Page 94 of Reluctant Bride

I look past him, out toward the tree line where Erin walked her slow, professional circuit an hour ago, and toward the empty chair where Ashley sat until she decided she couldn’t stomach the rest of the night.

Three weeks of an open door. Rehearsal dinners, seating charts, Erin walking our hedge line with a clipboard and a radio, every chance in the world for somebody to reach for something. Nobody moved on it. Whoever’s running this didn’t flinch. Didn’t reach. Didn’t hand us one careless thing we could turn around and use.

They just watched. Patient enough to let three weeks of opportunity go by untouched, and patient enough to keep filming straight through the one hour we thought belonged only to us.

I find Sage across the tent, laughing at something Bree’s saying, cheeks flushed pink, champagne in one hand and the last of the daylight catching the ring on the other. She feels me watching and looks up, and whatever she reads on my face gets her moving toward me before I’ve decided how to say any of it.

She married a man whose own family taught her to spy on him before she ever taught herself to love him, and now she’s married into a war that’s still watching her through a lens nobody can find. I don’t want her staying in this because a wedding already happened and walking away would look like defeat. I want to hear, out loud, that she’d choose it again knowing what we just learned.

“Tell me this is your choice,” I say, quiet, once she’s close enough that nobody else picks it up. “Not the road. Not the easement. Not even the vows. This. Tonight. Whatever’s still out there watching us do it.”

She goes still. Then her chin lifts, like it did the night she signed a contract instead of running from me, and whatever almost cracked behind her eyes settles into something steadier.

“Choosing you.” She says it plain, no hedge in it, like a woman reading a verdict she wrote herself. “Staying, even knowing somebody’s still out there watching us do it. That’s not something Gideon ordered and it’s not something your father engineered. It’s mine.” She takes my hand, lacing our fingers together in front of anybody left watching. “This part,” she says, “was never in the contract.”

THIRTY-ONE

SAGE

Dawson stops me at our own front door with his hand flat against the wood, and I realize he has no intention of opening it until I say something he hasn’t earned yet.

“Say it,” he says.

“Say what? It’s two in the morning and I’ve been in this dress for eleven hours.”

“Tell me it’s yours.” His voice has gone rough at the edges from a whole night of toasts and dancing and whiskey. “Wife. I want to hear you claim it before I carry you over this threshold, because I am not doing this twice.”

“You already married me twice, Dawson. Courthouse, then four hundred witnesses. I think the word’s been mine for a while.”

“Say it anyway.”

I look at him standing there in the porch light, tie long gone, top three buttons undone, sleeves shoved up, like the whole reception was one long fight against stripping down to nothing and he finally lost. Two years of watching this man ration himself out to me in careful, measured doses, and tonight he’s standing on our own porch refusing to move until I hand him the one word he’s apparently decided matters more than the ring.

“I’m your wife,” I whisper it slowly. “My decision. Not our fathers’. Not the county’s. Mine.”

His face breaks open, the last of the composure he’s worn since the altar finally giving out, and he sweeps me up off my feet so fast my bare shoulder catches the doorframe on the way through, and neither of us slows down enough to care.

“I love you,” he says, carrying me over the threshold with his face an inch from mine, no performance left in it at all, nothing built for an audience. “I’ve loved you since I was twenty-four and too much of a coward to say it. I’m saying it now. I love you, Sage Sullivan.”

He gets the door locked behind us one-handed without ever looking away from me, his eyes flicking to the tree line through the window for one beat, the habit that doesn’t fully switch off even tonight, before they come straight back to mine like nothing interrupted them at all.

“I love you too.” It comes out steadier than I expect, the truest sentence I’ve ever handed anyone. “I’ve loved you the whole time, Dawson. Every single year I told myself otherwise.”

“You told yourself a lot of things.”

“So did you. Twenty-four and too much of a coward, remember?” I say it against his mouth, no heat in it at all, just an old wound finally safe enough to tease.

He doesn’t set me down. He carries me straight through the kitchen and up the stairs, and Cricket, curled on the landing rug, lifts her head once, decides we’re not worth the effort tonight, and goes back to sleep.

The only light in our room comes from the one lamp on the dresser, low and gold, and he sets me on my feet in front of it instead of the bed, like he wants to see every second of what he’s about to do.

“You danced with me for four hours,” he says, turning me by the shoulders until my back’s to him, “and I spent every single one of them thinking about this tiny hook holding all of this silk together. Such easy access.”

“It’s one tough hook, but you’ve handled harder negotiations.”

“Not with this much riding on it.” His fingers find the small hook at my nape and he works it open, taking his time in a way that has nothing to do with the whiskey and everything to do with a man who’s finally decided he has all the time in the world to take. The dress loosens degree by degree, his mouth finding the back of my neck at the same pace, pressing against each new inch of skin as it clears the silk.

The dress pools at my feet.