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Bring a jacket. It’s colder out at the site than in town ?

Why the hell had I typed this last part? Because she would always steal your jacket , Thorne piped up. This way, you won't feel obligated to let her do so again. Just a precaution .

For the first time, he and I finally agreed on something concerning the feminine part of the world's population.

Still, the way I had just typed those words bothered me more than I was willing to admit.

Just like I wasn't willing to admit that I missed Ella.

Had been missing her for the last ten years.

Even though I was the one who pushed her away, I had loved her.

She was my mate. I knew when I ended things between us that I would never have a family, but I wanted that for her.

We had talked about it, dreamed about it.

Before… before the damn accident that took everything.

My dream of a football career and Ella. I was supposed to make big money, like my brother Gabe, right out of the gate.

Colleges had been recruiting me, offering scholarships and money, enough of it to buy a house, marry Ella, and start a family.

But that dream ended for me with a broken neck.

I suppose I should have been grateful that I didn't die that day, but it was hard to be grateful for something that ended your life in a different way.

Suddenly, I was looking at months and months of painful rehabilitation instead of my happily ever after.

This wasn't what Ella had signed up for when she said yes after I popped the question, holding out my mom's wedding ring.

I ended things before she could. Before she had a chance to realize what it really meant to bind herself to a cripple.

Of course, Ella hadn’t agreed with that assessment. I love you, Pats, no matter what , she’d cried. I’m sure she meant it; she just didn’t know what she was saying. How could she? She wasn’t the broken one.

At that time, I hadn't known if I would be wheelchair bound for the rest of my life or if, best-case scenario, according to my therapists, I might one day use crutches. Two years later, I needed neither, but that's probably only thanks to my bear shifter genes.

You're welcome , Thorne piped up, ever the thorn in my side. But it wasn’t just genes.

It took two years and hard work to get there.

It took pain, dedication, and suffering.

None of which I would have wanted Ella to see.

It was bad enough that Carol refused to leave my side.

For her, though, it was easier; my broken body didn’t represent her broken dreams. Even then, she could work from wherever she wanted.

She started writing stupid love stories on those short story apps and was making good money by our junior year of high school.

She’d planned to pursue an English degree after graduation, but she was already making a hundred grand a year by then.

So instead of college, she just kept plugging away at her keyboard, moving up from pay-by-chapter to full-blown books and making more money than she knew what to do with.

I never asked about Ella. Never looked her up.

And Carol, realizing I wasn't ever going to be in the mood to talk about my ex-fiancée, never mentioned her again either.

It was easier for me to assume Ella had moved on, that I had done the right thing by freeing her.

I told myself she went to college, met her future husband, and started the family we had dreamed of.

I'm not going to lie, once I was on my feet again—no pun intended—I was tempted to look her up.

To call her. But I didn't. It was one of the few times Thorne and I agreed about Ella.

Let her live her life. She's probably happy , he said, and I believed him because I wanted to.

Because I had created this fantasy life for her in my mind, and I wasn't going to mess it up for her.

She was different than me. She wasn't a shifter.

She didn't mate for life. She was a regular human, and humans had the capability to move on.

Besides, I was sure that if something bad had happened to Ella, Carol would have told me.

I still didn't know if Ella was married with a family or not.

I didn't see a ring on her finger, and yes, I looked.

I knew that didn't mean she wasn't, but my gut was telling me she was as alone as I was.

Why else would Carol have tried to set us up again?

Carol wasn't cruel like that. As mad as I was at her right now, deep down I knew that she only had my best interests at heart, just like I did for her.

It was ironic that, as a romance writer, she hadn't found any romance herself, but whenever I brought that subject up, she waved me off.

As much as she liked to pry into my life, I wasn't allowed in her romantasies.

I gathered my courage one time and asked her, filled with trepidation, if she had feelings for me, and that was why she wouldn't find a steady boyfriend.

I was relieved when she laughed in my face and told me no, that I was like a little brother to her, nothing else.

She did, however, have a faraway look in her eyes, like she was in love with someone she couldn't have, but I figured I had already spent all my goodwill for the day and didn't dig any deeper.

My curiosity won out, and I typed Ella's name into the Google search engine. I’d been to her restaurant, so I wasn't all that surprised to see several mentions of her.

I picked the most recent, a write-up in Forbes Food , of all places, and stared at the screen, scrolling through the article with a hand half-curled into a fist on the desk.

Front and center: Ella Lambert, the woman behind Salt & Flame .

She’d gone to ICE in New York. Not the flashiest culinary school, but the kind of place that produced real chefs—the ones who could handle a 14-hour shift on their feet, break down a whole animal, and still plate risotto that made grown critics cry.

She started out working under some hotshot celebrity chef in Brooklyn, then moved upstate to open Salt & Flame in our hometown, helping it grow. Pride for her settled in my chest.

Her original menu had been pure fine dining.

Tasting menus. Smoke domes. Foams. Caviar on things that didn’t need caviar.

Critics ate it up, but locals, not so much.

She was close to losing the restaurant when she turned her focus and simplified the menu.

Instead of lobster and caviar, she leaned into seasonal comfort food.

Venison stew with roasted wild onions. Cast iron mac and cheese with three cheeses and a crust of herbed breadcrumbs.

Local trout with brown butter. Stuff people at home would actually eat—and still talk about for weeks.

She also owned another restaurant, this one in the city, Ash & Velvet .

Thorne piped up, The food there was really good . It was. Good enough to make me want to offer her the opportunity to open a third location here. I still wanted that. Despite knowing who I was inviting back into my life. Or maybe because of it?

Well, keep sitting here thinking, and the decision will be taken from you.

If my memory serves, Sparkles hates it when you're late , Thorne reminded me.

Only he and I knew the nickname he'd given her, and only I knew that Thorne had a soft spot for her despite his grouchiness.

Which he had just proven, again. Had he not reminded me, I would have been late.

As it was, I was Ella-Late, a nickname I had given her obsession with punctuality. In her world, anybody who wasn't ten minutes early was late.

"Patrick," she greeted me, standing in front of the restaurant shell. It kind of hurt, hearing her call me by my full name. Just as much as seeing her standing there did, like a time warp had sucked me in and spat me out ten years ago. She was still breathtakingly beautiful.

"Ella," I moved to embrace her, but she stepped to the side.

"Business, remember?"

"We've known each other for over fourteen years, I think a hug would be even business appropriate," I replied.

She arched an eyebrow in the way only she could, a way that made Thorne recoil inside me. I was sure that was the real reason he pretended not to like her: he was afraid of her.

She raised a hand, "I’d rather not."

Yeah, that hurt. I forced a smile to my lips and moved to unlock the door. "Well, come on in, then, and tell me what you think."