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The drive home took ten minutes and felt like forty. The door had barely shut behind them before her coat hit the floor.

This time there was nothing slow in it. This time it was buttons scattering somewhere near the kitchen and her boots hitting the hall floor one and then the other, his shirt gone by the bedroom door, her hands greedy on the bare heat of him and his sliding under her thighs to lift her the last of the way, and they came down on the bed already tangled, already breathless, three days of learning each other compressed into knowing exactly where everything was. He put his mouth on her and took her apart fast and thorough, one hand pinning her hips when they rose, and she'd barely stopped shaking before she pulled him up and over her and took him in with a long exhale that turned into his name, and this time there was no stillness in the middle of it, no carrying, just heat and speed and the headboard against the wall and her nails and his voice going rough and wrecked against her ear, and when she came the second time he followed her over inside the minute, her name breaking out of him like something spilled.

They lay after in the wreck of it, breathing, her leg thrown over his and the sweat cooling, and out in the dark the band was probably still playing, and Mason drew his knuckles slow down her spine like a man memorizing a road.

"Can I ask you something," she said, into his shoulder, in the voice of a woman asking the dark as much as the man. "The ranch. Everybody in this county has an opinion about what I should do with it. Pearl has two. You've never said one word."

His hand kept moving on her spine, but she felt something in his chest change gear under her ear.

"What should I do with it, Mason?"

He was quiet long enough that she lifted her head to look at him.

"That's not mine to answer," he said, finally, to the ceiling.

"That's not an answer."

"I know it's not," he said, and reached up and pulled her mouth down to his, and kissed her until the question came apart in her hands.

It was a long while before she surfaced, loose and warm against his chest again, drifting at the edge of sleep, and she'd half forgotten she'd asked him anything at all. She smiled into his skin. Let him keep his opinion. Every other one in the county came with an angle anyway.

"The realtor can wait till January," she murmured, half to herself, and felt his hand go still on her spine for one breath before it moved again.

"One week," she said, after a while, drowsy and glowing and further from Denver than she'd ever been in her life. "Wedding in a week."

"Mm." His mouth was in her hair. "Better bring a date."

She laughed, low, done for, half-asleep already in the warm dark of her house with the circle's newest member on the roster and this man's heart going steady under her ear, and one week out from a wedding that wasn't even hers, Lauren Merritt fell asleep smiling.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The map was already out on the desk when Mason came up to the house Monday morning.

He'd been summoned for the week's operations run-through, the ordinary Monday business of a ranch that was also a mine, and Jace was already there with coffee and a clipboard, running through feed contracts and a pump schedule and a fence crew's winter list with their father as he did every Monday of the world. Mason gave his piece on the cattle, the winter numbers, the hay situation. It took ten minutes. It was all fine. And the whole time, under the paperwork and the coffee and the ordinary morning, the map lay on the corner of Clay's desk with one corner weighted down by a glass paperweight, and on the map, outlined in red pencil, sat a hundred and sixty acres Mason knew by heart. He'd hung the gate on that map. He'd pulled the well on it, braced the windmill, spliced the wire his own cattle had walked through, and his father had flattened all of it to a red outline on paper with her garden sitting inside the line. He sat through the feed contracts with that red pencil in the corner of his eye like a splinter.

Jace gathered his clipboard when the run-through was done, glanced once at the map, once at Mason, and left without a word, which from Jace was a paragraph.

Mason was two steps behind him when his father spoke.

"Stay a minute, son. Shut the door."

Mason shut the door.

"Greene's office says she never listed." His father settled back in his chair, comfortable, a man reviewing an account that was performing well. "No realtor's been out. Nothing's changed hands." He turned the paperweight a quarter turn. "Wedding's Saturday. And I got the survey crew's schedule for the new year this morning, and here's the thing of it, son. If we're going to put the west expansion where it wants to go, I need road access and two pad sites on that seam ground, and I need the paperwork moving by February. So." He looked up, warm as ever, nothing in his face but planning. "After the wedding, after the glow settles, you find the right afternoon and you get her thinking about a number. That's all. Just thinking."

There it was. Laid out on a desk between the feed contracts and the coffee, in the same voice his father used for pump schedules.

"No," Mason said.

"You keep saying that word like it ends the conversation." Clay said it without heat, almost fond. "Nobody's asking you to do anything but talk to the woman you talk to every day anyway. You think John's not going to come sniffing around that parcel the minute the ink's dry on Dean's wedding? You think that girl's better off fielding an offer from strangers? From Burchall's shell men, if they ever get their feet back under them? We're the good outcome, Mason. We're the neighbors. She sells to us, she walks away whole, everybody⁠—"

"She's not selling."

"She hasn't been asked right."

"She's not going to be asked. Not by me." Mason heard his own voice come up a register and didn't stop it. "And look at what's actually happening out there for once. She's painting that house room by room. She's fixing fence with her own two hands. Whether she sells in January or keeps it till she's ninety, that's hers to decide, and I'm not going to be the man who talks her off the first ground she's ever had under her own name so you can put a road and two pad sites on it."

Clay studied him a long moment, and there was no anger anywhere in it, which was somehow worse. Just recalibration. A man moving a date on a schedule.