Chapter 23 #2
“The warrant’s authorization chain matches Robbie’s truck,” Mackenzie continues.
“Matches the cove camera. Same forged Sullivan Transport credential, same falsified digital signature, run through the same three-relay burner pattern we’ve been tracking since the wedding.
That’s not evidence against Cruz. That’s the same hand that’s been framing everyone all summer, and a defense attorney would shred the county’s case in about four minutes.
And the basement inventory request under his name, nine days before the fire?
Same pattern. Somebody pushed his badge token through the county portal from outside.
Cruz was on the west pasture with Rae that whole afternoon. ”
“So he’s clean.” Knox says it slow, like he’s been carrying the weight of doubting a man he’s trusted for twenty-two years and can finally set it down.
“He’s clean. He was never anything but a name that was easy to reach for.” Mackenzie closes the folder. “County’s dropping it tonight. I’d get him a ride home before the local news catches wind and makes it a bigger story than it needs to be.”
A knot I’ve carried since Cruz drove me to the courthouse finally lets go. I think about that drive, his hands steady on the wheel, the locked door where an answer should have been, and I still don’t know what was behind it.
“Too clean,” I say, mostly to myself. “I called it five days ago. I hate that I was right, and I hate more that somebody used a man like Cruz, twenty-two years of loyalty, and burned it for nothing.”
Holt’s truck is in the drive an hour later, and Cruz is standing on the porch when I open the door, hat in his hands, not coming in.
“Holt’s giving me a ride home,” he says. “Asked him to stop here first.”
Dawson stays in the hallway behind me. Close enough. Not closer.
“The east gate,” Cruz says. “You asked me in the car and I gave you nothing, and you’ve been carrying that around for almost a week.
That’s on me.” He turns the hat once by the brim.
“I crossed that afternoon because I’d been walking the ridge on my own time.
There’s a spot up there, worn down to dirt, sightline straight to this porch.
Somebody’s stood in it a lot of hours. I found it three days before your father sent me to drive you to the courthouse, and I took it to him, because that’s the chain.
He told me you weren’t to hear a word of it until after the wedding. ”
Every warm thing in me goes still. “Gideon knew someone was watching this house.”
“He knew what I knew. He decided what you’d carry.
” Cruz doesn’t apologize for my father. He never has.
“The truck at the fundraiser, the grey one. I’d seen it at Knox’s wedding.
Saw it again by the range and knew it for what it was.
I was looking at it because I’d already told him twice and nothing came of telling him. ”
“So you kept your mouth shut in a jail cell instead.”
“He told me not to speak to you. I don’t get to pick which orders.” He puts the hat back on. “I’d have taken a bullet for you that drive, Sage. I’d have done it without a word too. That’s the job. I’m not sure anymore that it’s the right one.”
He goes back down the steps to Holt’s truck without waiting for an answer, and Holt, behind the wheel, gives me one short nod through the windshield that says he heard every word and has opinions he’ll keep until they’re useful.
Dawson’s hand finds the small of my back.
“Your father,” he says.
“My father,” I say, “is about to find out the condition’s over.”
I don’t want to talk anymore by the time we get upstairs. I want quiet, and his hands, and about six fewer things happening at once.
I peel my own shirt over my head instead of waiting for him to do it, and something in the certainty of the motion makes him go still by the door, watching.
“I’ve got you,” he says, like he thinks I need convincing.
“I know you do. That’s not what I need right now.” I reach for him and pull him down onto the bed by the collar of a shirt that’s seen better days. “I need you to let me set the pace tonight. No knife-in-the-gravel version of you. No efficient anything. Just slow.”
“I can do slow.”
“You’ve never once in your life done slow.”
“I’ve done slow. You’ve just never asked for it before.” His mouth curves, and there’s nothing tame in it at all, just banked instead of loose. “Careful what you wish for. Slow, from me, is a different kind of dangerous.”
He proves it about a minute later, which is an argument I’m happy to lose.
He lays me back against the pillows and takes his time with every bruise the airbag left behind, his mouth following the map of them down my side like an apology he’s not saying out loud, so light over the worst of the purple along my ribs that I feel his breath more than his lips.
Collarbone. The scrape down my forearm. My hip.
He kisses each one like he’s counting them and intends to remember the number.
“Slower,” I tell him.
He goes slower.
That’s the danger he warned me about, and I understand it about thirty seconds too late.
I asked for slow, and he gives it to me so precisely it turns into a kind of cruelty.
His mouth finds my breast and stays, patient, until my nipple aches and my hips are lifting off the mattress, and he still doesn’t move lower.
His fingers trace the inside of my thigh and stop an inch short, every time, and wait.
“Dawson.”
“You said slow.”
“I know what I said.”
“Then tell me what you want instead.” His thumb drags one lazy circle right where I need it and lifts away again. “You’re setting the pace, Sage. I’m just following orders.”
I’d hit him if it wouldn’t hurt my ribs. “Faster.”
He smiles against my stomach and gives me one degree more. One.
When he finally slides two fingers into me I’m so wound up the first stroke nearly finishes me, and he feels it and eases off again, and I call him a name Tessa would be proud of.
He laughs, rough and quiet, and doesn’t stop, and when I come the first time it’s with his fingers curled inside me and his mouth on the jewel and my hand fisted in his hair hard enough that I’ll apologize tomorrow.
I can’t take his weight. We both know it. When he starts to move over me I stop him with a palm on his chest and turn us instead, onto our sides, face to face in the dark, my leg hooked high over his hip.
“Like this,” I say.
“Like this,” he agrees.
Before he moves, I catch his hands. Both of them.
I hold them up between us and look. They look like anybody’s hands, and that’s the part that gets me, because I know what they did this afternoon on the stables road.
His fingers go still in mine like he’s waiting for me to set them down and pull away.
I put them on me instead. One at my hip. One spread wide at the small of my back, pulling me in. On purpose. Where I want them.
His breath leaves him all at once.
He slides into me so slowly I feel his entire length, and then he stays there, buried and still, forehead against mine, until I’m the one who has to move.
I rock against him and he meets me, small and deep, the two of us barely moving, eyes open, nothing between our faces but breath.
No knife-in-the-gravel version of him. No efficient anything.
Just two people proving to each other that gentleness survived today too.
The second time builds so slowly I don’t recognize it until it’s already on me, rolling through me in long pulses that won’t stop, his name coming out of me quiet and certain instead of torn out.
He holds on until it breaks, watching my face the whole time like it’s the only thing he’s ever wanted to see, and only then does he let himself go, my name rough against my mouth, his hand still spread on my back where I put it.
Cricket sleeps across the threshold of our door afterward, like she’s decided that’s her post now and nobody’s allowed to argue with her about it.
I fall asleep with my head on his chest and wake somewhere past two, moonlight thin across the sheets. His heartbeat is too quick under my ear for a man who’s supposed to be asleep, and his breathing hasn’t dropped into that slow, even rhythm I’ve learned to recognize.
I drag my palm down his chest, testing.
He doesn’t pretend. His hand catches mine before I’ve even reached his stomach, lacing our fingers together, and I feel him let out a breath he’s clearly been holding for a while.
“You’re not asleep,” I whisper.
“No.”
The Ledger’s still sitting in the back of my mind, that decrypted name Mackenzie handed us right before the frame and the ambush pulled everything sideways.
Dated the summer I was twenty, six figures, a shell company nobody was supposed to find.
I never got the rest of it, and Dawson’s had the day to decide how much of it he’s still willing to hand me piece by piece instead of whole.
I turn his face toward mine in the dark.
“Now tell me about Ashley,” I say. “All of it. Start with why she got the daylight.”