“Haven’t seen snow here in a long time,” she said, feeling a nostalgic yearning to do just that, to watch it come down in snowflakes the size of dinner plates, watch as it accumulated into twenty-foot drifts, covering everything, making the trees appear as two-hundred-foot-tall ghosts.
And since Cassandra had decided not to come back to work after having her baby, Lily had a job at the salon for as long as she wanted it. Jonathan had given her carte blanche to continue to fix the place up, especially since it wasn’t coming out of his bank account.
Aidan’s arms came around her, warm and sure. “You’re okay?” he asked.
She took one last look at the view that had dogged her memories and dreams for a decade and then turned in the circle of Aidan’s arms to face him. “More than okay. I’m … at peace. Excited for whatever comes next.” Going up on tiptoes, she kissed him softly before pulling back to look at him.
Aidan hadn’t had it easy in the past few months. Jacob was still out there, injured and hopefully recovering, but he’d made no contact with his brothers, which was pretty much killing them. As for the resort, there’d been no magic solution to save it, but none of them had given up that fight. They still had nine months. The toll of that worry was dragging on him, on all of them, but she liked to think that she helped him. “And you, Aidan? You okay?”
He lowered his head and kissed her. Not softly. They were both breathing unevenly when he pulled back and met her gaze. “Depends.”
“On what?” she wanted to know.
“What happens next. With us.”
Her breath caught. “What do you want to happen next?”
“Me? That’s easy. I want to fall asleep with you at night and wake up wrapped up in you in the mornings.” He smiled and lifted a shoulder. “Anything else is just icing, babe. A ring. A white picket fence. Babies. Whatever you want.”
She stared at him. “Whatever I want? You can’t just offer me whatever I want.”
“Of course I can.” His eyes were intense now. Serious, smile gone. “Just name it.”
“There’s really only one thing,” she said.
He waited with characteristic patience.
“I just need you to love me,” she whispered.
“For the rest of my life,” he promised.
Chapter 1
The wind whistled through the high mountain peaks, stirring up a dusting of snow as light as the powdered sugar on the donut that Hudson Kincaid was stuffing into his face as he rode the ski lift.
Breakfast of champions, and in three minutes when he hit the top of Cedar Ridge, he’d have the adrenaline rush to go with it. He only had time for one run before this morning’s board meeting, aka fight with his siblings, and he was going to make it Devil’s Face, the most challenging on the mountain.
Go big or go home, that was the Kincaid way.
Danger, excitement, and adrenaline rushes were par for the course for all of them and Hud, head of Ski Patrol at Cedar Ridge Resort, was no exception. The antics that happened on their Colorado mountain, combined with all he saw as a cop in the off-season … well, it was safe to say that not much surprised him anymore.
Just yesterday, two hormone-driven twenty-year-olds had decided to have sex on one of the ski lifts. Because they were also idiots, they had the safety bar up so that when a gust of wind came along, it swept the poor pantsless girl off the lift, down thirty feet to a—luckily—soft berm of snow. She’d lived, though she’d do so with frostbite in some pretty private places. Her boyfriend, of course, hadn’t fallen, had retained his pants, and had reportedly dumped her in the hospital due to the humiliation.
The story made the news, but sex on a ski lift, stupid as it was, continued to happen at least once a season. And that wasn’t even close to the most dangerous thing to have happened this week. Yesterday he’d caught a shift at the station, covering for a fellow officer who’d been out with the flu. A burglary call had come in. An eighty-year-old man said someone was in his kitchen eating his brand new raspberry tarts. And he’d been right. There’d been someone in his kitchen eating his raspberry tarts—a 350-pound bear, roughly the size of a VW Bug, had been sitting at the guy’s bar calm as you please.
Call him jaded, but Hud usually operated from the place where he was pretty sure nothing could surprise him.
So when he skied off the lift and found a girl sitting just off-center at the top, her skis haphazardly stuck into the snow at her side, he didn’t even blink.
Or at least he assumed she was a girl. Her down jacket was sunshine yellow, her helmet cherry red. She sat with her legs pulled up to her chest, her chin on her knees, her ski boots as neon green as neon green could get, staring contemplatively at the admittedly heart-stopping view in front of her.
Hud stopped a few feet away.
She didn’t budge.
He looked around. Sharp, majestic snow-covered peaks in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista. They were on top of the world.