She blinked. Attempted to process that.
“Are you asking—”
Her cell phone rang in her jacket pocket, spearing through her thoughts and interrupting them.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, reaching into her overcoat to retrieve it. “I turned it on after I called a cab and—”
Jared pulled the phone gently from her hands and pressed the button to answer it.
“Heather can’t talk right now. She’s in the middle of the most important moment of my life.” He thumbed the off button along with the power switch, never taking his eyes off her.
“I don’t understand.” She was so confused. She didn’t want to return to the demands of her family early, either, but she couldn’t stay and grow more attached to Jared.
She knew the moment he’d shown her those damn cabins that she had fallen in love with him. Knowing that prohibited her from playing any stupid game of revenge, but it also meant she couldn’t sleep with him on a casual basis.
“I didn’t have a choice about leaving you five years ago. It would have been unfair of me to ask you to wait because we hardly knew each other. I didn’t understand until years afterward how much our time together affected me, but waking up night after night thinking about you finally pounded it into my head.”
A couple walked out of the lodge, laughing and kissing as they wove through the parking lot as one body. Heather envied that happiness even as she began to wonder if Jared’s words meant there was still hope they might one day share that.
“I couldn’t forget you, either,” she confessed, knowing the time had come when keeping score didn’t matter. She owed him the truth about how deeply he affected her. “You’re the reason I’m not getting married today.”
“Thank you.” He cradled her face in his hands, his big body warming hers with his nearness. “I’m so glad you didn’t end up with someone else, because I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t have a second chance with you.”
Her breath caught.
“Marry me, Heather. Move up here and be with me and—Hell, I’m doing this wrong and I’ve had five years to think about it.”
“No!” She put a finger over his lips, an eagerness rising up in her chest in spite of her head’s cry for caution. “I like where this is heading. I—I want to hear more.”
“I want to be with you and I’m willing to go wherever you are. Here. Georgia. The Arctic. A tropical island. I don’t care. I just want to have you in my life because I love you.”
Her heart beat so hard now she couldn’t even hear the dining room carols anymore, her whole world bubbling with new possibilities when she’d been five minutes from leaving Jared forever because she was too caught up in her wounded pride to understand what he really wanted from her this weekend.
“You invited me up here to court me.”
The idea appealed to her every old-fashioned notion of romance.
He grinned.
“I figured we had already successfully conquered the chemistry aspect of a relationship, so I tried my damnedest to show you we could get along out of bed.”
The warmth in her heart bubbled into happy tears that spilled from her eyes.
“Except I kept pulling you back into it.”
“I didn’t exactly fight you off—”
“I love you, Jared.” The sentiment rose up from the depths of her soul, the secret truth that had kept her from loving anyone else. “I didn’t want to acknowledge that because no one falls in love during a one-night stand. Or—in our case—a weekend stand. But I guess I should have realized you meant a lot to me when I was still mad at you for leaving me years after the fact.”
“I’d like to make it up to you.” Jared waved to Mrs. Krause who had returned to the window to look out at them. The older woman brightened up like one of her trees, waving back at triple speed.
“I’d like that, too.” Heather hoped at this point her cab was never coming. She could stay here staring into Jared’s eyes forever. “You mentioned some very intriguing scenarios for the future.”
“You mean the part about living in the Arctic?”
“Uh, snow is nice, but that might be a bit much even for me. I was thinking more about marriage, or did I mishear something?”
Behind them, the inn doors opened and the Krauses spilled out into the courtyard with Roland holding an overcoat over their heads like a tent.
“You didn’t mishear anything.” Jared kissed her long and slow on the lips, a kiss full of promise that made her forget about anything else but enjoying the shivery delight of his tongue stroking over hers.