Mackenzie #2
"This dress." His mouth brushes the shell of my ear, and my whole spine goes electric. "How it's going to look on my bedroom floor in about two hours. How long I'm going to make myself wait before I get you out of it."
"That's presumptuous."
"Is it wrong?"
"No," I admit, and feel him smile against my temple, satisfied, in no hurry at all. "It's not wrong."
"Good." His hand drifts, deliberate, until it's cupping the curve of my ass through silk, and I feel every finger of it, and I feel, unmistakably, what this party has been doing to him, in the hard bulge of his dress pants against my hip.
"Because I've had my hands full of that dress in my head since you walked out of the bathroom, and I intend to collect on the real thing the second we're somewhere private. "
"You could at least buy me dinner first."
"I sat through an entire dinner at the same table as you, four seats away, and couldn't touch you once. Watched you laugh at somebody else's joke for an hour and had to sit on my own hands about it. That's dinner covered, and I paid for it in suffering."
I laugh, rough and unguarded, right against his collar, and he pulls me in another inch, close enough that there's no pretending the heat between us is anything but exactly what it looks like.
Around us the whole lawn is glowing and golden and full of people who love each other in complicated, damaged, entirely earned ways.
For one full song I don't think about McKenna or Voss or Gideon's one sentence or anything at all except the fact that this man's hands are on my body in front of God and half of Rimrock, and I have never once been ashamed of it.
I notice it because I never fully stop noticing things, even in a dress, even three champagnes in.
Gideon crosses to the edge of the tent line and says something quiet to Sage, and she goes, glass still in hand, laughing at something he hasn't finished saying yet.
Across the lawn, at almost the same moment, Declan pulls Dawson aside near the drink table, both of them still holding champagne, still smiling for the crowd they're stepping out of.
Neither conversation lasts long. Neither one looks, from thirty feet away, like anything at all.
Sage comes back first. The laugh's still on her face and then it isn't, all at once, like someone reached in and turned off a light behind her eyes while leaving the smile switched on out of pure muscle memory.
She finds her champagne glass with both hands like she's forgotten what else to do with them, and her knuckles have gone white around the stem before she notices and loosens her grip.
Dawson doesn't come back for a while. When he does, he's got his jacket back on, which nobody else at this party has bothered with, and something in the set of his shoulders has gone rigid enough that even from here I can see it.
He shakes one man's hand on his way past the bar, says something that makes the man laugh, and I watch his jaw tick twice while he does it. A muscle firing under skin that never once matches the smile on top of it.
Nobody announces anything. The band doesn't stop. Finn's already halfway into another story to somebody near the bar, and Kathleen is directing a server toward the cake table like nothing in the entire evening has shifted at all.
But I watch two people get pulled out of Knox and Maren's engagement party and handed something that isn't a gift, and I watch them both put their faces back together fast enough that only somebody trained to catch exactly this kind of thing would ever notice.
A dynasty doesn't run out of tools. It just goes back to the oldest one it owns and uses it again, on whichever child is standing closest when the fear gets bad enough.
"Holt." I keep my voice pitched down, my eyes still on Sage across the lawn.
"I saw it." His hand tightens at my waist, and for one second the man holding me isn't the one who danced two songs ago.
His eyes track Declan across the lawn with the same flat, patient stillness, marking exits, and then it's gone, tucked back behind the black shirt and the easy shoulders, like he never let it show at all. "Don't ask them tonight."
"I wasn't going to."
"I know you weren't. I'm telling you anyway."
I let it go, because he's right, and because a server's already angling toward us with a tray of fresh champagne, Kathleen's silent signal from across the lawn that everyone's glass needs topping off.
But I don't forget the look on Sage's face. I keep it, the way I keep everything now. Quiet, patient, and waiting for the day someone hands it back to me and asks what I'm going to do with it.
The house is dark when we finally get in, past midnight, many glasses of champagne and a pair of heels conspiring against me on the gravel until Holt's hand closes around my arm and steadies me up the porch steps.
Gus meets us at the door, tail going, entirely unbothered by the late hour or the dress or any of it.
"Best part of my whole night," I tell the dog, crouching to scratch his ears despite the silk, "and you didn't even have to make small talk about hay futures."
"Traitor," Holt says, but there's no heat in it, just a man watching his dog love someone he loves too.
Upstairs, the loft's dark except for moonlight coming through the west glass, Broken Sky standing black against a sky gone clear and star-heavy.
I sit on the edge of his bed to unbuckle the heel and he crouches in front of me, takes over the job himself, easy, taking his time, his thumb dragging up the arch of my foot before he sets it down.