Page 64 of Reluctant Bride

A ghost, you can’t fight. A pattern, you can.

“Good work,” I tell West, and mean it.

Sage finds me alone in the Blackwater kitchen an hour later, both of us finally released from the war room long enough to remember we haven’t eaten since morning. She doesn’t say anything at first. She just leans against the counter across from me, arms crossed, watching me like everything else that matters to her, patient and thorough and entirely unwilling to let me hide inside my own silence for long.

“I know what Ashley is,” she says. “I’ve known since I was fourteen and she made fun of my glasses in front of half the county fair. I’ve watched her chase you at every function both our families ever shared since she was old enough to know what chasing meant. I watched her arms around your neck at the fairgrounds, the week after you stopped answering my calls, and I built a whole story out of it. Girl finally got the thing she’d wanted for a decade. I’ve lived inside that story since college.”

“Sage.”

“I’m not finished.” Her voice stays level, but there’s an edge under it now, the one she uses right before she takes somebody apart with facts instead of volume. “Tate just told us somebody paid her a small fortune to do whatever she did to us. Somebody who knew how long she’d wanted you and how easy that would make her to use. That’s not the story I’ve been carrying around. That’s a different story wearing the same face, and you’ve had it for over an hour and you still haven’t told me what’s in it.”

I don’t answer right away. There’s a version of this conversation where I hand her everything, right now, standing in a kitchen that isn’t even ours, and I want that version badly enough that my hands go still on the counter to keep from reaching for her.

I don’t hand it to her. Not here. There’s a piece of that summer that’s mine, not Ashley’s, and I’ve carried it alone for eight years. I’m not setting it down for the first time in Gideon Blackwater’s kitchen.

“There’s more to it,” I say. “Somebody knew which desire to fund. And there’s a part of it that’s mine, something I did that summer, that I’ve never told a living soul. You’ll get it. Not in your father’s house.”

“That’s not an answer, Dawson. That’s a well disguised no.”

“It’s a where, not a no.” I hold her eyes and don’t look away from it. “Tonight. Ours.”

“You said that after the records fire too. Full disclosure, no more deciding for me. That was the whole deal we wrote into this marriage.” She’s tight through the shoulders, but she hasn’t moved away from the counter, hasn’t put distance between us like she did in the gravel after the bombing. “You keep promising me the whole truth eventually. I keep getting told to wait for it.”

“I know how that sounds.”

“Do you?” She steps in close enough that I catch her shampoo first, something clean and green, and under it the sweet drift of the body mist that’s been sitting on her bathroom counter since the day we started living together. It is a genuinely unfair thing for my body to notice in the middle of being told how badly I’m failing her. “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds exactly like the year you left. Something happens with Ashley, and you decide, alone, what I get to know and when.”

That one hurts, bone deep, more than anything Knox or her father has managed to throw at me all week, because it’s true, and because she’s not wrong to say it out loud.

“This isn’t that,” I say, and I make myself say it slow, so she hears that I mean it. “That year I decided for you, alone, and let you live inside a lie. I’m not asking you to live inside anything. I’m asking for one drive home. Tonight you get why I left, the whole of it, in our house, where nobody’s four feet away pretending not to listen.”

Her eyes hold mine a long moment.

“Fine,” she says finally, jaw tight, her eyes narrowing. “Tonight. But if I find out you had more than this and sat on it anyway, I’m not going to be this reasonable a second time.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to be.”

She steps in close enough that I see her irises gone dark, whiskey brown shot through with something furious and unresolved. Her hand finds my jaw, gentle despite everything she just said. “I’m still furious. I want that on the record.”

“Noted for the eulogy.”

That almost gets her. The corner of her mouth twitches before she catches it, and she goes up on her toes and kisses me anyway, taking her sweet time, nothing soft left in it but nothing angry either, and for as long as it lasts I let myself believe we get to have this, easy and unrushed.

My hand slides to her waist, thumb finding the strip of bare skin where her shirt’s ridden up, and she makes a sound against my mouth that has nothing to do with being furious with me thirty seconds ago. Her arms wrap around my shoulders, and she tips her head to the side to give me better access, deepening the kiss until neither of us is thinking about Mackenzie or the war room or anything else that isn’t this. It’s the same violent, hungry pull that took us both to the floor of The Ledger, except there’s no grief driving it, no dead men’s letters scattered around us, just need, rising hot, and the kitchen goes quiet in the good way.

My phone buzzes against my thigh, right where she’s pressed against me, and we both feel it at the same time.

Sage doesn’t pull back right away. I feel her decide not to, her arms still locked around my shoulders, her breath still uneven against my jaw, one more second stolen before the day gets to have her back.

She pulls back an inch, forehead against mine, both of us still catching our breath.

“Ignore it,” I say, though I already know whose name is sitting on that screen. Mackenzie doesn’t text unless it matters.

“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

She’s right. I never do.

Mackenzie’s already reading the screen when we cross into Knox’s office, and whatever’s on it has drained every ounce of the calm she’s worn all day.