Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
DAWSON
Erin Van Ness’s file is clean enough to be a lie, and my wife had coffee with her this morning.
I read it twice at the kitchen island, laptop angled away from the window in case anybody’s still got a lens on this house, and both times it comes back the same.
Honorable discharge. Three deployments, all boring on paper, all the kind of boring that means somebody scrubbed the interesting parts before they ever hit a public record.
Security consulting license, current, no complaints filed.
A woman with nothing wrong in it anywhere, which is wrong in a different direction when you’ve spent two years learning to read what people leave out instead of what they put in.
I close the laptop when I hear her feet on the porch. Second time this week she’s gone out on an evening trail run and come back saying Erin happened to be running the same stretch, and I’ve marked both, like a shipment running off schedule by the same number of minutes twice in one week.
“You’re still in your running clothes,” Sage says, letting the screen door bang like she always does, like the house owes her a little noise after a day like this one. “It’s almost six.”
“You ran into her again. Coffee and a trail run in the same day?”
“I ran into her, and yes, Erin happened to be out on the same stretch of trail.” She toes off her running shoes, easy about it, and doesn’t miss where my voice just dropped to. “She’s good company. Doesn’t talk unless there’s something worth saying and I’m letting her believe we’re friends.”
“That’s one way to describe a woman running a long game inside your own family’s security.” My jaw does the thing I hate that it does, tight and involuntary, and I hear my own voice go quieter instead of louder, which is worse and she knows it. “Twice this week.”
“Careful, Sullivan. That almost sounded jealous.”
“It’s not jealousy.” It’s exactly jealousy, and we both know it, and I’m not proud enough to pretend the time she’s spending with Erin is unrelated to how little of her I’ve gotten today.
“Sure it isn’t.” She crosses into the kitchen, already reaching for a glass of water like the accusation doesn’t even register, and lets the subject drop, her habit when she’s decided to enjoy something instead of arguing it.
“What did you do all day, besides keep a jealousy log on my running schedule?”
“I got distracted. By deciding what to make you for dinner.” Not a full lie.
Half a truth wearing the other half’s jacket.
I’ve spent all day deciding two things at once, what goes in the pan and who’s lying to her family, and I’m not ready to hand her the second one until I’ve got more than a clean file that reads too clean to trust.
“That’s the answer you give when there’s something else underneath it.” She lets it go, which is worse. “Feed me first. Then you tell me what you were actually doing today.”
“Guilty on both counts.” I head outside to fire up the grill before she can dig the rest of it out of me standing in my own kitchen, because she’s not wrong and I’m not fool enough to fight her on it tonight.
I grill the ribeyes over hardwood coals, Sullivan beef, the cut I pulled from our own family’s locker this morning and roast the vegetables from the garden box Maren keeps forgetting is technically mine now that I live here full time.
No cream sauce, no butter drowning the plate, just olive oil and rosemary and the kind of restraint I bring to everything except her.
I pour two glasses of the Cabernet I’ve been saving since the wedding and don’t let myself think too hard about the fact that I bought it planning for a night like this one before I had any real reason to believe I’d get it.
Sage sits on the counter instead of a stool, bare feet swinging, watching me plate like she’s grading a competition she has no intention of scoring fairly.
“You’re a very good cook for a man who slits men open as a hobby. This seems to be a better use of the knife.”
“Multiple skill sets. Protecting you is not a hobby; it’s critical.
” I turn to her and run my unshaven face down her cheek, then lean in and plant a kiss under her jaw.
She tastes like salt and fresh air. “And I like knowing exactly what’s going into my body.
Cooking it myself is the only way I trust that. ”
“You say that like it’s a virtue instead of a control issue.”
“It’s both.”
She steals a piece of asparagus off the pan before I’ve even got the plates finished, and I catch her wrist, not hard, just enough to make her look up at me over it.
Her hair’s come loose from the ponytail she had it in on her run, dark waves falling over sun-browned shoulders.
The thin white tank top she’s wearing does nothing to hide what the evening air’s doing to her, her nipples pressing hard against the cotton in a way my mouth has already decided is a personal invitation.
