Page 26 of Reluctant Bride

“If Robbie was right before he died, Mackenzie might not even have the right building.” His fingers brush mine as he lets the words settle, and even now, even with a dead informant’s ghost sitting on the counter between us, that brush travels straight through me like it always does. “Which means whoever’s behind this has been patient enough to stay invisible through two smaller mistakes and one dead informant. That’s not panic. That’s discipline.”

“Comforting.”

“I told you I wasn’t trying to comfort you.” He sets his empty cup in the sink, rinses it himself without being asked, and the sight of a Sullivan rinsing his own cup in my kitchen chips one more brick out of the wall I’ve been rebuilding since the courthouse. “Get changed. I want to ride the Corridor and see the sightline from ground level instead of a photograph. If somebody’s been watching this house long enough to know which afternoon light hits the porch just right, I want to know how close they had to stand to get it.”

“That’s not a romantic invitation.”

“It’s the only kind I’ve got today.” He’s already at the door, pulling his damp shirt over his head one-handed, and I refuse, on principle, to watch the muscles in his back do what they do while he does it. I fail almost immediately. “Ten minutes, Blackwater.”

“It’s Sullivan. Legally.”

“Ten minutes, Sullivan.”

He says my new name like he’s testing the sound of it, and a reckless answer kicks up in me, louder than it should be at six in the morning.

Rae has both horses saddled by the time we reach the barn, Bravo already restless under Dawson’s tack, Briar standing with her ears pinned in a way that means she’s decided this morning is beneath her.

Rae looks between us once, quick, assessing, the same look she gives a horse before she decides whether it’s sound enough to ride. Whatever she sees, she doesn’t say a word about it. Just hands me Briar’s lead and goes back to coiling rope like the silence isn’t a verdict.

That’s worse than if she’d said something.

Briar fights me at the gate the second we reach the Corridor, head tossing, back legs dancing sideways, the exact temper she’s had since Gideon bought her as a yearling nobody else wanted. I don’t fight her back. I let the lead go loose in my hand and turn her in a wide half circle instead, giving her somewhere else to put all that refusal until the gate stops being the enemy and starts being the only interesting direction left. She walks through it twenty seconds later like it was her idea all along.

Dawson’s watching me the whole time from Bravo’s saddle, a thought I can’t read working behind his eyes.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing.” He nudges Bravo forward to fall in beside me. “I just watched you talk a half-ton animal into doing what you wanted without raising your voice once.”

“She’s not stupid. She just needed a better idea than the one she came in with.”

“That’s how you killed my road.” He says it without heat, almost admiring, and I feel it land low and warm despite myself. “You didn’t fight the county commission. You gave them a better idea than mine and let them think they found it themselves.”

“You’re only figuring that out now?”

“I figured it out fourteen months ago. I’m just telling you out loud for the first time.”

We ride the fence line in a silence that isn’t uncomfortable, the Corridor stretching green and empty ahead of us, alfalfa fields catching the early light on one side, cattle grazing in the rotation pasture on the other. The Front rises up out of the grassland to the west like it grew there overnight, granite gone bright and yellow and brilliant where the sun hits it, the kind of abrupt, ten-thousand-foot wall of rock that still stops my breath even after a lifetime of waking up underneath it. Dawson checks the tree line every few hundred yards without seeming to, the same quiet vigilance he wears into every room he doesn’t fully trust.

“You’ve been photographing my desk,” he says, out of nowhere, conversational, like he’s commenting on the weather again.

I nearly lose my seat.

“Excuse me?”

“Both nights.” He’s not looking at me, eyes still on the fence line, voice perfectly level. “I notice things move. Everything back exactly a half inch off from where I left it. Too precise to be nothing, not precise enough to be me. You’ve been documenting my desk for your father, and you’re better at it than you think, but not quite good enough to fool a man who runs the same operation.”

Heat crawls up my throat, half mortification, half the sting of being caught at a task far more intimate than surveillance.

“You could’ve said something.”

“You could’ve asked what was on it.” He finally looks at me from under the brim of his hat and there’s no accusation in it at all, just that same infuriating calm. “Instead, I’ve been leaving things out for you. The Sullivan border contracts. The freight manifests you needed. I’ve been handing you what your father wants and watching you take it like you outsmarted me.”

I stare at him. “You’ve been feeding me information on purpose.”

“I’ve been giving my wife what she needs to do her job.” A wicked ghost of a grin crosses his mouth. “You could’ve just asked me what’s on it, Sage.”

“You could’ve just asked what I was looking for.”