Page 29 of Reluctant Bride

Wouldn’t you like to know.

That’s not a no.

It’s not a yes either. Get back to work, Sullivan. Some of us have legislative calls to make.

I unlock the door and sit back down, and there’s one more message waiting.

I started this, so I don’t get to complain, but I have a legislative call at one and I need my brain back for at least an hour. Behave.

I have never once behaved in my life. Ask anyone.

I’ve heard the rumors. I’m choosing to test them myself.

I don’t answer that. There’s no answer that doesn’t end with me driving home five hours early, and I have a company to run and a fence line to worry about and a wife who apparently intends to make both of those things nearly impossible for the rest of the day.

She’s in the kitchen when I walk in, barefoot, dark hair loose around her shoulders she never bothers taming at the end of a day, wearing one of my old Sullivan Transport shirts like she stole it out of a drawer on principle, and I have to stop in the doorway and let the sight of her sink in before I trust myself to say anything at all.

“That’s mine,” I say.

“Was yours.” She doesn’t look up from the pan on the stove. “Marriage is a community property state, Sullivan. I checked.”

“You checked Montana law for a t-shirt.”

“I checked Montana law for several things. The shirt’s just the one I’m currently wearing.”

I cross the kitchen and don’t touch her, which is harder than anything I did at the office today. She feels it anyway, she always could, and her shoulders go still before she turns the burner off and faces me.

“Long day,” she says.

“You have no idea.”

“I have some idea. I was there for the science conversation.”

“You started the science conversation.”

“I finish what I start.” She tips her chin up, and there’s nothing careful left in her face at all, none of the armor from the kitchen table negotiation, none of the county commissioner voice from Nell’s. Just her, barefoot in my shirt, looking at me like she’s already decided how tonight ends and is simply waiting for me to catch up. “Eat something first. You’re no good to me if you pass out.”

“I’m not going to pass out.”

“You forgot lunch.”

“I forgot lunch because my wife sent me a research methodology joke right before noon.”

“That tracks.”

We eat. I couldn’t tell you what. I watch her mouth more than my plate, and she catches me twice and doesn’t call me on it either time, which is an answer.

She finds the ink before I find the words for any of it.

I step out of the shower with a towel slung low at my waist, and she’s standing in the bathroom doorway when I do it, and her eyes go straight to my arms like they did on the porch after my run, except this time she doesn’t look away and pretend otherwise.

“Both arms,” she says.

“Yeah.”

She crosses the room and takes my left wrist first, turning it under the light, tracing without quite touching the mountains inked dark along my forearm, the river bending toward my elbow, a horse mid-stride over the muscle. Her fingers barely graze skin and it still runs like a current down my spine, sharp enough that I lock my jaw. Not yet. I am not going to be the man who ruins this by moving too fast in a towel. “This one I remember. You started this the year after.”

“The year after you left.” I let her keep my wrist. “I wanted something permanent that was mine. Something nobody could talk me out of or blackmail out of me.”