“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “For running. For assuming the worst. For being so ready to believe this was all manipulation instead of?—”
“Instead of what?”
She turned to look at him, finding his face closer than expected, his eyes reflecting firelight like green flames. “Instead of you choosing me. Actually choosing me, not because your grandfather said to find someone clever, but because?—”
“Because you make every day better just by being in it. Because watching you work is like watching someone conduct a symphony. Because you look at what's damaged and see the potential for restoration, and you helped me see that in myself too.”
“When?” she whispered. “When did you know?”
“There was a morning, maybe three years ago. You were under that horrible woman’s Bentley, and you were humming—off-key, completely absorbed. And suddenly you laughed at something, maybe the solution to whatever problem you’d been chasing. And I stood there thinking—I could listen to that laugh for the rest of my life and never get tired of it.”
Dylan’s heart was attempting escape through her throat. “Aidan?—”
“I’m not asking for promises,” he said quickly. “We’re trapped in a cabin in a blizzard. But Dylan, this ring—it’s not just mine to give. It belongs to the family, to the generations that come after. It gets passed to the last bachelor, and he gives it to his bride, and one day their son will search for someone worthy of it. It’s bigger than just us.”
“That’s a lot of pressure.”
“That’s a lot of history. But history is just people choosing each other, over and over, through everything.” He picked up the ring box, turning it so the silver caught the light. “My grandmother wore this for fifty-six years. Through war and peace, children and grandchildren, loss and joy. She wore it while she planted her moon garden and while she buried her firstborn who died in infancy. She wore it until the day she died, and then Grandda kept it safe for the next love story.”
“And you think we could be that? That kind of love story?”
“I think we already are. We just haven’t admitted it yet.”
The wind chose that moment to scream against the cabin walls, rattling the windows like something trying to get in. Dylan shivered despite the warmth.
“We should try to sleep,” Aidan said, though his eyes suggested sleep was the furthest thing from his mind. “The bunks are small, but with the sleeping bags?—”
“We could share,” Dylan heard herself say. “For warmth. Purely practical.”
His eyes darkened, but his voice remained steady. “Dylan, I don’t think that’s?—”
“I trust you,” she said simply. “And I’m freezing, and those bunks are narrow, and I don’t want to be alone tonight while the mountain tries to blow us off its face.”
They made a nest of sleeping bags and blankets on one bunk, fully clothed in their dried base layers, curled together like quotation marks around an unspoken truth. Aidan’s arm around her waist was careful, respectful, but she could feel the tension in his body, the effort it took to hold still.
“Dylan,” he said into the darkness, his breath warm against her neck.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know we need to wait. I know you’re an honorable man. I know when we take that step, you want it to be right. I just—I needed to be close to you. Is that okay?”
His arm tightened around her, pulling her back against his chest. “It’s more than okay. It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”
“I’m not?—”
“You are to me.” He pressed a kiss to her hair, chaste but somehow more intimate than anything else they’d shared. “Sleep. Tomorrow we’ll deal with the town and my mother and all the assumptions. Tonight, just let me hold you.”
Dylan closed her eyes, feeling his heartbeat against her back, strong and steady as the mountain itself. Outside, the storm raged like the end of the world, but inside their small shelter, she felt safer than she had in thirteen years.
“The ring,” she said sleepily. “We found it.”
“We did.”
“What happens now?”
“Now we become the next chapter in its story. If you’ll have me. If you’re ready to stop running.”
“I already have,” she murmured, drowsing toward dreams. “Stopped running, I mean. I stopped the moment you said the ring was about choosing each other through the storms.”
Sleep took her gently, while Aidan lay awake holding her, marveling at the way she fit against him like she’d been designed for this exact space. The ring sat in its box on the small table, patient as it had been for centuries, waiting for the next part of its story to unfold.
