Releasing a breath she held almost a year, she fell into his arms, knocking the hat clear off his head. A rainbow of flowers scattered at her feet. She buried her face in cottony softness and nestled her head in the hollow beneath his chin. After a long, lonely winter dreaming about him, she could feel him, warm and solid in her arms. She closed her eyes and breathed his scent—recognizable but changed, infused now with fresh mountain air and pinesap.

He was just Jonas—just one man alone in the world, and she knew with absolute certainty, suspenders or no, she loved him. “How did you find me?”

“I came to Colorado and looked.”

His voice rumbled in his chest, vibrating her cheek. He looked? A breathy laugh whooshed from her lungs, ricocheting off her ribs as she snuggled closer. “But how? Where?”

He tucked a finger under her chin and tilted up her face.

She’d almost forgotten how tall he was, and she’d never seen him with the perfect dusting of scruff. Her stomach pulled. She wanted to kiss every inch of it.

“Tessa Rose, I knew you’d be in the Rockies. Did you think I’d forget?”

So, he just came to Colorado, asked around, and somehow found her? Presumably without the assistance of a cellular phone? Impossible. Her pulse thudded faster than the timer ticking on the kitchen counter. “But Colorado is a really big state.”

“I didn’t want to cash your check, but I had to if I wanted to find you. Since September, I’ve worked my way from county to county. Mostly carpentry and odd jobs. I was even a cowboy for a week or two.” He inclined his head toward the fallen hat and grinned. “At a newsstand in Aspen yesterday, I finally got lucky.” He slung a duffel from his shoulder, unzipped it, and pulled out a copy of the local paper.

She laughed. “It’s not the Times.”

“No. It’s much better.”

When he smiled, and his eyes crinkled at the corners, and his cheek creased the way it always did, it was so heartbreakingly familiar she thought she might weep. But she didn’t. She flushed a deep, hot flush stored up over a year in his absence, a year without the kind of blush he summoned straight from her hammering heart to every inch of supersensitive skin. She grinned like grinning was going out of style. “You left Green Ridge.”

He nodded. “So did you.”

“And Rebecca? Nora?” She spoke their names with ease. Any animosity she felt for his sister couldn’t survive the high-altitude. That kind of fire needed oxygen. And Rebecca? Her love for the girl was old as the mountains and twice as big. Jonas’s expression didn’t falter. He seemed at peace, too.

“In Ohio. They’re well cared for. I’ll tell you everything later.”

She bounced on her toes, and her bare knees grazed denim. “Tell me now. Tell me everything.”

He shook his head. “Later. I promise. I’m not going anywhere.”