Page 42 of Desired

Both of them slick and heaving and laughing at nothing, her heart banging against his ribs like it wanted in. Mason wrapped both arms around her back automatically, his hand spreading between her shoulder blades, rubbing there without thinking. She made a sleepy little sound against his throat that nearly undid him all over again.

He kissed her hair.

Outside, the night hadn't changed.

Inside, everything had.

He held on and thought nothing, gloriously, for whole minutes, a man with an empty head and a full house.

"Well," she said eventually, into his neck. "Happy wedding."

"Happy wedding."

"Do all Royston weddings end like this?"

"There's a hope for it, yeah. It's on the invitation. Small print."

She laughed, felt it go through both of them, and pulled the quilt up over her shoulders without moving off him, which he took as a ruling on where the night was ending, and he had no appeals to file.

The house ticked and settled. The window went from black to blacker, the moon gone down somewhere over his father's works, and her breathing stretched out long and slow against his chest, and Mason lay in the dark of the house he'd built on his mother's family land, with the woman from the seam asleep on his heart, and took inventory the way he did at the end of any big day of work, unhurried, item by item.

The flowers in the cold hall that morning, and her hands knowing what to do before she did. The green dress coming up the church walk. Levi's cake, Giana's petals, his baby sister stitching Lauren into the family like it was needlework she'd been planning all her life. The slow song. The porch steps. Her palm on his jaw, there you are, like she'd found something she'd been looking for.

Thirty-one years he'd wondered what it felt like, the thing that landed on other men. He'd made his peace with never knowing, and peace was the wrong word for it, and he knew that now, tonight, with the full count in his arms.

It felt like this.

He fell asleep holding all of it, and slept like a man who'd never owed anybody a word.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lauren woke up in Mason Royston's bed with the sun coming through unfamiliar curtains, and lay still a minute taking stock, and the stock was good.

She was warm. She was wrapped in a quilt that smelled like him and pinned under an arm that weighed roughly what the gate had, and somewhere in the night she'd claimed both pillows and he'd let her, and the light through the curtains was the wrong color for early, which meant she'd slept past seven for the first time since Denver. Outside, far off, a tractor was running somewhere on his father's place, and the sound of other people working while she lay in a warm bed doing nothing was, she decided, one of the finest sounds in the world.

The other thing she woke up with was the decision.

It had finished itself somewhere in the night, like the big ones did, quietly, without her, the whole question folding up while she slept. She'd come to Texas with a plan she could have said in one breath, clean it up, sell it, be somewhere else by spring, and she lay in Mason's bed and looked for the plan and found it dead. It'd been dead a while, if she was honest. It probably died at the picnic, or the first morning the water ran, or on a bench with bobby pins in her hand, and she'd been carrying it around out of habit, the way you carry a key to a place you don't live anymore.

She wasn't selling. Not to the standing interest in Nathan Greene's letter, not to the realtor in Midland whose sign she'd stopped seeing weeks ago, not to anybody. Monday morning she was going to call Greene's office and make it official, and then she was going to stand in her grandfather's kitchen and figure out what a florist does with a hundred and sixty acres, and the thought of that problem, that exact problem, made her want to get up and start.

Mason stirred behind her, and his arm gathered her back into him like she was drifting stock, and his mouth found the back of her neck, half asleep and unhurried about it.

"You're thinking," he said, into her hair. "I can hear it."

"It's nearly eight. Normal people are up."

"It's Sunday. Normal people are snug in bed." His hand had started moving, slow, flat-palmed, down the length of her stomach, a man in no hurry anywhere, and her breath went unreliable on schedule. "You got somewhere to be?"

"No," she said, and turned over in his arms, and for a good while after that neither of them was anywhere else.

It was different in the morning. Slower, warmer, half laughing, the urgency of last night gone and something easier in its place, his stubble against her throat and her cold feet against his shins by way of revenge, the two of them unhurried and thorough with the sun climbing the curtains, and when she finally came apart it was with her face pressed into his neck and his name gone soft in her mouth, and he followed her holding on like the quilt had, like the whole morning had, warm and heavy and staying.

After, she lay on his chest and listened to his heart slow down, and thought, this. This was what she was keeping. The land and the kitchen and the beds gone wild behind the house, and this.

"Coffee," Mason said eventually, to the ceiling, with the gravity of a man announcing a cattle drive.

"Coffee," she agreed.