Page 41 of Reluctant Bride

“Good day,” he says.

“Good day.” I mean it, and the guarded, old part of me that keeps expecting to catch myself performing this never quite gets its evidence. “Raised more than the goal. Knox got dunked twenty- three times. Felony’s banned from the raffle table for life.”

“Banned for life feels aspirational for a mule who doesn’t recognize fences as a concept.”

“He’ll be back next year committing a new crime.”

“God help us.”

He catches a smear of huckleberry at the corner of my mouth with his thumb before I can get to it myself, slow about it, and doesn’t immediately let go once it’s gone. I could step back. I don’t.

West finds us by the truck as we’re loading the last of the folding chairs, phone already out, scrolling through the day’s photos with the single-minded focus of a man who takes his role as unofficial family archivist more seriously than anyone has ever asked him to.

“Got some good shots for the ranch page,” he says, thumb moving fast. “Knox in the tank is going to get about four hundred likes by itself. Sage, you and Dawson by the raffle table, that one’s actually kind of—” He stops scrolling. His thumb goes still.

“What?” I say.

“That truck.” He turns the phone toward us instead of finishing the sentence, and there’s something different in his voice now, flatter, the tone he uses when he’s found a discrepancy in a shipping manifest and hasn’t yet decided how bad it is. “Grey Silverado, no plates. It’s in like six of my shots today. I thought it was just parked, but.” He swipes back, and back again, faster now, and I watch his face do the math before he says it out loud. “I’ve got this exact truck in my Knox and Maren wedding album too. Same grey, same missing plates, different angle, same month.”

Dawson’s whole body changes beside me, the easy warmth of the day burning off him in one breath.

“Show me,” he says.

West turns the screen fully toward us, and the truck sits there, parked at the tree line behind the dunk tank in a shot from an hour ago, half in shadow, deliberately angled away from the fairground’s own security cameras like whoever’s behind the wheel has done this before and knows where the blind spots sit.

Then West scrolls one more photo forward, the most recent one, taken not sixty seconds ago from where he’s standing right now.

The truck isn’t behind the dunk tank anymore.

My hand finds Dawson’s sleeve without my permission, the same unthinking reflex as the arm I took this morning, except this time it isn’t ease pulling me toward him. It’s every instinct I own telling me to get closer to one of the most dangerous men in this valley and stay there.

It’s parked fifty feet from where we’re loading chairs, engine running, windows dark, close enough that if I turn my head right now I could probably read the dust pattern on the tailgate.

It’s parked behind us.

FOURTEEN

DAWSON

I’ve reached for a gun before. Tonight all I need is the threat of two broken arms aimed at a county assessor three drinks past good judgment who tries to put his hat on my wife’s head like he’s got a standing invitation.

He doesn’t. I watch him find out.

The Dead Horse Saloon smells like it always smells this late, spilled beer and fry oil and the kind of sawdust nobody’s bothered sweeping, and half of Rimrock’s poured in here straight off the fairgrounds still sunburned and pleased with themselves. Somebody’s already racked the pool table. Somebody else has claimed the jukebox and is punishing the room with it.

Four hours ago I had my hand on my gun for real. By the time I turned, the grey Silverado was already easing out of the fairground lot, no plates, windows black, and gone before I cleared the truck bed. Holt had deputies on every road out of town inside five minutes. Nothing. A truck with no plates can’t last a mile on a county road with Aldridge’s men watching, which means it doesn’t use them. It uses the back roads and the spliced fences between our ranches. It isn’t hiding from the law. It’s hiding inside our property lines.

I brought Sage here instead of home anyway. I’ll be damned if a truck decides where my wife spends her Saturday night.

Sage is at the bar in a sundress the color of the last hour of daylight, laughing at something Tessa said, and the man from the assessor’s office, mid-thirties, golf tan, wedding ring he’s apparently decided doesn’t count tonight, leans into her space like the drunk fuck that he is.

Marcus is drunk and closing in on Sage and Tessa both, working some story about the fair board that neither of them asked to hear, and I watch Sage take a step sideways without breaking eye contact with him, the kind of practiced retreat a woman learns before she’s old enough to need it. Tessa’s already angled her whole body half a turn away, arms crossing, the universal posture for get me out of this conversation.

Marcus doesn’t read either signal. He pulls his cowboy hat off, sweaty and grinning, and reaches to set it on Sage’s head. “You wear the hat, you ride the cowboy,” he says, like it’s the funniest line he’s ever landed, like it’s landed for him before.

“Don’t,” she says, catching his wrist an inch from her hair, even and final, no room in it for a joke.

I’m across the room before I decide to be.