Chapter 17
seventeen
Jax looked like a man about to face a firing squad. That was the only way X could describe his face when Nessie came around the corner of the barn with Oliver at her side and Echo, his Australian shepherd, following with a basket in her mouth.
He was shaking. Barely — a tremor in his hands that he stilled by clasping them in front of him — but X had known Jaxon Thorne long enough to know the man didn’t shake. His old SEAL teammates—two of whom were in the crowd—had nicknamed him Steady, because the man was usually a rock.
But Jax was shaking now.
Nessie had done something with her hair, soft waves in an updo sprinkled with flowers—Mariah’s handiwork, no doubt.
She wore a dress that was exactly her—a pale pink silk sheath that moved like liquid.
She came up the makeshift aisle with Oliver’s hand in hers, smiling, eyes locked on the man at the end of it.
Oliver walked with the gravity of a boy who understood this mattered.
Tate sat in the audience beside Mariah, copper curls just clearing the chair back, his stuffed velociraptor on his lap despite being informed it was a wedding.
X grinned at that. He adored that weird little kid and his “Veloci,” who went everywhere with him. Tate waved. He wiggled his fingers back.
Mariah turned, saw him grinning at them, and scowled.
Walker read the ceremony. Short, no flourish, so very typically Walker. When Jax said his vows, his voice came out rough at the edges, and X found his eyes had suddenly gone blurry.
Oliver stood so still during the rings that X almost didn’t know him.
The kid who’d spent the past year running at full volume, who’d informed X on several occasions that T-Rexes had feathers and demanded he update his understanding accordingly — that kid stood with his hands folded and watched his mother marry the man who’d been doing the work of “dad” for months.
When Jax slid the ring onto Nessie’s hand, Oliver looked up at him and nodded, once, the way a business partner might. X smothered a laugh.
When the new husband and wife were announced, Kavik howled. Ceremonially, and at full volume.
Echo startled into Jax’s leg. Oliver doubled over laughing. Nessie put her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, and Jax — solemn, stone-faced Jax Thorne — tipped his head back and laughed, full and real, a sound X had never heard out of him before.
X clapped Kavik on the side of the neck. “Outstanding. Truly. Your best work, hermanito.”
Kavik wagged.
The reception spread across the yard in the long evening light.
Johanna had done most of the food, and the smell of it came off the tables in waves — slow-cooked things, warm bread, the sweet sharpness of whatever Nessie baked at four that morning because she baked when she was anxious.
Someone had a speaker going, something low and warm that sat under the talk.
Across the yard, River sat alone at the end of a table, a drink sweating in front of him. Gemma had planted herself beside him, close, saying something with her hands, and River gave her the barest of nods and nothing else. She tried again—leaned in, bumped his shoulder.
Nothing. River stared out past the dance floor at the tree line.
X frowned. River deflected everything into a bit. Give the man a funeral, and he’d have you laughing by the graveside, then hate himself for it later. But he’d been folding into himself all week, quieter each day.
Gemma caught X looking. She lifted one shoulder, gave up, and reached for her drink.
X filled a plate, lost Kavik to Oliver feeding him scraps, and found himself watching Mariah Duval cross the yard with a glass of sparkling water and her son beside her.
Fourteen months. He’d counted. Fourteen months since he’d gone to Nessie’s with Jax after a security scare, and Mariah had shrugged off his charm and told him, “I don’t know where you got all that audacity, but you need to go put it right back,” in her honeyed southern lilt.
And he’d fallen. Right then and there. Hard.
Fourteen months of asking, of getting told no with varying courtesy, of inventing reasons to be in the parts of Solace where a florist might logically be.
Fourteen months of calling her “mi reina” — the word came out of him before he could stop it, every time, no matter how firmly he told himself to quit.
He knew what she thought of him. Charm on legs, all polish and no weight, the flirtatious ranch hand who’d run the same routine on a hundred women before her. She wasn’t wrong about the routine. She was wrong about what it meant when he ran it on her.
Tate had caught some cake frosting on his thumb and was studying it like a scientist with a specimen. Mariah watched the yard with the composed, watchful look she wore in public, the one that performed serenity.
Christ, he thought. She’s beautiful.
He crossed the grass.
“Reina.” He stopped in front of her with his best grin assembled. “Dance with me.”
“No, thank you.”
“That was fast.”
“Practice.”
“Bailas bien,” he said. “I’ve seen you dance at festivals. It’s criminal, you sitting this out.”
