Page 35 of Reluctant Bride

My stomach drops before he even finishes the sentence.

“Mackenzie messaged me. Four times, back to back, right after you fell asleep.” He watches my face for the exact moment it lands. “You put your hand on my wrist and gave me five minutes. I took them. Then I called her from the hallway so it wouldn’t wake you.”

“You still haven’t told me what it said.”

“The location tag from the recovered backup. The fragment that survived. She confirmed it points somewhere on Sullivan land.”

“You’ve had this since last night?”

“I have.”

“And you waited until coffee to tell me?”

“I did.” He doesn’t dress that up as anything other than what it is. “I wanted one morning where the first thing either of us said to the other wasn’t about a body count.”

I set my mug down harder than I mean to. The old reflex is there, the one that’s kept me alive in every room my father’s ever put me in, reaching automatically for the anger. It comes up empty. Underneath it is a quieter part of me that believes him, and that’s worse.

“Where?” I ask instead. “Specifically.”

“She doesn’t know yet. The tag’s corrupted past that point. Just that it’s older than anything currently active. Older than the boundary house. Older than most of what my father’s built in the last twenty years.”

Older. The word sits strange in me, heavier than it should for two syllables.

“You should have told me last night.”

“Maybe.” He doesn’t apologize for it, which somehow makes the honesty feel harder than an apology would have. “I’d do it the same way again.”

I drink my coffee instead of answering, and for once the silence between us doesn’t feel like a standoff. It feels like morning, gold light across the counter, Cricket asleep in a patch of sun by the door, a man in sweatpants watching me like I’m the only thing on his schedule today.

“Don’t,” I say, before either of us can turn this into more softness than I’m ready for.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make me believe you want the mornings too. I can survive the nights. I don’t know what I do with the mornings.”

He doesn’t answer that. We hold each other’s eyes too long, a raw current moving behind his, and I’m saved from whatever he was about to say by three sharp knocks at the front door, brisk and cheerful in a way that immediately sets every nerve in my body on alert.

Dawson’s whole posture changes, shoulders squaring, all that morning warmth burning off him like fog.

“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters, already moving for the door. “It’s barely seven.”

Through the front window I catch a flash of blond hair and a blazer too crisp for a Friday, a manila envelope tucked against one hip, and a smile already arranged and waiting before either of us has crossed the room to open the door.

Ashley Rourke Pruitt stands on our porch like she’s been invited, envelope in hand, smile perfectly in place.

“Morning,” she says, bright and untroubled, like she hasn’t just driven twenty minutes past the last gate that should have stopped her. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. Mind if I come in?”

TWELVE

DAWSON

Ashley Rourke Pruitt looks at my bare chest a second longer than a married woman has any business looking, and I decide right there that whatever she wants, she’s not getting it easy.

I didn’t grab a shirt. That’s on me. I heard the knock, saw blond hair through the window glass, and figured a Friday morning visitor could survive a man in sweatpants. I didn’t account for her eyes dragging from my shoulder to my stomach and stop somewhere south of my navel like she’s pricing a used truck.

“Morning,” she says, bright, like she hasn’t just done that. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“You are.” I don’t move to let her in. “It’s seven in the morning.”