Page 39 of Reluctant Bride

“Married in.”

“Lucky guy.”

“He’d agree with you.” I tear him two raffle tickets and take his ten dollars, and if I were feeling generous, I’d tell him to enjoy the drive and mean it. I am feeling several things right now. Generous isn’t one of them, because I can feel Dawson’s attention land on us from thirty feet away like weather moving in off the Front, fast and aimed and entirely uninterested in subtlety.

Maren beats him to it.

“Brandon, is it?” She sets the cash box down and rounds the table with the effortless, terrifying warmth of a woman who has spent thirty years talking men out of things they don’t know they’re about to regret, close enough that she’d caught every word of it from three feet away. “You’re going to want to see the pie table. Nell does a huckleberry that will genuinely change your understanding of dessert. Right this way.”

“I was just talking to⁠—”

“I heard every word of that.” Maren’s smile doesn’t move, and neither does the hand she’s already using to steer him by the shoulder. “Pie table. Now.”

She only gets him a step away before Dawson arrives, hands in his pockets, wearing the kind of calm that has never once meant calm on this man.

“Everything all right over here?” he says, to me, not to Brandon, which is somehow worse for Brandon than if he’d said it the other way around.

“Everything’s fine.” I hand him a raffle stub he didn’t ask for, mostly to give his hands something to do that isn’t whatever they’re currently deciding not to do. “This is Brandon. He’s on his way to Glacier.”

“Is he?” Dawson’s eyes move over Brandon once, slow, taking inventory, the same look I’ve watched him give men right before their insurance bonds mysteriously evaporate. “Long drive. You’ll want to get back on the road soon.”

“Yeah, for sure, man, I was just—” Brandon’s already backing up, his lizard brain a step ahead of the rest of him, the part that makes deer freeze and then bolt. “Enjoy the fundraiser.”

He goes. Maren goes with him, presumably all the way to the pie table and possibly all the way back to his RV, and Dawson watches him disappear into the crowd with the stillness of a man doing complicated math.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.

“Do what?”

“The eyes. The long drive, you’ll want to get back on the road. You practically walked him to his car.”

“I said two sentences to a tourist about pie logistics.”

“You said two sentences that ended a conversation I was having.”

“You were tearing raffle tickets.”

“I was flirting a little, Dawson. It’s a fundraiser. It’s allowed.”

His eyes flick once, quick, and I watch him decide whether to lie about it and then decide not to bother. “I don’t like it.”

“Noted.” I don’t try to hide how much that satisfies the petty, starving thing in me that has been waiting a long time to watch this man be jealous in broad daylight where everyone can see it. “For the record, that’s a new development. You didn’t used to mind who I talked to.”

“I minded plenty. I just didn’t have the right to say so.”

“And now you do?”

“Now you’re wearing my name at a hockey fundraiser my sister organized the food truck schedule for.” His voice drops, pitched for me only, rougher than four seconds ago. “I’m allowed to want the men who flirt with my wife to remember there’s a husband standing thirty feet away.”

“Careful. That’s almost romantic.”

“God forbid.”

“Also,” I say, stepping into the space he just made smaller, “you don’t get to run off my raffle customers and call it hospitality. Brandon bought two tickets. That’s twenty percent of what you’ve raised standing here being smug about it.”

“He can buy tickets from Maren.”

Taking his arm isn’t a decision. I only notice it half a second after I’ve already done it, my hand curling into the crook of his elbow like it’s been doing this for years instead of five days, easy, unnegotiated, nothing about it timed or weighed against a clause. He doesn’t look down at it. He just resettles his stance to make room for me against his side, the adjustment so small and so immediate that I know he’s done it without thinking about it either.