Tate looked up from the frosting and swiveled his head between them. “Just dance with him, Mom.”
Mariah looked down at her son. Tate looked back, too serious for an almost eight-year-old.
“Tate—”
“He asks you every time,” Tate said. “Every time. And you say no. And then you watch everyone else dance.” He considered the frosting on his thumb, then licked it off. “That seems bad. Go dance.”
X held up his hand and waited for Tate to smack it. “Chamacho has a point.” Then he turned and gave Mariah his best puppy-dog eyes, clasping his hands in front of him. “Please? One dance.”
Mariah looked at the sky, briefly, like she was appealing to a higher power that had repeatedly declined to help. Then she looked back at X and Tate, who had mimicked his pleading pose, and amusement cracked through her composure.
She gave him her hand. “One dance.”
Joy bubbled up inside him, and he just barely held back the whoop of excitement as she let him lead her out to the wooden dance floor.
She held herself at the correct social distance, posture flawless, like she was at a charity gala instead of a ranch wedding with a husky stealing food from tables.
He kept it easy at first. A rhythm anyone could follow, his hands respectfully at her waist until her scent reached him.
Fresh flowers, always, worked into her hair and her skin from the shop.
Something warmer and softer underneath. He pulled her a little closer and inhaled. She didn’t protest the contact.
The song ran halfway before she spoke. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m full of contradictions.”
“You’re usually performing.” She wasn’t looking at him — her gaze was somewhere past his shoulder, watchful, always watchful—but her jaw wasn’t quite as tight, her spine not as steely.
“Thinking about Jax and Nessie,” he admitted, nodding to the happy couple who were laughing with Jax’s two SEAL teammates. “I’ve been to three weddings in my life, but today’s the first one where I understood the point.”
She glanced at him, and he caught her gaze, held it. “Don’t you want that, reina?”
She shook her head. “What they have is rare.”
“What if we could have it?”
She didn’t respond.
The song wound down. She was still in his arms, her hand still in his, and she hadn’t rebuilt the distance.
He took the opening. He always took the opening; that part of him had no survival instinct at all.
“Go out with me. Dinner. Real dinner — not the Rusty Spur, because I know you hate that place. Somewhere we have to dress up. Saturday. I know Tate’s got plans with Oliver.” He kept it easy and braced for the usual rejection. “One dinner, Mariah.”
She stared up at him for a long moment, lips parted. Her thumb moved, barely, against the inside of his wrist, where his pulse went wild.
“Yes,” she said.
He missed a half-step and covered it with a spin, smooth enough she might not have caught it, though the flicker at the corner of her mouth said she had.
“Yeah?” His grin hurt his cheeks, and his heart was going in Spanish and making very little grammatical sense.
“One dinner,” she said. “Don’t make it strange.”
“Reina, I would never—”
“Xavier.”
“Nothing strange. Completely normal. Boring, even. I’ll be boring, you’ll be impressed, it’ll be—”
An alarm went off.
Puta madre.
Ghost appeared in typical Ghost fashion, said a few sentences to Walker, and Walker’s posture shifted. Boone, Brandt, and Bear were already moving toward the fence line.
River jumped to his feet, his eyes wild. “What is that?”
“Someone at the western gate,” Ghost said.
River broke into a run, following Boone, Brandt, and Bear.
X turned to Mariah. “Take Tate inside. Main house, stay in the kitchen, away from windows.” If it was the Sins, he wanted her as far out of the line of fire as possible.
She nodded and gathered Tate with one hand, crossing toward the house, unhurried, because running scared the kids, and she was Mariah Duval, and she didn’t run. X watched them clear the porch before he turned for the west gate.
He had his holster unsnapped before he reached it. The jacket felt absurd over the weapon.
Beyond the gate, the tree line stood thirty yards out, dark where the reception lights fell away.
X tracked the movement that had tripped the alarm, a shape resolving from the shadows, then breaking into multiple figures.
One taller, wider through the shoulders, a rifle raised.
The other shape beside him, smaller, a hand at his back.
A big black shape moved low at their feet, alert.
They came into the light.
The man’s face was a mess — a cut at his temple gone black, a bruise climbing his jaw. His shirt was torn at the shoulder. He moved like every step hurt.
Evander Cole.
The woman had blonde hair loose. Tattoos on her arms. A septum ring catching the light. She scanned the crowd and her gaze stopped on River.
The smile she gave was weak. “Hi, River.”