Page 4 of Reluctant Bride

“You’re agreeing to live in the old boundary house. Learn his routes and his contracts, what Sullivan Transport actually moves, where it’s exposed federally. You bring it home. Paper only, Sage. Whatever this marriage becomes on paper, it doesn’t become anything else. I watched your brother fall for a Sullivan and lose half his usefulness to sentiment. I won’t watch it happen twice.”

“You want a spy in his house,” I retort.

He doesn’t blink.

“I want a Blackwater in his house. Whether that’s the same thing is up to you.”

Across the tent, past the string lights and the dancing and my brother’s brand new, blindingly happy marriage, I see Declan Sullivan lean in close to his own son’s ear. Dawson’s face goes still, a mirror of whatever mine is doing right now. We are being handed the same sentence in the same breath, and neither one of us is going to be allowed to warn the other.

TWO

DAWSON

Sage Blackwater has put a body between us at every wedding, funeral, and county fundraiser for two years running, and tonight, watching her vanish into a crowd that isn’t even that crowded for the fourth time, I decide I’m done letting her.

No fireworks. No announcement. I just stand at the edge of the tent, watch her spine go rigid the second she feels me find her, and think: I built this. Every inch of the distance between us has my hands on it somewhere. I’ve just never been in a hurry to tear it down, because tearing it down means admitting what it took to put up.

My father is at the family table, which means I have somewhere to put myself that isn’t fifteen feet from Sage’s sun-lightened brown waves falling down her tanned, bare back.

Declan tilts his head half an inch as I sit, which from him passes for a formal welcome.

“You’ve been staring at that girl all night.” No preamble. He never bothers with one.

“I’ve been standing at a wedding. Same as everyone else.”

“Don’t insult me by pretending I raised a man who can’t tell the difference between standing and staring.” He turns his glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth, the same slow, even motion he uses right before he reroutes a shipment or ends somebody’s career. “You’ve had two months to get used to the idea. Gideon and I set the date tonight. September twenty-first.”

I don’t ask if he’s serious. My father has never set a date in his life he wasn’t already prepared to enforce.

“That’s not a question.”

“No.” Something close to satisfaction moves across his face, the kind he saves for closing a deal the other man will pay for longer than he understands yet. “This feud’s become a liability neither family can keep funding, and frankly, watching the two of you circle each other for two years has gotten tiresome to observe. It ends. Publicly. Permanently.”

“And privately?”

He gives me the look he gives a spreadsheet when he already knows the number’s wrong and wants to see if I’ll say it first.

“Privately, you learn to run a wife the way you run everything else that matters to this family. You’ll be at the old boundary house. She’ll be in your bed, if you’re smart about it. And you make sure she learns exactly what we want her to learn about our operation, and nothing more. Gideon’s sending his own daughter in as a strategist, Dawson. I’d rather you controlled that narrative than let her write it herself.”

I go cold and still, the stillness I use on men right before I take something from them.

“You want me to run her?”

“I want you to marry the smartest woman in three counties and not waste the advantage.” He says it like there’s no difference between what he’s asking and what he thinks he’s asking. “I’ve watched you circle that girl since the summer you came home from Boulder. I don’t need to know why. Use it. Don’t let it use you.”

I don’t answer. There’s no answer that doesn’t hand him more than I’m willing to give away at a table with three hundred witnesses close enough to read my face if I let it move wrong.

Across the tent, Gideon and Sage are walking back toward the lights, the kind of walk a father only takes when he’s just delivered what he needs to say to an audience of exactly one. Her shoulders are square but her face shows defeat. I know what happened. She got handed the same news that I just received.

She doesn’t look back at me once. I get up before my father can watch me notice.

I don’t go toward her. I go toward the horse trailers instead, because standing still with my father’s offer sitting in my gut is a different kind of dangerous than I want to test tonight, and because the tack room is still close enough that I can feel it behind me like a hand on my back.

She didn’t step back from my hand.

Two years of watching her cross a room to avoid me, and the one time I finally touched her, she stood there and let me. She had every reason to leave the second she saw me against that saddle rack. She took none of them. When my knuckles found her jaw she went still instead of pulling away, and her breath caught and held until I dropped my arm.

Eight years I’ve told myself I made peace with what I gave up. One graze of my knuckles against her jaw and I know how much of that was a lie. I stepped back first anyway, because two years of watching her build a wall taught me the one thing worth learning: if I want her to ever trust anything I do again, I have to be the one who stops first, every time, until she stops expecting me not to.