Reluctant Cowboy Bride

Chapter 1

ONE

SAGE

I have successfully avoided Dawson Sullivan for the last two and a half hours, and I am not about to let a wedding ruin my record.

Three times now I’ve dodged him. Once fetching bobby pins for Maren, once corralling cousins into position for the photographer, once helping the flower girl practice her walk down the aisle one more time.

Each time I feel him find me before I see him do it, that prickle at the back of my neck like weather changing, and each time I turn on my heel and go find something else that suddenly can’t wait.

The valley is doing everything right tonight, like it knows what’s riding on it.

My brother is about to stand up in front of everyone he loves and mean it, and the whole evening seems determined to give him the sky for it.

Early July sun drops gold and low behind Broken Sky Mountain, throwing long streaks of warm light across our ranch.

Twinkle lights flicker on above rows of white chairs set out on grass so green it looks unreal.

My parents spent a fortune making it look effortless.

Nell’s betting pool, taped up behind the bar like a menu, has moved to even money on which of us draws blood first. I checked on my way in.

Somebody wrote Sage, by paperwork in blue pen.

It’s not wrong. Near the pool, two Sullivan security men and one of ours stand shoulder to shoulder pretending to watch the band, which is what men who carry concealed weapons at weddings always pretend to do.

Nobody in this valley throws a party without a body count of hired muscle standing at the edges of it anymore.

Nobody blinks at it either. That’s the part that should worry me more than it does.

My brother is getting married. Knox Blackwater stands under a floral arch dripping white peonies, dark suit, jaw set, looking like he might come apart at the seams if Maren doesn’t hurry, and when she appears at the top of the aisle the entire crowd holds one breath together.

Her dress catches the last of the light like it was cut from it.

She reaches the end of the aisle on her father’s arm and turns to face Knox, and everything on her face goes soft and open and hungry, and Knox, who spent our entire childhood pretending he didn’t have feelings, looks at her like she’s the only structurally sound thing in his whole life.

I am absolutely not crying, and if I am, it’s allergies, and if it’s not allergies, nobody needs to know that either.

I’m standing up for her. Maid of honor, bouquet of white peonies shaking slightly in my grip, and beside me is Laney, Maren’s best friend, already crying into a tissue, close enough to the altar that I can hear Knox breathing, slow and deliberate, which is how Knox breathes when he’s trying hard not to let anyone see how much something matters to him.

Holt stands across from me as best man, giving away nothing to anyone who doesn’t know him.

But I know him. His eyes find Mackenzie in the crowd and stay a beat too long, softness crossing his face he’d never let anyone else see.

My brother, who once told me love was a liability, is looking at a woman like she’s the only safe thing left in the world.

And beside Holt, in a groomsman’s suit that fits him with genuinely offensive precision, is Dawson Sullivan.

A year ago that would’ve been unthinkable.

Dawson and Knox weren’t friends, just two men who tolerated each other because the alternative was worse.

The McKenna mess dragged them into the same rooms and the same late-night calls against the same enemy.

Somewhere in the last twelve months my brother decided the man who wrecked me, quietly, privately, in a way Knox has never once suspected, was worth trusting with a tuxedo and a spot at the altar.

I haven’t decided how I feel about that.

I try to fix my eyes on Holt instead, on his steady, unreadable posture, on anything that isn’t the man standing beside him. It doesn’t work. My gaze keeps sliding past Holt’s shoulder like it’s got a mind of its own, landing on Dawson again and again no matter how many times I drag it back.

He’s already looking at me when I glance over. He doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Tessa, seated in the second row with her phone already angled for a photo nobody asked her to take, catches my eye and mouths something like mascara at me.

She’s run the Pizza House since her dad handed her the keys at twenty-two, and she’s been collecting gossip on this valley since before she could reach the counter.

I’ll deal with my face later. Right now my job is standing perfectly still while trying not to look at the man across from me.

