“Have you seen my daughter?” Mrs. Greenley looked better than I had seen her in years. I used to notice her walking down the street sometimes, but less and less as time went on. She had always looked frail, shaky. Like she might break if the wind blew too hard. I would chalk it up to her working so hard for so long. It never occurred to me that she was just unhappy. When I saw her there, in the gym, she had a smile on her face, color in her cheeks. I had seen her laughing with a few of the ladies at one of the tables. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her laugh before.

“No, I haven’t. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.” I looked toward the doors just in time to see her walk in. “See? There she is.”

When she stepped through the door, it was like everything got a little brighter. I felt that familiar tightening in my pants when I saw the way her long hair curled over her shoulders. She unbuttoned her coat, and I caught a look at the cream-colored dress underneath. She stood out from everybody else without even trying.

Our eyes met from across the room, with dozens of dancing people between us. She smiled at me the way people do when they know each other very well, soul-deep, and they feel relief at being together again. I knew that feeling.

She waved me outside, so I excused myself from my spot behind one of the food tables and walked around the outer edge of the room to get to her. I was surprised when she stepped outside, since it could only have gotten colder since I got there.

It was freezing. It was supposed to snow overnight, and the thought of cleaning off the truck and opening up the diner in a half-frozen tundra the next morning didn’t appeal. When I was the owner, would it be different? Probably not. I would always love being there in the middle of it all, opening the place up, saying good morning to the customers. And I was sort of a workaholic, too.

“It smells like snow, doesn’t it? They say we could get a foot, maybe more.” I noticed the way she wrapped her arms around herself. “We could always go inside, where everybody else is.”

“I wanted to talk with you first, even if I’m afraid I might freeze to death.” She laughed a little, and her breath clouded the air around us.

“What about?”

“About us. You know it’s about us. We haven’t done any talking about what any of this really means, have we? Me having the house now, you having the diner. Me not having a job.” She laughed a little.

“That’s a lot. You’re sure you wanna talk it out now?” I jerked my head in the direction of the door. “When we could be having fun?”

“I just need to know. It’ll be on my mind all night.”

So she wasn’t about to let up. “You know how serious I am about you.”

“But you left me hanging for so long. And you still haven’t told me why. If I’m going to build a life here, I need to know you’re not just going to change your mind one day.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her jaw. “I couldn’t go through that again.”

I leaned against the wall with a sigh. Good thing the cold rarely bothered me. “I was a kid. I was scared. I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground in those days.”

“None of us did,” she reminded me. “We were all just kids.”

“You were never a kid,” I chuckled. “You were always grown up. You always knew what you wanted.”

“What I thought I wanted.”

“There was nothing wrong with wanting more than what you grew up with. I just didn’t want what I had already seen.”

“What didn’t you want?” she asked. She stood next to me, then leaned her head on my shoulder.

“I didn’t want to get left. Love ends, somebody leaves. That’s how it went in my house.”

“What do you mean?”

I blew out a long, deep breath before continuing. “There were a lot of things I didn’t tell you about my life back then. You were going through enough. I didn’t want to weigh you down with the shit my parents put me through. I can’t blame my mom, of course. She didn’t want to get sick. But Dad? Yeah. I blame him.”

“I thought his company transferred him to Philadelphia.”

I shook my head. “Did you really believe that?”

She stood up straight and stared at me. “That’s what you told me.”

“He did go to Philadelphia, but it wasn’t for his job. He left us. Mom, really, but I got included in that.”

“He left? Like…left for good?”

I nodded. “A real Prince, right? Just when she needed him the most. Not to mention me.”

Her hand rested on my shoulder. “Sweetheart, there’s nothing wrong with being hurt because your father was a jerk. What kind of cold person do you have to be to leave your sick wife?”

“The kind of jerk who doesn’t want to be the husband of a sick woman anymore. You remember him. He was good looking, he was still young—they were only eighteen, nineteen years old when I was born. So he was a little younger than I am now when he left Mom. He had the rest of his life ahead of him, and he wanted a healthy woman.”

“You’ve done some thinking about this.”

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, haven’t I?” I laughed a little. “It’s not easy. Something I had to do a long time ago was put myself in his shoes.”

“I had to do the same thing with my mom—put myself in her shoes, I mean.”

I nodded. “But that wasn’t until maybe ten years after he left, you know? When I was seventeen, eighteen years old, it was a lot more raw. No matter how many times I thought it over, how many directions I looked at it from, one thing kept coming back. Love doesn’t last. It always ends. Somebody gets left.”

