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“Take it, Ky,” I whispered. “You deserve some peace. Let me give it to you.”

“And what do I give to you, sweet Tenleigh?” he asked on a broken whisper. “What can I possibly give to you?”

I thought about it for a second. “You help me believe.”

“In what?”

“In goodness, in strength.”

In the fact that there are good men out there who are honorable.

He smoothed a piece of hair back out of my face.

“Plus, your ass. You have a really great ass,” I said.

He gave a short laugh that turned into a sigh. “I know.”

I punched him lightly on his shoulder and he grinned, crossing his eyes.

“You’re touched,” I said, using a word mountain folk use to mean “loopy.”

Still grinning, he nuzzled his nose into my neck. “Hmm. I like how your inner hick comes out when you’re annoyed.”

I laughed, not feeling annoyed at all. “Did you know that mountain dialect can be traced back to Elizabethan English?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” he said, running his nose along my jaw.

“Mm-hmm. Appalachia and other places have held on to it because there are so many areas that are so remote—cut off from the rest of society in a lot of ways…like how we add a t to the end of words like twice and across.”

“Ah. So when I go to New York and say, ‘Pull up a cheer and set a spell. You look a mite peaked,’ they’ll think I’m speaking the King’s English?”

I laughed. “No, they’ll think you need a translator, but you do sound sexy when you talk all hillbilly like.”

He made a humming sound and nipped at my jaw. “You like that, huh? Good to know. Because later”—he trailed his lips down my neck—“I reckon I’ll go down yonder.”

I laughed again and pushed him away, as he laughed too. As our laughter faded, Kyland pushed my hair back out of my face tenderly, his gaze filled with something I wasn’t sure how to read, his lips still turned up in a small smile. My eyes moved over his beautiful face, trying to discern what he was feeling.

After a moment, he leaned forward and kissed me lightly. “What are your dreams? Tell me,” he whispered.

To fall in love with someone who stays. To stop wishing so hard it could be you.

“Hmm. To see the ocean. To dance in the surf. To go to dinner at a restaurant. To have more than one pair of shoes. To get one of those store-bought birthday cakes with the perfect pink roses in the corners. To get my mama a good doctor who knows how to heal her. To be a teacher—to inspire kids to love books as much as I do. To live in a house with a yard and a garden and my very own bed.”

He was quiet for a second. Finally, he said very quietly, “You should have all those things and more.”

“What are your dreams, Kyland? Other than leaving here…what things do you hope for?”

He was silent for several beats. “I want to be an engineer. I want to have a refrigerator that’s always stocked with food. I want to do something that matters—that really, truly makes a difference. And I want to be wise enough to recognize that thing when it shows up.”

I smiled, grateful he had shared that part of his heart with me. “I bet you’ll do all those things and even more,” I said, feeling just a tinge of sadness. I wanted him to achieve his dreams, but I wondered if, when he did, I would only be a small memory in his head.

He wove his fingers into my hair and put his mouth on mine again and I melted into his kiss.

We found release in each other’s bodies like we’d done the night before and then we slept, wrapped around each other—the loneliness and the cold left outside the warm cocoon of our blankets.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Tenleigh

I went to Kyland’s bed almost every night of Christmas break. He wouldn’t make love to me despite my often and shameless begging. But we became experts on each other’s bodies nonetheless. We whispered in the dark of night, telling our secrets and revealing our hurts. He told me about his father and his brother and the more he talked, the easier the words seemed to come—the more he smiled and laughed at the memories he shared. He told me about his mama, about the hurt he’d harbored for so long, the confusion and the pain.

“Do you think you’ll look for her?” I asked one Saturday morning as we lazed in his bed. “When you leave, I mean?” Just as it always did, pain speared through my heart at the word leave.

He seemed to consider my question for a few moments. “I’ve thought about it. But what would be the point? She left me. She never came back. Even if for some reason she didn’t know about the mine accident, it doesn’t take those two facts away.”