Every plan I had for dinner rearranges itself into something considerably less patient.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m allowed to stare at my wife.”
“Ten days of marriage and you still can’t get enough?” She arches an eyebrow. “You’d think you’d have had your fill by now.”
“I’ll never get my fill of you, Sage. You haven’t changed a bit, and yet you’re a completely different person.
I’m still working out how the two of you fit into one woman.
” I let go of her wrist and drag my fingertips along her jaw instead, softer than the knuckles I used on her in a tack room a lifetime ago, except there’s no restraint left in it now.
“My razor’s on your counter. I moved my things into your bedroom this morning.
That’s not a guest anymore. That’s a husband. ”
My hand drifts lower, cradling one breast through the thin cotton, thumb finding her nipple already peaked and hard, and I step in between her knees where she’s still perched on the counter, close enough that she has to feel what she’s doing to me.
“Looks like you’re ready for my mouth instead of this dinner.
I’m willing to bypass it and eat you instead. ”
“The steak’s resting.” Her hand slides down between us, slow, and closes over me through the running shorts, nothing left to guess at through fabric that thin. “You’re not.”
“The steak can rest longer. I’ve waited enough to last a lifetime. I’m not waiting through a resting period too.”
“That’s quite the offer from a man who just spent half an hour standing over a grill.
” Her hand tightens once, testing, and I hiss out a breath through my teeth, both hands leaving her breast to grip her slim waist instead, my legs pressing into hers, holding her steady while I fight for something close to control.
“I can see meals with you are going to be a problem. Keeping you fed or fucking your brains out. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do both.”
“Pace yourself, Sullivan. You’ve got the rest of our lives to figure out the logistics.
” She lets go of my balls with one last quick squeeze and reaches past my shoulder to steal another piece of asparagus off the pan like she didn’t just leave me half-wrecked against my own counter.
“Feed me first. You can fuck my brains out for dessert.”
I’ve got the speakers going in the living room, something to fill the quiet while I was cooking, and it’s not until we’re both settled at the island that Sage goes still over her fork, head tilting toward the sound drifting in from the other room.
“Is that Lukas Nelson?”
“Might be. I put on a Spotify playlist built around the Marcus King Band and this came on somewhere in the middle of it.” I catch a memory lodged in her eyes.
“Nashville. Your roommate dragged you to it the same trip you got the piercing.” She looks satisfied that I remember, and I let her see that I do.
I’ve carried that story since the day she handed it to me in the granite pool, every part of it still sitting where she left it, same as everything she’s ever given me, whether she notices I kept it or not.
“Take me next time.”
Her eyes widen, surprised in a way that guts me a little, like she wasn’t expecting the offer to come this easy.
“You want to go to a Lukas Nelson show?”
“I want to go to whatever you love enough to still be talking about it five years later.” I hold her eyes, no joke left in it.
“Pick a show. Any city. The second Erin and Ashley and whoever’s still pulling strings behind them stop being a threat, I’m flying you there myself.
Just the two of us. No radios, no Holt on the perimeter, no families waiting on either end of the phone. ”
“And you claim you weren’t paying attention to the playlist.”
“I pay attention to everything that matters to you, Sage. I’ve just spent most of my life hiding how much. I’m done doing that with you.”
We eat at the island instead of the table. She tells me about coffee with Erin, how easy the woman makes herself to like, how she’d never have caught a single wrong note in her if Tate hadn’t already handed us the reason to look.
“I want to run the Erin audit past you before I set anybody loose on it,” I say, halfway through the second glass. “Not after. Before.”
She sets her fork down. “That’s new.”
“I know it’s new. I’m working on it.” I hold her eyes.
“Tate takes her route access. West takes cameras and permission logs, quiet, nothing that pings her own system. Holt runs her service record against real military channels instead of the civilian file. Mackenzie cross-references federal. Finn just talks to people, because half this valley underestimates him and tells him things they’d never tell the rest of us. ”
“You already built the whole plan.”