Page 29 of Desired

"Good ones, until I had to match a national chain's prices. They could sell at a loss for a year and never feel it. I couldn't sell at a loss for a month."

Something moved across Stephanie's face that on another woman might have been a smile. She topped up Lauren's wine herself, waving off Irene without looking, and asked it light as a napkin.

"And the Merritt place. What do you intend to do with all that dirt?"

Mason's fork stopped in the air.

"I haven't decided," Lauren said, easily, honestly. "It keeps getting less decided, actually."

"Does it?" Said his mother, and looked at her son for exactly one second, and put the whole exchange away somewhere behind the pearls, and offered more potatoes.

His father, meanwhile, was happy. That was the worst of it.

"He ever tell you about the pecans?" Clay said, pouring wine down the table like a man at his own celebration, expansive, warm, the source his sons had gotten all their charm from.

"Oh, here we go," Knox said.

"The pecans," Ainsley told Lauren, in the tone of a flight attendant pointing out the exits. "Every new guest gets the pecans. Don't fight it."

"Mason's seven years old," Clay began.

"Nine," Knox said. "He was nine. It's a better story if he's nine, because then he knew better."

"Seven, maybe eight," Clay said, sailing over him. "Delia Voss's pecan tree drops half its crop on our side of the fence every fall. And this one," a warm nod down the candles at Mason, "gathers it all up in his wagon, hauls it around by the county road, knocks on her front door, and sells the woman her own pecans."

"He did not," Lauren said, delighted.

"Two sacks," said Knox and Ainsley together, who had heard it four hundred times.

"Two sacks! And here's the part." Clay leaned in, conducting the table. "Delia knew. Knew exactly whose tree those came off of, and she paid him anyway, because that boy had a smile on him you couldn't say no to at any price. Seven years old, and he sold a widow something that was already hers." He sat back, glowing at his son. "I knew right then he'd never be poor."

"She still counts her pecans," Jace said, into his glass, and the table went up all over again.

Lauren laughed with them, her hand finding Mason's knee under the tablecloth, and Mason smiled the smile the story required and felt the whole thing land wrong in his stomach for the first time in his life. He'd heard his father tell it a hundred times. He'd never once noticed what it was about: a charming boy, a trusting woman, and a sale of something that already belonged to her.

"Now." Clay turned the warmth on Lauren like a man opening a gate. "Tell me about this well pump. I hear you pulled forty feet of pipe out of the ground your second week in the county."

She told it well, and he laughed in all the right places, and to anybody who didn't know, to HER, it was a father delighted with his boy's girl. Mason knew better. He heard the ledger running under every warm word of it, the parcel coming along, the heir settling in, the whole thing ahead of schedule, and when Clay finally lifted his glass down the table with the candles in his eyes and said, "To good neighbors," Mason put wine in his mouth so he wouldn't have to say anything with it.

Lauren clinked and drank, pleased, none the wiser, lovely in the candlelight at his family's table.

Across from him, Jace's eyes came up over his glass and found Mason's, one flat unreadable second, and slid to their father, and came back. Beside him Knox had gone quiet for the first time all evening, watching the same thing from a different angle. Neither of them said a word. They didn't have to. Mason could read the arithmetic on both of them, the same sum the whole county kept getting: Dad wants the parcel, Mason's got the heir at the dinner table, and look how well it's all going. The belief hardening one course at a time, and every course of it fed by his own silence.

He got one clean breath of her all evening. Between the main course and dessert, when his mother took Lauren off to see the conservatory, not the garden, Ainsley mouthed across the table, but close, and the party rearranged itself, he intercepted Lauren coming back down the long hall alone, caught her hand, and pulled her into the doorway of his father's study.

"Hi," she whispered, already laughing.

"Hi." He kissed her in the dark with the family's voices carrying down the hall, one hand at her jaw, quick and quiet and starving, and she came up on her toes and gave as good as she got, and for ten seconds in that doorway there was nothing in the house that was measuring anything. He broke it before it got them caught, forehead to hers, both of them grinning like teenagers. "Okay. That's what I came for."

"Your mother showed me the conservatory."

"I heard."

"Ainsley says conservatory means still deciding." Her thumb traced his knuckles once. "Your family's a chess set, Mason. I like them anyway."

You're winning games you don't know are being played, he didn't say, and walked her back into the light.

At the door, at the end of it, with the coats on and Lauren already down the steps ahead of him being embraced by Ainsley like the two of them were shipping out to different wars, his mother caught his arm. Two seconds, no more, her voice pitched under the porch light for him alone, and her face, for the first time all night, without the company polish on it.