Chapter 1 #2
Somewhere in the noise a man I don’t recognize, three drinks past good judgment, grabs a passing waitress’s wrist too hard when she tries to clear his glass.
It lasts maybe two seconds. Dawson is out of his chair and standing at the man’s shoulder before I’ve even finished registering what I saw, close enough to speak into his ear, too quiet for anyone else at the table to catch a word of it.
Whatever he says empties the color straight out of the man’s face.
Dawson straightens his jacket, smiles like nothing happened, and walks back to his seat without breaking stride, and the man finds an excuse to leave the tent inside of a minute and doesn’t come back.
Nobody even seems to notice except me, and the waitress, who looks at Dawson like she isn’t sure whether to thank him or be afraid of him.
I understand the feeling. I’ve felt both at once about that man since the summer I was twenty.
I love this family, both of them, Blackwater and Sullivan alike. That’s the whole problem, actually. Loving both of them was never supposed to be complicated until it became the only complicated thing in my life.
I slip away during the cake cutting to catch some air, mostly because I need thirty seconds where nobody is watching my face for information, and instead I find the tack room off the side of the reception barn, door half open, lantern light spilling gold across the dirt floor.
Dawson is already in it.
Of course he is.
He’s leaning against the saddle rack with his tie loosened and his jacket over one shoulder like he’s been waiting for me and only me, which he has not, because he’d never admit to something like that out loud. He just arranges the world until you walk into the room he’s already standing in.
“Somebody’s aunt is looking for her dance partner,” I say.
“I danced with three of them already. I’m off duty.”
“Off duty men don’t usually look like they’re guarding something.”
“Feels like the only honest room at this wedding.”
I should leave. I have ninety seconds, tops, before someone notices I’m gone and comes looking, and every one of those seconds I spend in this room is a second I’ll have to explain later, to myself if no one else.
But my feet don’t move, and neither does the air between us, thick with hay dust and old leather and the stillness of two people who used to know what to do with a room like this.
“Fourteen months,” he says. Not a greeting. A verdict. “You could’ve just called.”
“You could’ve just not.”
“Not what?”
“Not turned my family’s cattle contracts into a hostage negotiation because I did my job.”
“You buried my road, Sage. Publicly. With a smile.”
“I did my job publicly, with a smile, because that’s how you do it right. You’re the one who decided the correct response to losing a hearing was scorched earth.”
“I responded to a declaration of war with a tariff. That’s restraint, by Sullivan standards.”
“God, you say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It’s information.” He tips his head, and the lantern light catches the line of his jaw, and I hate, genuinely hate, that my body still runs the same old calculation it ran when I was twenty: dangerous, gorgeous, mine, not mine, never again.
“You’ve spent two years perfecting the art of not looking at me.
It’s very impressive. Frankly it’s the most consistent thing you’ve done since the hearing. ”
“I don’t look at you because there’s nothing left to see.”
“Liar.”
He says it soft, almost bored, like he’s reading a contract, and it lands harder than if he’d shouted it.
I take a step forward before I decide to, close enough that I can smell cedar and clean cotton and something under it that is just him, unchanged, infuriating in its familiarity. He doesn’t move. He watches me come like weather he’s already decided not to run from.
“You want to try that again,” I say, “with your hands where I can see them?”
“My hands are where I want them, Sage. They’re not touching you. Notice the restraint.”
“Don’t confuse cowardice for restraint.”
His jaw tightens, just once, there and gone. He straightens off the saddle rack, and now there’s maybe a foot between us. My pulse picks up a rhythm it hasn’t used in eight years and doesn’t ask my permission to use it now.
“I’m not the one who walked away from the tent three times tonight looking for somewhere to hide,” he says.
“I’m not hiding. I’m strategically regrouping.”
“In here. With me. Again.”
I glance around the tack room, at the one place on this entire ranch where I could’ve gone to be alone, and land, apparently, where he already was. “This is going poorly.”
For one full second, neither of us says anything, and the silence tells the truth the arguing couldn’t. My body remembers this man in ways my brain refuses to admit. It remembers the exact height of him, the exact weight of his attention.
He reaches out, slow enough that I could stop him and don’t.
His fingers find the loose strand of hair first, tuck it behind my ear with a care that doesn’t match anything else about him tonight, not the banter a minute ago, not the man who emptied the color out of a stranger’s face an hour ago with nothing but a sentence.
Then his knuckles drag, slow, along my jaw, and I feel the exact roughness of them, calluses I’d know blind.
It’s been so long I’d almost convinced myself I’d forget how this felt. I hadn’t.
He doesn’t rush it. That’s the part that undoes me, not the touch itself but the control in it, the same control I watched him spend on a stranger by the bar, except now he’s spending it on restraint instead of threat, and somehow that’s worse, because it means he decided how much of himself to give me and stopped there on purpose.
I hold my breath, but his scent gets in anyway, and my stomach knots around it.
Then I let myself have three slow inhales and exhales of not fighting, not calculating, not being anyone’s daughter, before I do anything else, and I hate how much it takes out of me to admit that it’s the best ten seconds I’ve had in longer than I can name.
I spent four years at Cornell building the kind of composure that could survive standing this close to him. It is taking every ounce of it now to keep from closing the last foot of space myself.
He lowers his hand and steps back first.
Not far. Just enough. Just enough to open the path to the door, a small, deliberate, infuriating chivalry, like he’s daring me to be the one who walks away, knowing I will, knowing what it takes out of me to do it in front of him.
“There you go,” he says. “Door’s open.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“You’re still here.”