Page 40 of Reluctant Bride

Across the fairground, Ashley’s megaphone catches on a laugh mid-sentence, and when I glance over she’s watching us with a smile that hasn’t lost a single watt. Only her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, cold and spiteful for exactly as long as it takes her to notice me noticing, and then it’s gone, buried back under the pinecones and the clipboard like it never happened at all.

I tuck it away with everything else I’ve been collecting on Ashley Rourke Pruitt lately.

Finn is cheating at the ring toss.

I don’t have proof, exactly, but I have four consecutive wins and a level of smugness that no honest man achieves purely through hand-eye coordination, and when I say as much he clutches his chest like I’ve mortally wounded him in front of God and the Rimrock Youth Hockey Association.

“Slander,” he says. “I am a gifted athlete.”

“You’re standing four inches closer to the bottles than everyone else.”

“That’s called strategic positioning.”

“That’s called cheating at a children’s fundraiser.”

“Tate,” Finn calls, without looking away from me, “back me up.”

Tate, sitting on an overturned bucket with a scorebook that has nothing to do with ring toss and everything to do with the football pool he’s running out of his back pocket, doesn’t even glance up. “He’s four inches closer to the bottles.”

“Traitor.”

“Accurate.”

Cricket has appointed herself official mascot of the entire event and is currently accepting ear scratches from a line of children that stretches nearly to the funnel cake truck, tail going like a metronome, taking her celebrity status with the gravity of a dog who has decided this is simply her due. Somewhere behind the hockey booth, a commotion rises that sounds exactly like a raffle table losing a structural argument with a mule, and thirty seconds later Rae comes jogging past with a lead rope and an expression of profound, weary resignation.

“Felony’s loose,” she says, to nobody, already gone.

“Again?” I call after her.

“He ate the gift basket,” she shouts back, not stopping. “The whole basket. Ribbon and all.”

Dawson’s laugh, rough and real and startled out of him, is worth more to me right now than the entire raffle pot.

Holt runs the shooting range in the far corner of the fairground, a fundraiser tradition older than most of the kids currently lined up to watch, and Erin’s there beside him working the sign-in table with the easy competence she brings to everything, checking IDs, walking nervous first-timers through eye and ear protection like she’s done it a thousand times.

I watch her take a rifle from a fourteen-year-old who’s clearly never held one, murmur something quiet that gets the kid’s shoulders to drop out of his ears and adjust his stance with two fingers and a patience that makes half the dads in line look sheepish about their own coaching. Then, when the range clears for a demonstration round, she picks up the rifle herself.

She doesn’t shoulder it like a security contractor showing off for a crowd. She doesn’t shoulder it like a hobbyist either. There’s a stillness to it, an economy, her breathing dropping into some rhythm I recognize without being able to name, the same rhythm Holt falls into right before he does something none of us want to watch too closely. She puts three rounds through the same ragged hole at fifty yards and lowers the rifle like it weighs nothing at all, and the crowd claps, delighted, and moves on to the next attraction.

Holt doesn’t move on. He stands there a beat too long, watching her rack the weapon clear.

“Army,” Erin says, catching him looking, already reaching for the next sign-in sheet. “Long time ago now.”

“Which unit?”

“Boring one. Paperwork, mostly.” She smiles at him, warm, nothing in it that reads as anything but true. “You going to interrogate me at my own fundraiser table, Blackwater?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He says it light. He doesn’t look light. He picks up the rifle himself once she’s set it down, checks the chamber out of pure habit, sets it back exactly where she had it, and doesn’t say another word about it.

I catch his eye over the sign-in table on my way past with a fresh raffle roll. He gives me nothing, the same bare courtesy he’d give a stranger, and that’s how I know he’s still thinking about it.

Holt has never once flinched at anything I’ve seen in my life. Watching him quietly recheck a rifle a woman he trusts just handled sits cold and small in my stomach.

She’s Mackenzie’s. Vetted. The first woman I’ve let inside my own house without a clause attached to it.

I let it go, because there’s nothing else to do with it yet.

By evening shadows have stretched across the fairground, the Rockies burning orange at the peaks and the clouds streaking bright red and purple above them, and half of Rimrock is draped over hay bales eating pie they didn’t pay for because Nell gave up collecting money for dessert around five o’clock. Dawson’s hand finds the small of my back without either of us discussing it, a habit four days old that already feels older than that, and I lean into it without deciding to, the same way I took his arm this morning.