“That’s sweet. Really sweet.” Olivia was quiet a moment, picturing Gabe and Samson camping in the back of the truck under a star-studded sky. “So, this explains you asking me to take a picture of your license plate. And you having an ax and rope and a self-inflating life vest in the back of your truck. I thought maybe you’d been an Eagle Scout or something.”

Gabe chuckled. “I was in the Scouts but didn’t make it that far. But you know what they say…once a firefighter, always a firefighter.”

Olivia wasn’t convinced it was her place to bring it up again now that the conversation had taken a turn, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Your, uh, fiancée leaving… I’m sure that was hard.”

He brought the truck to a stop by a narrow strip of woods off to his left between two newly planted fields and scanned the trees. “It’s a deer. See it? Behind the cedar, a hundred feet in.”

Olivia leaned over the center console and followed the direction he was pointing. On the second sweep, she spotted a fleck of white that turned out to be the underside of a swishing tail. “Oh. There she is. She’s pretty. Want to stick around here a few minutes and see if the pointer shows up? Maybe he’ll catch her scent and come to investigate.”

Gabe made a face that seemed to say it was worth a shot. He pulled to the side of the empty road but left the ignition running, for which Olivia was thankful. Without the heat blowing on her, her shivering would certainly return full force.

She was beginning to think he wasn’t going to respond to her comment about his ex-fiancée when he spoke. “Her leaving was hard. At the time at least. I have to admit I’m pretty sure we’d have been among the fifty percent of marriages that wind up in divorce a number of years down the road. Probably not even very many years. So, I guess it all worked out in the end.”

His answer only made her want to know more. “Do you say that because you two were too different…or too much the same?” It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she’d walked away from a guy and an engagement, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it until she knew his answer.

Gabe fell quiet and studied her for several seconds. Olivia let her gaze travel from those remarkable eyes to a pair of equally remarkable lips, and her heart pounded like a bass drum in her chest. When he wasn’t smiling, she could just barely make out the dip in his cheek from his dimple.