Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALANA
His palm is rough and warm and twice the size of mine, his fingers lacing through like they’ve been doing this for years instead of days.
People are watching. I can feel every pair of eyes on this street cataloguing the visual: this huge, bearded, silver-streaked mountain man holding the hand of a twenty-two-year-old blonde in a sundress.
The age difference is visible from across the road.
His body takes up twice the space mine does, and the shadow he casts in the morning light swallows mine whole.
I stand taller.
Not in spite of the staring. Because of it.
I want them to see. Every woman on this street who glances at his weathered hands wrapped around my small one — I want them to look.
I’m done being the baby sister, the protected one, the girl people look at and think cute.
I’m the woman this man chose, and his hand on mine is the proof.
The diner smells like coffee and cinnamon rolls browning in the oven. The bell above the door chimes when we walk in. Lorna is behind the counter wiping down the surface, and her hands go still on the rag.
She doesn’t look at Zac first. She looks at me.
Studies me the way mothers do — not the body, not the face, but something underneath.
What I’m made of. Whether I’m enough. I’ve survived four brothers who treated me like glass and a man who tried to set rules he couldn’t keep and a confrontation on a gravel driveway that left Zac’s jaw bruised purple.
But this — a five-foot-three woman in white sneakers and a grease-stained apron, looking at me like she’s reading my whole life in one glance — this is the evaluation that makes my hands shake.
She comes around the counter. Walks straight to me. Takes my face in both hands — her palms are cool and her grip is firm and she pulls my face down so I have to look at her.
“He’s been waiting for you,” she says. Quiet. Steady, in the way only women who’ve raised sons alone can be steady. “I’ve been waiting for him to stop being stubborn enough to find you.”
My eyes burn. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have to — she pulls me into a hug. Hard, tight, the kind that says I mean this. She holds me like she’s been rehearsing for this moment without knowing when it would come.
Then she lets go, turns to Zac, and swats his arm. “Took you long enough.”
“Yeah, Ma.” His voice is rough. “I know.”
Esme from the General Store lifts her coffee cup from a booth.
“About bloody time.” Martha from the bakery nods beside her.
Peggy the waitress grins so hard her cheeks go pink.
Etta Bowen is in the corner booth — pearl earrings, a linen blazer that costs more than anything else in this diner, sharp blue eyes that miss nothing.
She doesn’t say a word. Just watches us with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who’s been right about everything for forty years.
Duncan’s there with Ruby — Duncan claps Zac on the shoulder, once, solid, the way men do when words would be too much.
Ruby catches my eye across the diner and mouths told you.
We sit in the booth by the window. Zac takes the seat beside me, not across — his thigh pressed against mine, his hand on my knee under the table.
His rough, scarred hands rest next to my soft ones on the table.
The nineteen years between us written in the lines around his eyes and the silver in his beard.
I trace the knuckle of his thumb with my fingertip, and the contrast makes something warm curl in my chest. I love how we look together.
We’re talking about the bakery logo I’ve been redesigning — he’s asking about the font choices, actually interested — when the diner door opens. The bell chimes.
Zac goes still.
Nate.
He stands in the doorway. Jacket on, jaw clenched, the same exhaustion from the driveway still carved into every line — but he came back.
He drove away without a word and he came back.
For a second I think he’ll turn around and walk out again.
My stomach drops. The diner goes quiet — that particular small-town quiet where everyone pretends not to watch while watching everything.
He walks over. His eyes find mine. Not Zac’s. Mine.
When he reaches the booth, he pulls me out of my seat and wraps his arms around me — fierce, almost crushing, the way he used to hug me when I was small and scared of storms and he was the biggest, safest thing in my world. I bury my face in his shoulder and the tears come before I can stop them.
He holds me for a long time. His hand cups the back of my head, and I can feel his jaw working against my hair.
“I need more time to forgive him for not telling me,” he says into my hair. His voice is rough and cracked at the edges. “But I know in my soul he’s a good man. I’ve known it since we were sixteen.”
The words aren’t for Zac. They’re for me. He’s not ready to speak to Zac directly — not yet. But he walked into a diner full of people watching and held his sister instead of throwing a punch. That’s more than I hoped for.
When he lets go, I catch Zac’s face over Nate’s shoulder. He’s looking down, jaw working, blinking too fast.
I slide back into the booth and Zac’s hand finds my knee under the table — my breathing slows the second he touches me. Nate sits across from us, waves Peggy over.
“Coffee. Black.”
The table exhales. The diner exhales. Peggy brings the cup without a word, sets it in front of him, and squeezes his shoulder on the way past. Small-town telepathy. Everyone in this room knows what just happened and no one is going to make it harder.
Zac takes my hand. Turns it over. His thumb runs across my ring finger — slow, deliberate — and then he reaches into his pocket.
A ring. Hand-forged iron, thick and uneven in the way things made by real hands are. He made this. In the workshop behind the cabin, with the same hands that split firewood and built my drafting table and traced the freckle on my hip like he was signing his name.
My breath stops.
“Marry me.” His voice is rough enough that the people in the next booth go quiet. He’s not looking at the ring. He’s looking at me. “Not for Montana Matches. Not for the trial. For real.”
