Page 69 of Reluctant Bride

My hands hold until my boots hit gravel, and then they quit.

Dawson checks me over twice before he lets go of my face. Knox does it a third time right after him, like the two of them split the job of making sure I’m still in one piece and neither one trusts the other’s hands. Then it’s radios and license plates and somebody saying lockdown like it’s a word with a comma already built into it, gate to gate, every road in and out of the valley. I sit there and take all of it in, spine straight, voice steady, answering every question Mackenzie fires at me in order.

It’s only once I’m out of the truck that my hands decide the emergency is over and they’re allowed to fall apart.

Dawson doesn’t say anything about it. He just takes both in his, safe and warm and still marked with someone else’s blood, and envelops them until mine stop trying to escape my own skin.

He presses his mouth to my forehead, brief and gentle, and doesn’t let go.

“Knew that was coming,” he says, quiet, once my hands are my own again.

“Don’t gloat.”

“I’m not gloating. I’m taking inventory.” A ghost of humor crosses his face, gone fast, replaced by the focus he wears like a second skin whenever there’s a body count involved. “You held it together through two rounds of me and your brother poking at your skull and an entire lockdown briefing. That’s not nothing, Sage.”

“I hate that you’re keeping score.”

“I’m keeping a list. Yours has one entry and it reads survived.”

Knox is already on the radio with Mackenzie, and Rae’s truck rattles up the gravel behind us before I’ve finished being handed into the passenger seat of Dawson’s, Cricket already installed on the bench seat like she’s decided she’s driving. Rae doesn’t ask a single question. She just leans in, sets Cricket’s blanket over both of us like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and squeezes my knee once before she goes to deal with the horses nobody remembered to unsaddle.

Nobody at the house asks me what happened for the rest of the night. Tessa leaves another casserole on the porch without knocking, the foil still warm, gone again before I can catch her to say thank you. Somebody, I never find out who, leaves a fresh box of gauze on the kitchen counter next to a bottle of the good whiskey, like my family decided the correct response to almost losing me is carbohydrates and top-shelf liquor delivered in total silence. With the ranch on lockdown, nobody from town gets past the gate tonight except Tessa, who apparently outranks a security perimeter.

Dawson cleans the cut at my hairline himself, in the bathroom, both of us still in our ruined clothes.

“Hold still.”

“I’m holding still.”

“You flinched.”

“I always flinch. You know this about me.” I catch his eyes in the mirror, top teeth biting his lower lip in concentration, and underneath the gentleness something colder is still running. I can see his brain churning, already several steps into whatever he’s planning before the sun’s up. “Is it bad?”

“It’s not stitches bad.” He dabs the antiseptic along the cut, and I hiss through my teeth despite every intention of being brave about it. “Shallow. Head wounds bleed like a crime scene no matter how small they are. You’ll have a bruise for a week and a very dramatic story to tell at Nell’s.”

“I already have several very dramatic stories to tell at Nell’s. This one’s not even cracking my top three.”

“Deeply concerning information about your life.”

“You married into it.”

“I’d marry into it again tomorrow. Doesn’t mean I’m not filing a complaint.” He tapes the last strip of gauze into place, careful and slow, and presses one kiss to the crown of my head. “Six days. Feels like a lifetime already.”

“Six days of me almost dying, both of us getting framed, a truck bay exploding, and finding out our entire families’ war was staged from the start.” I say it before he can, because watching him carry all of it alone for one more sentence isn’t a thing I’m willing to do tonight. “Add it up. That’s not a marriage. That’s a hostage situation with great sex.”

His eyebrow goes up, slow, and something wicked replaces the exhaustion in his face for just a second. “Great sex, huh?”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late.” He drags his thumb along my jaw, in no hurry at all, watching me like everything else he’s decided is his. “Fuck, why does being married to you have to be this complicated?”

“You picked the family, Sullivan. Complications came standard.”

He doesn’t let go of me after that. He walks me to the tub instead, turns the taps himself, tests the water twice with his wrist before he decides it’s right, and starts on the buttons of my shirt slow enough that it stops being about getting me clean and starts being about something else entirely. He works each one loose with practiced fingers, watching my face instead of his own hands, and by the time the shirt slides off my shoulders my breath’s gone shallow for reasons that have nothing to do with the day I’ve had.

He peels my jeans down next, on his knees now, and presses his mouth right over where the jade sits hidden beneath the last scrap of fabric, a slow drag of his tongue against the cotton that has my breath catching hard enough to embarrass me, before he keeps going and drops the ruined pile of clothes somewhere neither of us is looking at anymore. His hands are steady, but I catch the muscle ticking along his jaw the whole time, the same one that gives him away right before he decides someone’s about to have a very bad night, except tonight it’s tangled up with something hungrier instead.

“Get in,” he says.