Page 28 of Reluctant Bride

Still thinking about you putting Bravo into a dead sprint the second we hit the flat trail this morning. Didn’t peg you for a man who needed to outrun his own thoughts.

I set my coffee down before I answer, because my hands aren’t entirely steady and I’d rather not explain a spill to Jennifer on top of everything else.

That was a horse being a horse. Nothing to do with you.

Liar. You’ve been riding that trail for years. You know exactly how to keep him collected.

I lost focus. Occupational hazard, apparently, of being married to a woman who shows a man a photograph of black lace and a piece of jewelry he’s still thinking about the next morning and expects him to sit a horse like a rational human being.

You’re the one who sent the photo and then acted surprised I couldn’t sit still on a horse.

Fair. Consider me thrown.

I put the phone face down on the desk, which lasts four minutes before I turn it back over.

I spend the drive to the yard replaying the fence line instead, because it’s the only thing in my head that isn’t her hands or her voice or the exact way she’d said tonight like she’d already decided it three days ago and was only now getting around to telling me. The splice. Professional. Recent. On Blackwater land, which means whoever’s crossing that fence has clearance on both sides of a war that’s supposed to keep people out, not wave them through.

I send Mackenzie the coordinates and two photos before I let myself think about anything else. Then I send the same to Knox, because it’s his family’s land under that splice, and whatever’s left of our alliance survives on this kind of thing.

Found a recent, professional splice on the Corridor fence, Blackwater side. Clean work. Not storm damage. Coordinates attached.

He leaves me on read for eleven minutes, which from him passes for careful consideration instead of a door slamming. Then, finally, Knox.

Send it to Mackenzie. I’ll walk it myself before dark.

Already did.

I type it back, and it’s true within the hour. Holt has it too, inside ten minutes, because nothing touches Blackwater security without going through him first.

Holt’s answer comes back a minute later. On it. Don’t let Sage near that stretch alone until I’ve walked it.

I don’t bother telling him she’s the one who spotted it. If I find whoever cut that wire before Holt does, there won’t be enough left of them for a federal case, and I’m not sure I’d lose much sleep over that.

Mackenzie answers faster than I expect.

Third crossing point in six months nobody’s flagged. Someone’s mapping this whole property better than we are. Team goes out tomorrow, quiet. Don’t touch it again.

Copy that.

One more thing. Robbie’s backup had a location tag buried in the metadata. Corrupted, mostly. But the fragment that survived points somewhere on your property. Not the boundary house. Older. More by end of week.

Older. That word lodges somewhere I don’t have time to examine today, because my phone buzzes again half a second later and this one isn’t Mackenzie. It’s Sage.

I’m looking at the photo you sent me last night. Studied it again. For science.

Science.

I’m a very thorough researcher.

You should publish.

Working on my methodology. I have questions about measurements. And performance testing.

I have to physically set the phone down and stay behind my desk, because Mick’s four feet away going over a manifest with me and my body has decided, without consulting a single rational part of my brain, that this is the moment to react to a woman twenty miles away. I press my palm flat against the desk edge and think about freight tariffs, about federal audits, about anything that isn’t her flat stomach or the black lace I still haven’t stopped seeing every time I close my eyes.

It doesn’t work. Nothing works. I stay seated until Mick leaves, then I lock the office door and give myself thirty seconds to get my body back under some kind of control, hands braced on the desk, breathing through it like a man twice my age with half my discipline.

Are you wearing it right now, I type, before I can talk myself out of it. The lace.