Page 21 of Reluctant Bride

I think about his hand at my jaw. His knuckles dragging along the line of it. The gravel drop in his voice right before he steps back and makes himself the one who stops.

My hips lift off the bed. My back bows. I bite down on the inside of my own wrist to keep quiet in a house that’s supposed to be empty, and when it breaks over me it breaks hard, a full-body pulse that leaves my thighs trembling and my chest heaving and absolutely nothing about my heart settled.

Cricket tilts her head the other direction, ears up, deeply unimpressed, and lets out one soft, confused huff, like she’s reconsidering her whole assessment of me.

“Yeah,” I tell her, breathless, staring at the ceiling. “Me too.”

When it’s over, I lie there wrecked in a completely different way than before, because my mind has spent eight years building an airtight case that I got over him cleanly, and my body just testified against me in about ninety seconds flat, with a dog as my only witness.

If he’s going to live in my head rent-free while staying perfectly composed across the hall, he doesn’t get to do that alone.

I find my phone before I find my dignity.

One photo of you. Every night before bed. You go first. How about your abs?

I hit send before I can talk myself out of it, and I sit there staring at the three dots that appear almost instantly, disappear, appear again, like even Dawson Sullivan needs a second to decide how much of himself he’s willing to hand a woman who just spent the afternoon reading his handwriting in a book he never should have kept.

His reply comes in under ten seconds.

It isn’t a photograph of him.

It’s a screenshot from the security feed, grainy, night vision green, timestamped ninety seconds ago. The Corridor gate, the one that splits Sullivan land from Blackwater land, the one Robbie’s truck sat idling near with the engine running and no driver in the cab.

A man’s silhouette stands at the fence line, motionless, facing the house.

Camera went dark for eleven seconds before this. West can’t explain the gap. Stay inside. Lock the doors. I’m on my way.

I’m still holding the phone, still half undone from ten minutes ago, still furious about a paperback and a man who kept it, and none of that matters anymore, because ninety seconds ago a man was standing at our fence line in the dark, looking at exactly the house I’m standing in, and I have no way of knowing whether he still is.

EIGHT

DAWSON

Boot prints. That’s the whole haul.

One set, deep in the soft ground on the Blackwater side of the Corridor gate, toes pointed at the house like whoever wore them stood here long enough to get comfortable about it. No shell casings. No fiber snagged on the wire. No cigarette butt with a story to tell. Whoever stood at this fence less than an hour ago knew exactly how long a security gap lasts and left before it closed.

Sage crouches beside me with a flashlight, jeans pulled on over what I’d bet money is a nightgown. Her hair is knotted up fast and messy, the same careless way it used to fall out of its braid the summer we used to meet past these exact trees. The wind carries just enough of her, warm skin, something floral, that I lose a full second remembering the last time her hair looked like this and what we were doing right before it did.

“Nothing,” she says. Not a question.

“Nothing we can use.” I snap out of my daze and straighten, scan the tree line one more time out of habit, not hope. “Whoever it was, they’ve done this before. This isn’t a first try.”

“Comforting.”

“I didn’t say it to comfort you.”

“I know. That’s what makes it comforting.” She stands, brushes dirt off her knees, flashlight beam swinging across the grass like she’s still hunting for something the ground refuses to give up. “So. This is it. Married six hours, and I’m standing in a field with my husband checking a fence line for a stalker instead of doing anything a wedding night is supposed to involve.”

I look at her. Mud on her boots, gun holstered at her hip that she put there herself without asking me for one, moonlight catching the sharp line of her cheekbones and turning her full lips pale, her eyes gone darker gold than whiskey in the low light, the color they only turn at night. Flippant is safer than saying what I feel standing here, so I go with flippant.

“I did promise you the wedding of a lifetime.”

She bites down on her full lower lip before she answers, and it sends heat, unwelcome and immediate, straight through me, the exact wrong reaction for a man looking for a stalker.

“You promised me nothing. I read the contract. Very thorough. Not one clause about romance.”

“There’s a clause about full threat disclosure.” I nod at the boot prints. “This is me disclosing.”