Knox says his vows like he’s been rehearsing them for years instead of weeks, and when Maren laughs through her own, the whole crowd laughs with her, three hundred people exhaling the same relief.

I catch myself staring at Holt’s hand instead of the ceremony, the one that took hours of surgery to put back together back in March.

It’s steady around the ring box he’s holding for Knox, healed enough that most people wouldn’t look twice. I do.

I do the math without meaning to. Sullivans on the left, Blackwaters on the right, and enough joint security in between that a stranger might mistake this for a summit instead of a wedding. Which, given who’s in this valley, it kind of is.

Ashley Rourke Pruitt is seated three rows back on the aisle, a clipboard of fundraiser sign-ups tucked primly in her lap like she’s been personally deputized to run the whole event, and she catches my eye long enough to give me a small, discreet wave, the kind meant to look like nothing to anyone else watching.

I give her the smallest nod back, because I have manners even when I’d rather not.

She’s got the easy charm of a woman who has never once been told no.

I don’t know her well. I’ve never needed to.

Some people you watch like a rattle snake sunning itself in the woodpile: not a threat yet, but worth remembering where it is.

The vows end. The kiss happens. The whole ceremony breaks into applause, and across the aisle Dawson claps for the man who’s become something like a brother in arms this past year without ever fully taking his eyes off me.

I hold his stare for exactly as long as my pride will allow, which today turns out to be about four seconds.

I look away first. I hate that I look away first.

Everyone moves into the reception tent together, one loose river of guests trading the open lawn for candlelight.

White tablecloths stretch under a canopy dripping with flowers and lanterns, twinkle lights strung so thick overhead they blur into a second sky.

A long head table seats the wedding party together at the front where everyone can see us, which means everyone can also see exactly how far I have to sit from Dawson and how close that still ends up being.

Waitstaff refill wine and champagne before anyone has to ask, and by the time the first toast starts, every glass in the tent is full.

Holt goes first, and he does it like he does everything, short and unshowy and somehow more devastating for it.

No jokes. Just Knox’s name, a beat of silence, and then: “I’ve trusted this man with my life since before either of us could ride alone.

He’s never given me a reason to regret it.

Watching him hand that same trust to someone else, completely, no hesitation, that’s not something I expected to see in my lifetime.

” His eyes find Maren. “You earned it. Both of you did.” He sits back down before the applause finishes, and Knox grips his shoulder without a word, which from both of them is its own paragraph.

Then it’s my turn, and the microphone feels heavier than it has any right to.

I didn’t write anything down. Gideon taught me that written toasts read like depositions, and Maren deserves better than a deposition.

So I just look at my brother, at the man who spent thirty-one years building a wall around anything that could be used against him, and I tell three hundred people the truth.

“Knox has never lost an argument in his life. Not one. He’ll dismantle you calmly, cite the relevant precedent, and walk away before you’ve finished being angry about it.

” A ripple of laughter, Knox’s mouth twitching despite himself.

“And then Maren Sullivan looked at him like he was a math problem she found interesting, and I watched my brother lose every single argument he’s ever won just so she’d keep looking at him that way. ”

I find Maren’s eyes across the table, steady and unshakeable, the kind of woman who negotiates federal contracts before breakfast and still cries at her own wedding.

“She’s the only person I’ve ever met who scares him a little, in the good way.

The way that means you’ve finally found someone who won’t let you win just to keep the peace.

Maren, you didn’t just marry into this family.

You out-argued your way into the one heart in it nobody else could crack open.

I love you both, and God help anyone who ever underestimates either one of you. ”

I raise my glass. The whole tent rises with it, and for one split second, over the rim of my champagne, I catch Dawson watching me with an expression I don’t have a name for and don’t want one for, because names make things real, and I have enough real things to survive tonight already.

Then Maren’s brother, Finn, ruins the mood entirely, on schedule, right when the tent needs it. His toast is less a toast than a hostage situation, a dozen childhood stories crammed into one run-on sentence until Tate physically pries the microphone out of his hand.