I leaned the back of my head against the wall. I had never spoken the words before. It was like opening a trunk that had never been opened and listening to the hinges squeak. “And you always wanted more. You were smart; you had everything going for you. And you had worked damn hard for your scholarship. You were gonna go out into the world and meet new people and see this bigger existence. Know what I mean? There was no chance that you would still want me after that.”

“You didn’t know that, though.”

“As an adult, I get that, but I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. I was scared, and I didn’t want to admit that, either.”

“You should have talked to me.” She wasn’t angry. She was sad. I heard it in her voice, I felt it in the way she rested her head on my chest. “I would’ve told you how wrong you were.”

“You couldn’t have known before you went to school how you were gonna feel when you were in school.” I wrapped my arms around her. It felt almost too good to have her that close. “I didn’t want to take the chance. It was easier to go through losing you on my terms. That was what I told myself.”

“It wasn’t easy for me. I didn’t want to lose you. I loved you so much.”

“I loved you.”

“I still love you.” Her voice trembled a little when she said it, and I felt her relax in my arms when it was out there.

I stroked her hair and pressed my lips against the top of her head. “I still love you, too. I’ve always loved you. You’re the only thing in my life that’s ever completely made sense. No matter where I’ve gone or what I’ve done, you’ve always been there. Twenty years can’t erase that kind of love.”

She sniffled. “Don’t make me cry. My tears will freeze up. It’s too cold out here for this.”

“I would say we should go inside, but I think I’m frozen to the wall.” We laughed together the way we had been doing since we were little.

Jake came out for a cigarette and saw us standing there in each other’s arms. “Get a room, you two.”

“I think we’ll go inside first,” she smirked. “Then, we’ll see the way the night goes.”

* * *

I woke up the next morning at my usual time, only I had a woman in bed with me. The only woman I wanted in my bed, ever.

She was curled up on her side, the way she always slept. I was behind her with an arm around her waist. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I realized it wasn’t as dark as it normally was at that time of morning. There was more light coming through the windows thanks to the snow reflecting the light from the streetlamps. It was almost torture leaving her. It was so much warmer under the blankets.

My first look out the window told me there was nearly a foot of snow on the ground, just like the weather people had predicted. It was still coming down, too, and the wind blew what had already fallen. There would be a lot of people out there who didn’t have a choice but to go into work, like the police and the plow drivers. They would need something hot to eat and drink. Then again, I could keep my own people safe by telling them to spend the day at home, or at least the morning. Once the roads were clear, we could talk about opening.

“What will you do?” Amanda’s voice was thick with sleep. I turned from my place by the window to look back at her. She pushed herself up on one elbow and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I whispered.

“I know. But you did. So what will you do?”

“I think I’ll call my people and tell them to stay home for a while.”

“You? The slave driver?”

I smirked at her as I picked up my phone. “Yeah. Me. The slave driver.” I got Debbie on the phone and asked her to call up the others. My woman was waiting for me in bed when I slid back between the sheets.

“Have you turned over a new leaf?” she asked as I rolled her onto her back. She opened her thighs to invite me. Like I would turn down an invitation like that. I settled over her and slid my arms under her shoulders.

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s somebody I’d rather boss around and force to fulfill my every deviant whim.” My mouth skimmed her throat and chest. I felt the vibrations of her soft groans.

“Wow. That sounds pretty specific.” She wrapped her legs around my hips and held me close to her warm, soft body. It fit so perfectly with mine. The heat between her legs called to me. I couldn’t think of anything but being inside her. That was the funny thing about all the blood leaving my brain and going south.

She lifted her hips to tease me a little more while I ran my tongue over her chest and down to her tits. Her pink nipples tightened in my mouth—first one, then the other. I moved back and forth, looking up at her to see the way she closed her eyes and gasped through her open mouth. Her hips started rolling in circles under me, which only made my cock harder. Her legs slid up and down my ass and thighs, closing tighter and tighter. She was dripping by the time I reached her pussy. I lapped at her swollen lips and listened to her moans and whimpers and knew I would pleasure her all day if I could. I could spend the rest of my life tasting her spicy sweetness and watching as she got closer and closer to exploding. A flush spread over her chest and face and her body tensed. I sucked her clit a little harder and flicked my tongue across the tip, which was all it took to make her thighs tighten like a vice around my head while she screamed my name. There was nothing like hearing her scream my name like that.

“How was that?” I muttered as I unrolled a condom and spread her legs again. Her eyes were closed, and her hair was a crazy mess. Her chest was rising and falling hard and fast as I positioned myself at her entrance—she was still quivering down there.

“How do you think?” she whispered, then moaned as I slid home. We made slow, sweet love as the snow swirled around outside the windows.