Page 82 of Reluctant Bride

She does. She doesn’t look away once, not when she comes apart around me with a sound halfway between my name and a prayer, not when I follow her under, both of us shaking, the swing gone still beneath us like even it understood this one needed reverence instead of speed.

She leans into my chest after, my shirt draped loose over both of us, her breathing slowing against my collarbone. If eight years bought me this one hour, I’d spend the eight years again without hesitating.

My phone lights up on the porch boards before either of us has caught our breath.

I almost let it ring out. Sage feels me tense before I’ve even reached for it, and she doesn’t tell me to ignore it. She just sits up, pulling my shirt tighter around her shoulders, and waits.

It’s Holt. He never calls this late unless it can’t wait for morning.

“Yeah.”

“Records fire,” he says, no greeting. “Tate got a clean pull on the Highline account. The second payment to Ashley, the one dated last week. It cleared the same day as the fire.”

“Same day.”

“Same day, Dawson.” A pause, and something shifts in his voice, careful now, how he sounds right before he hands somebody a wound instead of a fact. “I had West run the basement inventory against what the insurance adjuster logged after the blaze. Half the 1962 archive’s missing from both counts. Not burned. Missing before the fire ever started.”

The porch goes very still around me.

“She didn’t burn the files,” Holt says. “She moved them first.”

I set the phone down on the porch rail and don’t pick it back up. The mountain’s gone black and enormous out past the fence line, giving nothing away, the same as it has every night of my life.

Behind me, from the dark where the swing is, Sage says, “Which one of them was it?”

She heard enough. She always hears enough.

TWENTY-SEVEN

SAGE

The next morning, I’m on the porch steps playing tug with Cricket when Dawson comes out with two mugs of coffee and a look on his face I haven’t seen since the courthouse.

“Sit with me,” he says, nodding toward the swing.

“That’s ominous for a man holding coffee instead of whiskey,” I say, letting go of the rope so Cricket can win it outright, and cross to the swing.

“I’m saving the whiskey. This needs a clear head.” He sets both mugs on the rail and sits down beside me instead, close enough that his knee finds mine, and the swing takes his weight with the same complaining creak. He doesn’t kneel. He doesn’t perform it. He just turns to face me and everything in me goes tight and hot at once.

“Dawson.”

“I already married you,” he says, his face stripped down to something I’ve only seen once before, the night he finally told me the truth. “In a courthouse, twelve minutes, a judge who looked bored the entire time. I don’t regret one second of it. But you never got to choose a single thing about that day, and I’ve spent eight years taking choices away from you without asking first. I’m done doing that.”

He pulls a ring from his shirt pocket, not the plain platinum band from the courthouse, something new. A sage green sapphire set low between two rows of diamonds, its color the exact shade of the ink hidden on his own wrist.

“Sage Pearl Blackwater.” My name in his mouth, slow and enunciated, like saying it right is half the point of the question. “Do you want the wedding you actually dreamed about? The one nobody’s father ordered and no county judge rushed through in twelve minutes? I want to give it to you. All of it. In front of everyone who ever doubted either one of us.”

My throat closes. I don’t have a single clever thing to hand back, which might be the first time in my whole life that’s happened.

“Yes.” Cracked and certain at once. “Yes, Dawson.”

He slides the ring on, and it fits perfectly, because of course it does. Then his mouth finds mine, soft at the edges and starving underneath, the kind that says everything the ring already said and means every word of it twice.

“Three weeks,” I say, when I finally get my breath back. “Not three months. I’ve waited long enough for both of us.”

“Three weeks from Saturday.” He says it like a man signing a contract he actually wants to be bound by. “Your father’s going to have opinions.”

“My father’s going to have a stroke. Get the defibrillator ready.”