Page 47 of Reluctant Bride

We slip away a little after two, when the cooler’s half empty and everyone’s loose on cheap beer and sunburn, deep enough into a game of chicken that nobody really tracks two horses peeling off from the tree line. Finn does.

“Where are you two sneaking off to?” he hollers, cupping both hands around his mouth for maximum carry. “Don’t come back with wildflowers in places wildflowers shouldn’t be!”

“Ignore him,” I tell Dawson, not turning around, heat climbing my neck anyway.

“I usually do,” Dawson calls back, easy, over his shoulder. “It’s part of his charm.”

“That’s not a no!” Finn’s voice chases us halfway up the trail before the trees finally swallow it.

“There’s somewhere else,” Dawson says, quiet, already reaching for Bravo’s reins. “If you want to see it again.”

I know which somewhere he means before he finishes the sentence. My stomach clenches like it did the first time he ever said it to me, twenty years old and reckless and certain nobody would ever find out.

We ride the fork nobody else ever took, up past the second lake’s turnoff and along a game trail so faint it barely counts as a trail at all. Dawson takes point without discussing it, the same automatic read of ground he brings to every room he walks into, checking the tree line twice before he lets Bravo pick up the pace. Twenty minutes later the trees open onto a smaller pool fed by its own thin waterfall, granite walls close enough on both sides that the whole place feels like a room somebody built on purpose and forgot to tell the rest of the world about.

This was ours the summer I turned twenty, and standing at the edge of it now with a marriage license between us, I have to stop and just breathe through what it does to see it again.

“You kept coming back,” I say.

He’s already pulling his boots off, in no hurry, watching me with those slate grey eyes, careful and complete. “The last two summers, since I came back from Chicago. Came for the annual lake day with your brothers, same as everyone else. Kept my face doing whatever it’s supposed to do around a group of people. Then I’d slip up here alone after, when nobody was watching, and let it stop.”

“Let what stop?”

“Whatever face I was wearing for the rest of them.”

“You knew why I wasn’t coming.” I fold my arms, mostly to keep from reaching for him too soon. “And you kept visiting this place anyway?”

“I did.” He doesn’t soften it either. “Didn’t stop hoping you’d change your mind. Didn’t stop me marrying you either, if we’re counting things that didn’t work out how I planned.”

“I married you because our fathers ordered a truce and neither of us gets to say no to Gideon Blackwater and Declan Sullivan. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You married me because Nell’s pool had bad odds and you hate losing an argument more than you hate losing to me.”

“I have never once lost an argument in my life.”

“You’re standing at the edge of freezing water with your ex-enemy, about to get in anyway. Tell me again who’s losing.” His eyebrows rise up.

I don’t have an answer for that. Somewhere under the banter a dull ache settles in, quiet and unwelcome, for those two summers I forced myself to stay away instead of just being brave enough to show up and let him see me not fine.

I reach for the hem of my shirt, and his eyes are already on me before I’ve even pulled it over my head, unashamed of watching. He doesn’t pretend to look anywhere else. He stands there in the sun with his jeans undone at the waist, forgotten, and lets his gaze drag over my collarbone, my ribs, the line of my stomach, like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be and nothing better to look at if he did. Heat crawls up my chest and throat under all that attention, the same shameless want that never once burned out, no matter how hard I tried to starve it. I untie my bikini top slower than I need to, and his jaw tightens, just barely, a man holding himself very still on purpose.

“You’re staring,” I tell him.

“I’ve earned it.” His voice has gone rough at the edges. “Years of not looking. I’m behind.”

I step out of the last of it and don’t cover myself, don’t want to, not with him looking at me like I’m something he still can’t quite believe he gets to have.

The water’s colder here than the main lake, sharper, and I gasp the second it closes over my shoulders, my whole body lighting up electric like the first time, like always. Dawson doesn’t follow me in the ordinary way. He goes under at the edge of the pool without a sound, barely a ripple to mark him, and for three long seconds there’s nothing but cold water and waterfall hush and the absence of him.

Then his hands find my ankles beneath the surface.

They drag up slow, deliberate, over my calves, the backs of my knees, my thighs, before he surfaces right in front of me, water sluicing off his shoulders, and his hands don’t stop climbing until they’ve settled at my hips and pulled me flush against him. I don’t hesitate. I wrap my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist in the same motion, like my body already knew the shape of this before my brain caught up, and he holds me there like I weigh nothing at all, like the cold isn’t touching either of us anymore.

His eyelashes are wet, clumped together in dark points, and this close I can see the water still clinging to them catching the light coming down through the granite walls, scattered and bright, so that for one absurd second, it looks like he’s got stars caught in his lashes instead of lake water. His eyes are steady on mine, pupils blown wide in the shade of the rock, and neither of us says anything for a moment, both of us breathing a little too hard, a little too fast, from the cold and from the slick, naked press of each other with nothing left between us.

“Hi,” he says finally, rough, like it’s the only word he trusts himself with.

“Hi.” My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to.