Page 100 of Forbidden Protector

He watches Knox spin Maren once, twice, both laughing at nothing and at everything. His jaw does the thing his sons' jaws do when something's landed somewhere he doesn't advertise.

"You chose well," he says. Not to me. To the space between Knox and Maren, like the sentence belongs to the whole lawn and not to any one person in it.

Gideon nods once, at nobody, and moves off toward Josephine, who's been standing near the tent line with the contentment of a woman finally getting to watch her family celebrate something, for once, instead of burying or defending it.

"That's the whole apology you're getting out of him," Holt says, quiet, at my ear. "For everything. The bribe, the memo, all of it."

"Was it enough?"

"It's what he's got." He looks at me instead of his father. "I've stopped needing more than that."

The band shifts into something slow around ten, strings and an easy, rolling rhythm. Holt intertwines his fingers through mine before I've decided whether I want to dance in front of half of Pondera County.

"I don't dance," I tell him.

"Neither do I." He's already pulling me onto the temporary dance floor on the lawn, past Knox and Maren, past two Sullivan cousins and their dates doing something that might generously be called a waltz. "We'll figure it out together. Lower the bar considerably."

"That's not romantic, Blackwater."

"Wasn't trying for romantic. Was trying for honest."

His hand settles at my waist, warm through silk, and mine finds his shoulder. For two beats we just stand there doing something that isn't quite dancing and isn't quite standing still either. Then his hips find the rhythm and mine follow and it turns out neither of us needed to figure anything out at all.

He's warm everywhere I touch him. Through the black shirt, steam is coming off him same as always, and I can feel his heartbeat where my palm rests against his chest. His jaw is close to my temple, his mouth even closer, and when he finally speaks, it's pitched so it doesn't carry to anyone else.

"You know what I've been thinking about all night?"

"Kathleen sat you next to a man who talked about hay futures for twenty minutes. I watched you die a little."

"That's not what I've been thinking about."

"Enlighten me."

"This dress." His mouth brushes the shell of my ear, and my whole spine goes electric. "How it's going to look on my bedroom floor in about two hours. How long I'm going to make myself wait before I get you out of it."

"That's presumptuous."

"Is it wrong?"

"No," I admit, and feel him smile against my temple, satisfied, in no hurry at all. "It's not wrong."

"Good." His hand drifts, deliberate, until it's cupping the curve of my ass through silk, and I feel every finger of it, and I feel, unmistakably, what this party has been doing to him, in the hard bulge of his dress pants against my hip. "Because I've had my hands full of that dress in my head since you walked out of the bathroom, and I intend to collect on the real thing the second we're somewhere private."

"You could at least buy me dinner first."

"I sat through an entire dinner at the same table as you, four seats away, and couldn't touch you once. Watched you laugh at somebody else's joke for an hour and had to sit on my own hands about it. That's dinner covered, and I paid for it in suffering."

I laugh, rough and unguarded, right against his collar, and he pulls me in another inch, close enough that there's no pretending the heat between us is anything but exactly what it looks like.

Around us the whole lawn is glowing and golden and full of people who love each other in complicated, damaged, entirely earned ways. For one full song I don't think about McKenna or Voss or Gideon's one sentence or anything at all except the fact that this man's hands are on my body in front of God and half of Rimrock, and I have never once been ashamed of it.

I notice it because I never fully stop noticing things, even in a dress, even three champagnes in.

Gideon crosses to the edge of the tent line and says something quiet to Sage, and she goes, glass still in hand, laughing at something he hasn't finished saying yet. Across the lawn, at almost the same moment, Declan pulls Dawson aside near the drink table, both of them still holding champagne, still smiling for the crowd they're stepping out of.

Neither conversation lasts long. Neither one looks, from thirty feet away, like anything at all.

Sage comes back first. The laugh's still on her face and then it isn't, all at once, like someone reached in and turned off a light behind her eyes while leaving the smile switched on out of pure muscle memory. She finds her champagne glass with both hands like she's forgotten what else to do with them, and her knuckles have gone white around the stem before she notices and loosens her grip.