He just stood there. Gave her a small smile. “And smart. You figured out how to survive until we could find you.”

For a second, the memory flickered in his eyes, and she saw it from his vantage point. A girl with a broken sled, surrounded by her dogs, trying to keep warm in the dead of night in front of a meager fire, thirty miles from the nearest town, the temperatures dropping fast.

“I still can’t believe I spotted your fire,” he said. “My dad said it was a miracle, and maybe it was, but we found you, Echo. And we’ll find Peyton too.” He kept his voice quiet, stayed where he was by the stove.

And shoot, now she desperately wanted him to cross the room and put his arms around her. The firelight lit his face. His dark whiskers had deepened with the hour, and his thermals outlined the body he’d cultivated in the military—corded shoulders, muscled arms, a core that bespoke a warrior, with the scars to prove it.

“I can’t bear to think of you wounded, in Walter Reed, all alone.”

His mouth pinched. “I should have written to you.”

So many should haves. “I thought of you almost every night. I’d look at the stars and wonder where you were.”

“And I’d look at the stars and think of you on that balcony overlooking the river.” His mouth tightened. “Although sometimes I wondered if Colt was there with you.”

Right. “You know he left for the military a couple months after you did. And Ranger too.”

He nodded. “Ranger is a SEAL. He served in Afghanistan, and I saw him once, in my first deployment. Larke wrote to me and told me that Colt was in Delta Force, but that was a few years ago. I don’t know where he is now.”

“I hate it.”

“What?”

“The fact that I exploded your family. That there is still a gaping wound because of me.”

He shook his head. “It’s not because of you. It just ripped open over you, but Colt and I had been . . . well, let’s just say that Ranger had his work cut out for him keeping us from killing each other.”

She did have a vivid memory of Ranger getting between them at the bonfire, emerging with his own bloody nose. “Why? What happened between you two?”

Dodge raised a shoulder. “Dunno.” He knelt and grabbed a log, used a hot pad to open the stove, and shoved the log in. Sparks escaped and he shut the door. “When we were kids, we were all close. But then my mom died, and I guess . . .” He stood and slapped the debris from his hands. “Colt didn’t handle it the way I wanted him to, I think. He got moody and reckless and started living sloppy.”

“Sloppy?”