The word yes is out of my mouth before I’ve finished hearing the question. He slides it onto my finger. It fits like he measured it while I slept — and knowing him, he did. The metal is warm from his pocket, heavy on my hand in a way that feels like an anchor, not a chain.
Nate picks up his coffee. Takes a long sip. Sets it down. Then he looks at Zac — the first time since he walked in — and nods. Once.
Lorna’s hand comes down flat on the counter. “Well, it’s about damn time somebody in this family did something right.”
Esme raises her cup from the booth. “I want an invitation.”
“You’re getting one,” Zac says without looking away from me.
Etta lifts her coffee cup from the corner booth. Her eyes are bright, suspiciously wet. “If I put you two together, there’s a reason,” she says. “You figured it out.”
Duncan leans back in his chair. “Took him longer than it took me. I married Ruby on day seven.”
“The girls proposed for him,” Ruby says, shoving his arm. “With a crayon drawing. He just stood there holding a ring.” She looks at me across the diner, eyes bright. “Runs in the town, apparently.”
We don’t stay long. I hug Nate goodbye, and he holds me close — longer than he needs to, like he’s making up for the days of silence. When he lets go, he looks over my shoulder at Zac. Doesn’t speak. Just holds his gaze for three seconds. Then he walks out. It’s not forgiveness. It’s a start.
The truck ride home is quiet. Zac drives with one hand on the wheel, the other on my thigh. The ring catches afternoon light through the windshield. I keep turning my hand, watching the dark iron absorb and release the sun. He made this. The thought keeps circling back — he made this.
Inside the cabin, the door barely closes before he has me against it.
His hand comes up to my face, tilting my chin. My thumb finds the bruise on his jaw.
“You chose me,” he says. “In front of everyone.”
“I chose you.”
He kisses me. Not gentle — claiming. His mouth on mine like he’s staking territory, and I surrender to it the way I’ve been surrendering since the first night in his bed. His free hand finds my hip, fingers digging into the soft flesh through the sundress.
“Take what you want,” I whisper against his mouth.
Something breaks in him. I hear it — a sound low in his chest, almost a growl, and then he drops to his knees.
The sundress pushes up around my waist. His beard scrapes my inner thighs and his breath is hot against me and then his mouth is there — tongue flat, slow, deliberate, the way he does everything. No rush. Just purpose.
“Zac.” My hands go into his hair. My back arches against the door. The wood is cool and his mouth is burning and the contrast makes me gasp.
He groans against me. Pulls one of my thighs over his shoulder, opening me wider, and his tongue drags through me with a possessiveness that makes my knees buckle. Two thick fingers push inside — not tentative, not asking. Claiming.
“Been thinking about tasting my wife on my knees since the day you walked up my driveway,” he says against my clit, and the vibration of his voice goes through me like a current.
“Fuck,” I breathe. “Yes. Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop. His tongue circles my clit while his fingers curl inside me, finding the spot that makes my vision blur — the same spot he found on the kitchen counter, in the armchair, in his bed.
He knows my body like a map he’s memorized.
Every ridge. Every reaction. His free hand grips my hip, thumb pressing the freckle through the bunched sundress.
I come standing against the door. The orgasm rolls through me in waves — my hands fisting in his hair, my thigh shaking on his shoulder, a sound tearing out of me that I couldn’t swallow if I tried.
He holds me through every pulse, mouth still working, fingers still moving, until I’m gasping and pushing at his head because I can’t take any more.
He stands. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Looks at me like I’m the only thing in the world worth looking at.
He picks me up before my legs give out. Carries me to the bedroom and lays me on the mattress — his shirt over his head, my sundress on the floor, his jeans shoved down before we’re even horizontal. Then he’s on me, bare and heavy, and the weight of him is everything I’ve wanted.
“I’m going to put a baby in you,” he says. His cock presses against me, thick and hot, and he holds there — not pushing in, just letting me feel him. “You ready for that?”
“Promise?” I say. And I mean it. Every syllable.
He pushes inside in one slow, deep stroke that fills me so completely I cry out into his neck.
He groans — a sound that vibrates through his whole chest into mine.
Then he moves. Not careful. Not the gentle first-time patience of our first night.
This is the man who’s claimed me in front of a diner full of people, who put a ring on my finger, who’s done pretending any part of this is temporary.
His hips drive into me with purpose. His hands grip mine, pinning them above my head, and the iron ring presses cool between our fingers.
“Mine,” he says, voice ragged. “Every inch. Every curve. Every part you tried to hide from me — mine.”
“Forever yours.”
The word forever does it. He buries himself to the hilt and holds there, shaking, his face pressed to my neck, his breath hot and ragged.
I feel every pulse — thick and deep and so much that the warmth of it spreads between us.
I hold him through it. My fingers trace the rope-burn scar on his forearm.
The ring catches the last of the afternoon light coming through the bedroom window.
We stay like that. Him still inside me, our bodies tangled, the cabin quiet around us. My breathing slows against his chest. His thumb traces the bone of my hip — the freckle side, always the freckle side.
“I love you,” he says into the curve of my neck. “I’ve loved you for four years. I’m going to love you for the rest of my life.”
“I love you too.” I press my mouth to his jaw — the side that isn’t bruised. “I’ve been waiting for you forever.”
He lifts his head. His eyes are the softest I’ve ever seen them. Like I solved something for him. Like I answered a question he’s been asking himself for forty-one years.