Mackenzie
I don't recognize the woman in Holt's bathroom mirror, and I paid four figures, mostly on the heels alone, to make sure of it.
Dark blue silk that moves like water, a slit that runs to mid-thigh and spaghetti straps that leave my whole back bare to the evening air. Heels that put me at six feet even and cost more than the dress.
Contoured cheekbones. Smoky eyes gone dark at the corners.
A red on my mouth that isn't the lipstick I keep in my badge case for court appearances, the kind that says something instead of just covering chapped skin.
My hair's up in a twist that took the stylist in Great Falls forty minutes and three bobby pin casualties, gold tendrils left loose around my face on purpose.
Under all of it, dark purple lace. I bought it three weeks ago and it's been tucked under my jeans in a drawer since, waiting for this night.
Tonight's the reason.
"You almost ready?" Holt's voice comes through the door, and something in it has gone tight in a way that has nothing to do with impatience.
"Almost." I smooth the dress one more time over my hip and open the door.
He's leaning against the doorframe in a black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, no jacket yet, hair down and shining, jaw shaved close and clean, which is how he keeps it most days now instead of the three-day neglect he wore the whole first week I knew him.
He doesn't say anything for a second. That's how I know it landed.
"Problem?" I ask, even though I already know there isn't one.
"Give me a minute." His eyes go from my face down the length of the dress and back up, lingering, and I watch heat come up under his collar like it did in a truck from the airport a lifetime ago.
"I had a whole plan for tonight. Somewhere around the second the door opened, most of it left the building. "
"Which parts survived?"
"The part where I get you into the truck before I do something that gets us both arrested for public indecency."
"Bold talk from a man who hasn't even seen the full effect yet." I turn, deliberate, and catch him tracking the slit as the fabric shifts. "You're staring, Blackwater."
"I'm fucking tracking every inch of you." He pushes off the doorframe and crosses to me, close enough that I can smell cedar and that rich, expensive cologne that's been undoing me since an airport curb in February.
His hand finds the small of my back, bare skin under his palm, and I feel every callus on it. "Occupational habit. Picked it up from a federal agent I know."
"Did it work out for her?"
"Jury's still out." His mouth ghosts my temple, careful of the makeup, careful of everything, and it's somehow worse than if he'd just kissed me properly. "Ask me again at midnight."
My nipples go tight under the lace before he's even off my skin, and I'm soaked through the purple already.
The smoldering look in his eyes when he pulls back tells me he knows exactly what he just did and considers it a job well done.
The Sullivan lawn has been transformed into something out of a magazine spread; the kind Kathleen would deny planning for months and clearly spent every one of them planning.
String lights run between the aspens in loose, glowing lines, and past the last row of them the Front stands up black and snowcapped against a sky just barely holding onto blue.
Tents flank the open ground in case the weather turns, though tonight it won't, warm enough that jackets have been abandoned to chair backs across the lawn.
Servers move through with trays of something that involves champagne and elderflower, and somewhere a string quartet is doing its level best to make a Montana cattle ranch sound like the Hamptons.
Both families are here. Blackwaters clustered near the bar, Sullivans spread out like they own the ground, which they do, and for the first time since I landed in this county the two blocks aren't holding their separate corners.
They're bleeding into each other, Knox with his arm around Maren's waist talking to a Blackwater cousin I've never met, Sage laughing with two of Maren's aunts like she's been doing it her whole life.
I stand at the edge of it in a dress that cost too much money, Holt's hand warm at the small of my back, and for the first time since February I'm not standing where I can see the exits.
"This is what it looks like," I say, mostly to myself.
"What what looks like?"
"Two families that hate each other, throwing a party neither one hates."
"Don't get used to it." But one side of his mouth goes up, close enough that I count it, and he steers me toward the bar with a hand that hasn't left my spine since we got out of the truck.
Maren finds us before we make it three steps. She’s in a green dress that makes her hair look like it's on fire. A ring on her left hand catches every string light within thirty feet.
"Look at you." She takes my hand, spins me once without asking permission, and whistles low. "Denial's officially dead and buried, Agent Tatum. RIP. We had a nice run."
