Page 9 of Mountain Man's Honeysuckle Darling
I’d built a whole life around careful distance. I’d constructed a plan around it—a year abroad, a fresh start, a version of expanding my world that didn’t require me to risk anything that actually mattered. It had taken four days in a Charlotte apartment and one phone call from Sunnie to understand what that really was.
“You told me that stand had been there longer than the cabin,” I said. “You never told me how you knew.”
His expression shifted—barely, the way it always did. “Been running this river a long time.”
“I deferred the position.” I kept my voice steady. “The year abroad. I called them last Friday.”
He held my gaze. “Why?”
“Because I kept thinking about a man who told me honeysuckle grew where it was happy.” I looked at the stand climbing the bank beside me and then back at him. “And I couldn’t figure out how to be happy somewhere else.”
He paddled to the bank without a word. Stepped out into the shallows, pulled the canoe up, and came up the slope and stopped in front of me. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from my face, his thumb settling at my temple.
I went still the way I always went still when he touched me.
“I go by the Alderman cabin every evening,” he said. “The deck’s been empty.”
“I know.” My throat tightened in a way that had nothing to do with sadness.
A raw honesty flickered in his eyes, and for a second, he was unguarded in a way I’d never seen from him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
I put my hand flat against his chest. His heart was steady under my palm.
“I’m going to be here a while,” I said. “If that’s all right.”
He looked at me for a long moment—dark eyes and that quiet stillness, the man who never wasted a word or a movement—and then both his arms came around me and he pulled me in.
“Yeah,” he said against my hair. “That’s all right.”
The river moved past us, steady and quiet. The honeysuckle was everywhere. I turned my face into his chest and held on and didn’t think about Charlotte or Italy. I thought about this bend inthe river, this man, and the scent of honeysuckle on the evening air.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I’d known it longer than I wanted to admit.
EPILOGUE
SURI: 5 YEARS LATER
The baby monitor was quiet.
I’d checked it twice in the last twenty minutes out of habit, not worry—Clover slept like her father, deep and immediate and completely committed to it, and Remy had been out since 7:30 without a sound.
Two kids under four, and neither of them had given us a single bad night in months. I didn’t say that out loud because I wasn’t taking any chances.
Kyron was on the wicker sofa with a beer, legs stretched out, looking at the river. I was in the chair beside the porch railing with a glass of wine I’d barely touched. The evening had gone soft and warm, the kind of July night that never fully cooled, and the honeysuckle on the railing beside me was giving off that thick, sweet scent that had become the smell of home to me.
I’d planted it the first spring. He’d said it would take over if I let it.
I’d said, “Good.”
It had taken over the entire south side of the railing and was making a serious run at the steps, and I loved it unreasonably.He pretended to be annoyed by it, but I knew he wasn’t. I knew him well.
This was the life. Not the one I’d planned—the year abroad, the fresh start, the careful expansion of a careful life. The one I’d found instead, or the one that had found me, standing on a riverbank with my hand in the honeysuckle while a gruff, tattooed logistics man told me it had been there longer than the cabin had.
We’d gone to Europe together. Italy in the fall of that first year, the two of us, three weeks that Cade and Bishop had covered for without complaint and which Ross had complained about loudly enough for everyone. We’d eaten well and slept better and gotten lost twice in Florence and agreed it was beautiful. We’d gone back the following summer—Portugal, then Scotland, then a long rainy week in the French countryside that I’d loved and Kyron had tolerated with the patient good nature he brought to everything that wasn’t his idea.
Every time, somewhere in the second or third day, one of us said it. “Not quite like home, is it?” And the other agreed.
