Page 2 of Reluctant Bride

Dawson is already in it.

Of course he is.

He’s leaning against the saddle rack with his tie loosened and his jacket over one shoulder like he’s been waiting for me and only me, which he has not, because he’d never admit to something like that out loud. He just arranges the world until you walk into the room he’s already standing in.

“Somebody’s aunt is looking for her dance partner,” I say.

“I danced with three of them already. I’m off duty.”

“Off duty men don’t usually look like they’re guarding something.”

“Feels like the only honest room at this wedding.”

I should leave. I have ninety seconds, tops, before someone notices I’m gone and comes looking, and every one of those seconds I spend in this room is a second I’ll have to explain later, to myself if no one else. But my feet don’t move, and neither does the air between us, thick with hay dust and old leather and the stillness of two people who used to know what to do with a room like this.

“Fourteen months,” he says. Not a greeting. A verdict. “You could’ve just called.”

“You could’ve just not.”

“Not what?”

“Not turned my family’s cattle contracts into a hostage negotiation because I did my job.”

“You buried my road, Sage. Publicly. With a smile.”

“I did my job publicly, with a smile, because that’s how you do it right. You’re the one who decided the correct response to losing a hearing was scorched earth.”

“I responded to a declaration of war with a tariff. That’s restraint, by Sullivan standards.”

“God, you say that like it’s a compliment.”

“It’s information.” He tips his head, and the lantern light catches the line of his jaw, and I hate, genuinely hate, that my body still runs the same old calculation it ran when I was twenty: dangerous, gorgeous, mine, not mine, never again. “You’ve spent two years perfecting the art of not looking at me. It’s very impressive. Frankly it’s the most consistent thing you’ve done since the hearing.”

“I don’t look at you because there’s nothing left to see.”

“Liar.”

He says it soft, almost bored, like he’s reading a contract, and it lands harder than if he’d shouted it.

I take a step forward before I decide to, close enough that I can smell cedar and clean cotton and something under it that is just him, unchanged, infuriating in its familiarity. He doesn’t move. He watches me come like weather he’s already decided not to run from.

“You want to try that again,” I say, “with your hands where I can see them?”

“My hands are where I want them, Sage. They’re not touching you. Notice the restraint.”

“Don’t confuse cowardice for restraint.”

His jaw tightens, just once, there and gone. He straightens off the saddle rack, and now there’s maybe a foot between us. My pulse picks up a rhythm it hasn’t used in eight years and doesn’t ask my permission to use it now.

“I’m not the one who walked away from the tent three times tonight looking for somewhere to hide,” he says.

“I’m not hiding. I’m strategically regrouping.”

“In here. With me. Again.”

I glance around the tack room, at the one place on this entire ranch where I could’ve gone to be alone, and land, apparently, where he already was. “This is going poorly.”

For one full second, neither of us says anything, and the silence tells the truth the arguing couldn’t. My body remembers this man in ways my brain refuses to admit. It remembers the exact height of him, the exact weight of his attention.