Page 68 of Reluctant Bride

“I need one more second.” I don’t move my hands. I can’t. Her pulse is going hard enough under my palm that I can feel it in my own fingers, too fast, too thin, and every part of me that just put two men down without blinking is right here shaking instead, held together by nothing but the fact that her eyes are open and finding mine and furious instead of glassy. “I almost didn’t get here in time. I need one more second before I let go of you.”

Her face softens at that, some of the fury bleeding into something else, something that isn’t fear either. Her hand comes up and covers one of mine where it’s still cupped along her jaw, and she doesn’t pull it away. She just holds it there, steady, letting me have the second I asked for.

“You have it,” she says, quieter now. “Take your second.”

I take it. I let myself want her, right here, blood on both of us and a dead man still cooling ten feet away, want her so hard it aches somewhere I can’t reach with my hands, and underneath the wanting is the fear I can’t get out from under no matter how still my hands stay. I almost lost her before whatever this is between us got the chance to be anything but stolen minutes and a contract full of clauses. I’m not losing it now that it’s real.

“Okay,” I say, finally, and drop my hands, though it hurts to do so.

“Whatever sentence you were building before that,” she says, “the one where you tell me to go home and let somebody else handle this, you can leave it right there. I already know how it ends.”

“I wasn’t building that sentence.”

“You were building it before you touched my face. You stopped once you got close enough to feel my pulse.” She holds my eyes, steady despite the tremor still running through her hands. “I felt you decide not to say it.”

I don’t deny it. Lying to her buys me nothing.

Knox and Holt are already there. They pulled in somewhere behind me, close enough that I heard the second truck’s doors but not close enough to interrupt, both of them hanging back at the edge of the wreck while I had my hands on her face. Now that I’ve let go, they move in at once.

“Both dead,” Holt says, taking in the scene in one sweep, not a question. He keys the radio without waiting for confirmation. “Ranch on lockdown, gate to gate. Finn and Tate are closing every road in and out of the valley.”

“West is on the second truck’s plates now,” Knox says, already crouched at Sage’s other side, checking her over with the same brisk efficiency he’d run on a spooked horse. “He’ll have something before it’s finished smoking. Maren’s already lit up both families’ phones. Sage safe. Lockdown now. That’s all anybody needs until we know more.”

“That’s everything we’ve got,” I tell Sage. “What do you want?”

She looks at me for a long moment, blood drying at her temple, hands still trembling at her sides, and something steadies behind her eyes.

“They wanted me alive,” she says. “That rifle wasn’t aimed at me. It was aimed at you, or at anybody who came to help me. The man at my door wasn’t carrying anything built to kill me either. He wanted me in that truck, not in a body bag.” Her jaw sets. I’ve watched that jaw take apart a whole diner. “So let’s find out why.”

“Sage.”

“I’m not asking you to let me get taken, Dawson. I’m asking you to let me be the reason they try again, on our terms instead of theirs. Controlled. Watched. Bait that bites back.” She holds my eyes, firm despite every part of her body still running on adrenaline and fear. “You just proved in about five seconds flat that you can end anyone who gets close enough to touch me. I’m not scared of what you are. I watched what you are keep me alive. I’m asking you to trust it enough to use it on purpose instead of just in an emergency.”

I think about the yard. About the version of me that scared her without meaning to, the shaking hands, the knife I couldn’t set down. This isn’t that. This is the other one, the one that doesn’t take anything out of me to activate. I’ve spent two years building it on purpose, ever since I came home and understood what Sullivan Transport needed from its next enforcer. Watching her sit here, blood on her face and no fear of me in her eyes at all, I understand for the first time that the yard wasn’t the truth of what I am.

It was the one time the control slipped. This is what it looks like when it doesn’t.

“Then we do it together,” I say.

Holt’s already crouched by the body at Sage’s door, the dead man’s wallet open in one hand and his phone in the other.

“Name on his license matches the lift crew sign-in sheet,” he says. “That’s the second man. The one who got away from me at the yard.”

The man who blew up our truck bay and put Mick in a hospital bed, dead in the gravel with my wife’s blood still drying on the door he tried to drag her through. I wait to feel something about that. What comes is closer to arithmetic. One more name crossed off.

Holt thumbs the phone awake, scrolling. He straightens, and whatever’s on that screen has drained something out of his face I’ve never once seen drain out of it before.

“Dawson.”

“What.”

He turns the phone toward me instead of answering, and I read the name sitting three lines down a short, recent contact list, the only entry that isn’t a burner string of digits.

Erin.

TWENTY-THREE

SAGE