Page 17 of Reluctant Bride

“Nobody knows about the fondue, Finn. That’s the problem with the fondue.”

“Chocolate fondue can get very sensual. As long as you let it cool a beat first.” He waggles his eyebrows. “You’ll thank me later.”

“Get out of my kitchen.”

He grins like he’s won something and wanders off to bother Tate, who has no patience for him and says so within thirty seconds. I let it happen. A week ago I would’ve cleared this house of everyone but the people I strictly needed here. That version of me is losing ground fast to whatever this is, a house filling up with people who love us enough to show up uninvited and rearrange my kitchen without asking permission.

I step outside for air and end up at the fence line myself, close enough to watch one of Erin’s newer hires walk the perimeter with Cruz. Methodical. Professional. The way a security detail should move.

I watch Cruz longer than I watch the other man. I don’t have proof. I have a scared man’s confession under duress and a data entry error Sage sat on for three weeks, and neither one is enough to say a name out loud twice, not with what Knox promised me would happen if I did.

He checks the gate latch. Notes the tree line like a man notes an exit. Some old animal part of my brain records it without my permission, storing every ordinary motion away for the day it stops looking ordinary.

He catches me watching. Doesn’t flinch. Gives me the same untroubled nod he’s probably given a hundred Blackwaters over twenty-two years and keeps walking the fence like a man with nothing to hide.

Which is either exactly what he is, or precisely what a professional would look like if he weren’t.

I go back inside before he can read anything else off my face.

There’s a mule standing beside my truck.

I notice him on my third trip out to the driveway for boxes, a grey, sway-backed, entirely too self-satisfied mule standing in the shade of my truck bed like he pays rent here.

“Whose is this?”

“Felony,” Rae says, going in with an armful of Sage’s things. “He’s Blackwater’s. Escape artist. Opens gates with his lips.”

“How’d he get here? This is Sullivan land.”

“No idea. He does this.” She says it like weather, unremarkable, permanent. “He’ll wander off eventually.”

He does not wander off. I try walking him back toward the fence myself and he plants all four feet, looks at me with an expression I can only describe as personally offended, and when I give up and walk away, I hear his hooves following at a distance, patient, unwilling to leave no matter how many times I ask.

“He’s decided you’re his now,” Sage says from the porch, arms full of a box marked FRAGILE in handwriting that isn’t hers. Dust on her jeans, hair coming loose from wherever she pinned it this morning, and she looks more like she belongs to this chaos than I do.

The sight of her catches me under the sternum before I can stop it.

She stood on this same porch eight years ago, twenty and barefoot, sneaking out past both our families to meet me here because it was the one patch of ground neither side watched close enough. I kissed her for the first time on that top step, her hands fisted in my shirt, her mouth soft and certain in a way nothing else in my life has ever been since.

Felony chooses that exact moment to headbutt my shoulder, unimpressed with how long I’ve been standing still, and it’s enough of a jolt that I almost thank him for it.

I’ve walked past that step a hundred times in the years since and made myself not look at it. I look at it now. She’s standing three feet from where it happened, holding a box like she has no idea what it took to walk back onto this porch.

It hurts worse than anything Cruz or Robbie or my father has managed all week, and it doesn’t even have the decency to look like an injury. A bullet I could work with. A bullet has an exit wound and a story you can tell people. This just sits in me, permanent, quiet, the one wound in my life I never got to close because closing it would’ve meant admitting I let her go.

“I didn’t apply for a mule.”

“Nobody applies for Felony. He just shows up and refuses to leave, like a subpoena with hooves.” She sets the box down on the step, catching her breath, and doesn’t ask for help, which I respect and hate in roughly equal measure. “Congratulations. You’re adopted.”

“I already have a dog problem.” Cricket, compact and thoroughly unbothered by her own size, has appointed herself supervisor of the whole move-in and already bitten one mover for getting too close to the porch steps.

“Cricket isn’t a problem. Cricket has excellent judgment.”

“Cricket growled at me for an hour straight this morning.”

“Like I said.”

I close the distance to take the box from her hands whether she wants help or not, and for one second before she lets go, both of us are holding the same weight, close enough that I catch dust and sunscreen and, underneath both, the warm note that’s just her, and she doesn’t step back either.