Page 7 of Reluctant Bride

The room goes very still.

He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence stretches long enough that I look up from the folder to check whether he heard me, and he’s watching me with an expression I don’t have a word for, something between recognition and grief, gone almost before I catch it, replaced by the practiced calm he wears for everyone who isn’t supposed to see underneath.

“Agreed,” he says finally. Just that. No joke this time.

I make myself keep going, because stopping means sitting inside that silence, and I already know what’s buried under it, and I am not digging up eight-year-old graves at a negotiating table.

“Clean exit. When the McKenna crisis resolves, whenever that is, either of us can end this without penalty. No custody of assets beyond what we each brought in. No lawyers billing by the hour to fight over who gets the good coffee maker.”

“Fair.” He almost smiles at that one, the first real crack in the composure since I walked in. “You’ve thought about the coffee maker.”

“I’ve thought about everything, Dawson. That’s the whole point of the folder.”

“So I see.” He leans back in his chair, arms crossed, and studies me like a contract clause he’s about to gut. “You’re very thorough for someone who claims this is just paperwork.”

“Thorough keeps people safe.”

“Thorough keeps you safe. There’s a difference.” He says it without heat, which somehow makes it worse than if he’d thrown it. “You built a wall out of clauses, Sage. It’s a good wall. I’m just telling you I can see the studs.”

“Then you understand why I built it.”

“I understand it better than you think.” He uncrosses his arms and reaches for the folder, turning it toward himself, scanning the last page with the same closed, unreadable focus he probably uses on freight contracts worth more than my house. “This is good work. It’s smart. It protects you from every version of me my father would want you to marry.”

“That’s the goal.”

“There’s just one thing missing.”

Here it is. I brace for it, whatever it is, some clause about access to Blackwater land or advance notice before I leave the property or a hundred other small erosions dressed up as reasonable requests.

“The Corridor easement.” He says it plainly, like he’s reading me a weather report. “You buried it. I answered with freight rates that are bleeding your family a fortune. Both fathers agreed this marriage ends the war publicly. It doesn’t end anything privately unless we actually settle it.”

“That’s a business dispute. It has nothing to do with our marriage.”

“It has everything to do with our marriage. We’re about to live under the same roof for as long as the McKenna threat runs, Sage. I’m not spending the next however-many months pretending the thing that started all of this doesn’t exist just because your contract doesn’t mention it.” He taps the page, once, decisive. “New clause. The Corridor easement gets renegotiated. By us. In this house. No fathers in the room, no lawyers feeding us lines, just you and me deciding what’s fair instead of what wins.”

I sit with that for a second, turning it over, looking for the trap, because there’s always a trap with a Sullivan, and I can’t find one, which somehow makes it worse.

“You’re turning my war into an asset.”

“I’m turning your war into a conversation.” He watches me while I fail to find a hole in it. “You gutted my road because it was the smartest legal move available to you and you didn’t flinch once doing it. I respect that more than you seem to think I do. I’m asking for a real seat across the table from the person who beat me. That’s not an ambush, Sage. That’s the only kind of fight I’ve ever actually wanted with you.”

I hate that it works on me. I hate that some traitorous, exhausted part of me is impressed, actually impressed, that he took the one thing I used against him and turned it into the one clause that makes this whole arrangement feel less like a sentence and more like something I might survive with my spine intact.

“Fine,” I say. “It’s in.”

“Good.” He slides the folder back across the table, and our fingers don’t touch, and I notice that they don’t touch, which is humiliating all on its own.

“You agreed to all of it,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to come out the way it does, rough and a little unsteady, but it’s too late to call it back. “Every clause. Fast. Like none of it touched you at all.”

“Would you rather I fought you on it?”

“I’d rather understand why you didn’t.”

He goes quiet, and for a second I think he’s going to give me the diplomatic answer, the safe one, the one that keeps this whole conversation where a Sullivan wants it. Instead he leans forward, forearms on the table, close enough now that I can see his eyes go from that careful boardroom blue-grey to something darker, something closer to slate, the color they turn when he stops performing.

“Because agreeing to protect you isn’t a sacrifice, Sage. It’s the only thing on that entire list I actually wanted to say yes to.”

The room shrinks by half.