Mackenzie #3
"I've been sitting on something," I tell him, before I lose the nerve I spent half the party building up. "Since the hospital. I should have told you weeks ago."
His hands go still on my knee.
"That sounds ominous for a man who just danced in front of his entire family," he says, but there's nothing light in his eyes anymore, just the same total attention he gives me now, both eyes gone black.
"Not ominous." I hold his gaze, my thumb drifting along his jaw before I let myself keep going. "The night you came off the anesthesia. You don't remember most of it. I know you don't, because you've never once brought it up, and if you remembered you absolutely would have."
My face goes warm, and it has nothing to do with the champagne.
"You told me a lot of things that night, Holt."
"Like what?"
His hands leave my knee and start climbing, slow, deliberate, fingers trailing up the outside of my thigh and under the hem of the dress where the slit already gives him an opening. My next sentence comes out a half-beat late, breath catching before the words do.
"You said I was wearing purple." I hold his eyes, watch something flicker there, uncertain, waiting. "Purple lace. You said you took your time with it. Said I looked like you'd been handed the best gift of your whole life."
His fingers freeze against my thigh.
"You told me you flipped me over," I go on, quieter now, watching every inch of his face while I say it. "Slow. In my ass. Until I couldn't tell if I was crying or coming."
"Christ." It comes out of him rough, half laugh, half something else entirely, and his hands tighten on my legs. "I said that? Out loud? To you?"
"You said a great deal more than that, actually."
"Mackenzie."
"You called it the best night of your whole life. Asked if we could do it again right then, hooked up to a drip, ten pins in your hand." I lean forward, close enough that my mouth is an inch from his. "I never corrected you. I let you keep it."
"Why?"
"Because you've never once let yourself say anything like that to me sober, and I wasn't giving it back for free. Because some nights a woman gets to keep a secret that isn't a threat to anyone, for once, and I wanted that one."
I straighten up, reach behind me for the hidden zipper at the small of my back, and let the dark blue silk slide down off my shoulders.
"And because I bought this dress and the matching set three weeks ago, Blackwater.
Purple lace. I've been waiting for the right night to actually give you the real thing. "
His breath goes out of him rough, both hands landing on my hips like he needs somewhere to put them.
The silk pools at my waist and I let it keep falling, no rush to it at all, exactly like he promised it would look on the floor tonight. His eyes go from my face down and stop there, black and entirely still. The same stillness I first learned to read in a truck from an airport a hundred years ago.
"You're wearing it right now."
"Have been all night." I stand and let the dress finish its fall to the floor.
I watch him take in dark purple lace against skin that's had his hands all over it for hours and none of the parts that count yet.
"Every second of that dance, Holt. Every time you told me what you were going to do to me once we got home. This was under it the whole time."
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. He just looks, and his breathing changes, and there's nothing contained left in it now, nothing held back, nothing tucked away for later.
My desire rushes straight to my clit, hot and insistent, and I'm sure he can smell exactly how soaked I already am for him.
Then he comes up off his knees, and I don't get another word in for a long time.
Later, tangled in his sheets with the window cracked to the cold mountain air, his heartbeat slow and even under my ear, Sage's face keeps surfacing behind my closed eyes, the light going out of it behind a smile that never dropped.
Two families spent a whole night proving marriage could bind them back together.
Gideon watched Knox and Maren dance and said it out loud, standing right beside us. Three words he didn't bother lowering his voice for. Whatever he said to Sage an hour later, standing at the edge of the tent line where nobody else could hear it, wasn't spoken like a choice at all.
I don't know what either of them was told. I know it came from both fathers within minutes of each other, on the same night the county watched one marriage get celebrated in the open. That kind of timing isn't a coincidence a person gets to ignore.
McKenna Group didn't exist until 2011. Everyone agrees on that. It's in the filings, the incorporation documents, every clean paper trail the Bureau's ever pulled.
Josephine told me not to pull on the date, 1962. Told me to wait until someone asked me for it.
But who was paying for a survey on Broken Sky Mountain in 1962, in the high country neither family has ever actually owned, thirty years before a company in Canada came into existence to hide what's been killing people ever since, including my grandfather?