Page 61 of Reluctant Bride

It doesn’t. It feels like somebody reached into me and rearranged everything I thought I knew about my own name.

“I’m not sending this to my father,” I say.

He looks at me and waits.

“I found the Ledger code from the blast site last night and I didn’t send that to him either.” I say it fast, before I can talk myself into softening it. “I don’t know what that makes me. A bad daughter. A worse spy. I don’t care right now. Gideon’s spent my whole life deciding what I’m allowed to know and when I’m allowed to know it, and I am done handing him the same thing he’s always done to me.”

“Good,” Dawson says, rough and immediate, no hesitation in it at all.

“That’s it? Just good?”

“You want an argument; you’re not getting one from me this morning.”

I laugh, short and wrecked, nothing funny in it at all. “God, we’re a mess.”

“We’re the only two people in six generations who get to actually read this letter.” He says it reverently, and the reverence goes straight through me, sharper than grief, closer to fury. “Every kid raised on this feud, every funeral, and it’s you and me on a cold floor finding out we might have been playing parts somebody scripted before Montana was even a state.”

“I want to be angry at somebody who’s still alive to feel it.”

His jaw sets. “Then be angry at me. I already told you why.”

I move before I decide to.

My hands are in his shirt, not gentle, not the careful hands I’ve used on his arm since I stitched him, and he lets me haul him closer with a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan, some rough thing caught between both.

He doesn’t say a word about the arm. I already have my belt working loose and unbutton my jeans.

“Get down on that rug,” I tell him. “Before I lose my nerve.”

“You don’t have nerve to lose. You have a plan and you’re already executing it.”

“Shut up, Dawson.”

“Make me.”

I do.

I push him flat onto the old horsehair rug someone left folded under the reading table decades ago, more out of practicality than romance, and I straddle him, my hands pressed into his chest. He doesn’t fight it, doesn’t try to flip us, not because his body’s asking permission but because he wants exactly this, wants my fury more than he wants control of it, his cock already straining in his denim like he’s been ready since the letter hit the floor.

His good hand finds my jaw and drags me down into a kiss that tastes like anger and cedar and generations of two families lying to their own children. I bite his lower lip harder than I mean to. He cusses into my mouth like he wanted it exactly that hard, then flips the balance of the kiss entirely, his hand fisting in my hair and pulling my head back just far enough that I feel it in my scalp, his teeth at my throat next, not soft at all, a man taking exactly as much as he’s giving.

“This isn’t gentle,” I say against his mouth, half warning, half confession.

“I didn’t ask for gentle.” His voice has gone deep and commanding, nothing reactive left in it. “Take off the shirt, Sage. I want to watch you do it.”

I pull it over my head, and his eyes go dark immediately, just unfiltered want with a hundred and fifty years of manufactured hatred sitting right underneath it. I work his jeans open next, impatient, my knuckles brushing skin gone hot and tight, and he hisses out a breath through his teeth when I finally get my hand around him.

“Fuck, Sage.”

“I know.”

I don’t wait. I don’t tease. I line myself up and sink down onto him in one merciless drop, and the sound he makes, broken and entirely mine, is the only apology either dead man in that letter is ever going to get out of either of us.

I set the pace myself, hard and fast, my hands braced on both his shoulders, mindful of the bandaged forearm even now. He watches me the whole time, jaw working, that maddening stillness cracking wide open, his good hand gripping my hip and pulling me down harder with every thrust, his cock hitting deep enough that I lose the rhythm and let him find it for both of us, all the leverage in his legs and none of it in the arm I’m protecting.

“Look at you.” His voice has gone wrecked, reverent, furious right alongside me. “Riding out somebody else’s lie like it’s the only thing that ever made sense to you.”

“Don’t talk. Just feel this.”