Page 92 of Reluctant Bride

The quartet shifts into the processional. Dawson’s groomsmen are already assembled at the altar around him, Finn steady at his shoulder, Tate, West, Knox, Holt, and Eli flanking beyond, Maren first, then Tessa, Cora, Laney, Mackenzie, and Bree, each one catching my eye through the doorway as she passes, and at the very front the same small cousin from Knox’s wedding scatters petals across white fabric like she’s been training for this job her whole short life.

Then the doors of the tent fall open, and I see him.

Black tux. Watch catching the light. Hair trimmed clean, jaw freshly shaved, and I catch the second his whole face changes watching me arrive, every bit of careful composure burning off him until there’s nothing left standing at that altar but a man who’s spent eight years learning to be dangerous and patient in equal measure and is finally done being patient. Something low and hungry curls tight in my stomach, want and certainty tangled together so completely I couldn’t separate them if I tried, the same pull I felt across a tack room the night I decided I’d rather hate him up close than miss him from a distance.

Four hundred people rise to their feet at once, the whole lawn standing in a single motion like the valley itself finally exhaled.

I don’t look at any of them.

Behind me, past the last row and the tree line and the quiet woman in the dark suit walking her slow, careful circuit of the grounds, one small camera West swears he already disabled twice this week keeps running anyway, patient, where it shouldn’t still be.

I step onto the white runner.

THIRTY

DAWSON

Four hundred people rise to their feet when Sage steps onto that runner, and my heart slams once, hard, like it forgot it was supposed to be behaving today.

I don’t hear the quartet anymore. I don’t hear my own mother in the front row already crying loud enough that Finn’s going to tease her about it for a decade. I don’t hear the whispered murmurs of every turned face or the wind moving through the calla lilies.

There’s just her, ivory silk and bare shoulders and a veil trailing long enough to need its own zip code, walking toward me like she already decided, before she ever stepped through that tent flap, that neither of us gets to be nervous about anything else today. Every rehearsed word I had ready evaporates out of my head. Mine. God, she’s mine.

I built two years of my life out of not letting anybody watch my face do what it’s doing right now. I don’t fight it today. Let the whole valley see it. Let Ashley see it, four rows back with her hands folded and her mouth doing something careful. Let Erin see it, dark suit instead of catering black, radio at her hip, professional right up until the second Sage’s eyes find mine and something behind Erin’s own composure flickers like a bad connection. I note it, tuck it somewhere I can find later, and don’t let it touch my face, because today doesn’t belong to whoever’s still watching us from the tree line.

Today belongs to one woman in her mother’s dress, and I intend to be entirely, uselessly present for every second of it.

Gideon hands her off at the base of the altar. He doesn’t say anything to me. He doesn’t have to. His eyes do the whole sentence, and I answer it the only way that matters, by taking her hand like I’ve been waiting my whole life to be handed something worth this much care.

“You’re staring,” she whispers, once the officiant starts the part where nobody’s listening yet.

“I’m allowed to stare. It’s my wedding.”

“You already married me once. This is a rerun.”

“A rerun implies I wasn’t paying attention the first time.”

“Were you?”

“Every second, Blackwater.”

“Sullivan,” she says, quiet enough that only I catch it, and it cracks me open wider than the last time she corrected me on our name.

The vows come faster than I want them to and slower than I can stand. I say mine plain, no polish on it, how I’d have said it eight years ago if I’d had the nerve. I tell her I spent two years teaching myself to read every threat in a room before it finished forming and never once managed to read the one thing that mattered most, which was that she never stopped waiting on me to be brave enough to choose her in daylight. I tell her I’m choosing her in daylight now, in front of four hundred witnesses and a mule that’s already been banned from three separate flower arrangements, and I’m not stopping.

She goes for something shorter and it still takes the whole tent apart. She says she spent eight years building a version of herself that didn’t need anybody, and she’s not sorry she built it, because it kept her standing through things that should have flattened her. She says she’s not giving that woman up to be someone’s wife. She’s just decided there’s room in that same woman for one more thing, and that thing is me, and she’s choosing it with both eyes open, no contract clause required.

“No unilateral decisions,” she adds, and half the crowd laughs before they understand why, and Knox, four feet to my left, makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a man remembering exactly how that clause got written.

The kiss isn’t performance. I’ve kissed her plenty of times with an audience in mind, the tack room, the Prairie Star parking lot, behind the Dead Horse. This one isn’t for anybody watching. I forget the four hundred people the second my mouth finds hers, forget the camera West swears he’s already killed twice, forget the whole valley’s two-year betting pool on which of us would draw blood first. There’s just her, warm and willing under my hands, kissing me back like she’s been rehearsing this exact ending since a tack room a lifetime ago.

The applause when we break apart sounds like thunder in the mountains, echoing off granite until it stills.

Nell’s got the chalkboard set up behind the head table, dragged all the way from the diner on a hand truck because apparently a hundred and fifty years of manufactured family war doesn’t end without a scoreboard.

She stands on a folding chair to reach the top line, wipes the whole thing down with her napkin, and writes one word across it in chalk that’s already crumbling at the edges.

DRAW.