"I never denied anything you could prove in court."
"You denied it so hard I nearly filed a motion." She grins at Holt over my shoulder. "You clean up dangerous, Blackwater. Somebody should warn the county."
"Somebody should warn you about standing this close to an open bar in that dress. Pheromones don't care whose wedding it is."
"It's not my wedding. It's an engagement party. Try to keep up." She squeezes my hand once and drifts back toward Knox, already laughing at something before she's fully turned around.
Finn finds the microphone around nine, which everyone in a hundred-yard radius immediately regrets and secretly looks forward to in equal measure.
He's got a golden retriever's whole personality distilled into one Sullivan body, and he opens with a story about Maren at fourteen that has half the lawn wheezing and Maren herself pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose like a woman praying for patience.
"To my sister," Finn finishes, raising his glass, "who spent her whole life swearing she'd never fall for a Blackwater, and then went and fell for the broodiest one on the ranch.
Knox, you obsessed, insufferable bastard, welcome to the family.
Try not to let the last name go to your head.
" He turns his glass toward Maren. "Love is truly blind, and also possibly a little concussed. "
The lawn roars. Even Declan, standing near the tent poles with a bourbon he hasn't touched in an hour, cracks something close to a real smile.
Then Finn's eyes drift, just for a second, toward a cluster of chairs near the dessert table, and land on a woman in a sheriff's-department polo who very clearly did not come dressed for a party and very clearly got dragged here anyway.
He holds it half a beat too long before he catches himself and swings the microphone back to the crowd.
I notice it. I don't say anything. Some things a person only gets to see once before they're gone.
Gideon finds us near the dance floor a little after that, no drink in his hand, which for a man who owns a company that could probably distill its own bourbon feels like a statement.
"Agent Tatum." He looks at the dress like he looks at everything, deciphering, pricing, deciding. "You've traded federal grey for something considerably more dangerous."
"I read a threat assessment on you once. Turns out I read it wrong," I retort.
"Apparently." His eyes go to Holt, and the corner of his mouth pulls tight. Not quite approval, not quite the cold calculation from a study desk either.
He watches Knox spin Maren once, twice, both laughing at nothing and at everything. His jaw does the thing his sons' jaws do when something's landed somewhere he doesn't advertise.
"You chose well," he says. Not to me. To the space between Knox and Maren, like the sentence belongs to the whole lawn and not to any one person in it.
Gideon nods once, at nobody, and moves off toward Josephine, who's been standing near the tent line with the contentment of a woman finally getting to watch her family celebrate something, for once, instead of burying or defending it.
"That's the whole apology you're getting out of him," Holt says, quiet, at my ear. "For everything. The bribe, the memo, all of it."
"Was it enough?"
"It's what he's got." He looks at me instead of his father. "I've stopped needing more than that."
The band shifts into something slow around ten, strings and an easy, rolling rhythm. Holt intertwines his fingers through mine before I've decided whether I want to dance in front of half of Pondera County.
"I don't dance," I tell him.
"Neither do I." He's already pulling me onto the temporary dance floor on the lawn, past Knox and Maren, past two Sullivan cousins and their dates doing something that might generously be called a waltz. "We'll figure it out together. Lower the bar considerably."
"That's not romantic, Blackwater."
"Wasn't trying for romantic. Was trying for honest."
His hand settles at my waist, warm through silk, and mine finds his shoulder.
For two beats we just stand there doing something that isn't quite dancing and isn't quite standing still either.
Then his hips find the rhythm and mine follow and it turns out neither of us needed to figure anything out at all.
He's warm everywhere I touch him. Through the black shirt, steam is coming off him same as always, and I can feel his heartbeat where my palm rests against his chest. His jaw is close to my temple, his mouth even closer, and when he finally speaks, it's pitched so it doesn't carry to anyone else.
"You know what I've been thinking about all night?"
"Kathleen sat you next to a man who talked about hay futures for twenty minutes. I watched you die a little."
"That's not what I've been thinking about."
"Enlighten me."