moved in that wasn't going to move out."
I lifted my head and looked at him.
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me," I told him.
"I have my moments."
"You really do." I settled back against him and laced my fingers through his and looked out at the dark beyond our windows, the city lights coming up gold through the trees. "I'm going to tell two million people you said that, you know."
"I know," he said. He looked like a man who had made his choice and was at peace with every consequence of it.
Lumberjack snored once, loud and authoritative, from his position across our laps.
"The best things in life cannot be planned," I said, to no one in particular. To the apartment. To the fortune slip on the bathroom door. To Rafe and the dog and the dark and the whole improbable, unplanned, entirely mine life I was living inside of.
"No," Rafe said. "They really can't."
He kissed me again, slow and certain, with a hundred-and-ten-pound Bernese Mountain Dog across our laps and the wind outside the windows and my whole life waiting for me in the morning.
I didn't need to document a single second of it.
I was already exactly where I wanted to be.
