Page 20 of Desired

The evening got a shade darker. Somewhere behind them the band found the front of a waltz and the string lights came on all at once, a soft yellow wash that reached the edge of the blanket and stopped, and Lauren looked at the line where the light gave up, because it was easier than his face.

"About the fence line," Mason said.

"We don't have to⁠—"

"You didn't misread it."

"Mason. It's okay."

"I watched you walk back to your house yesterday with your spine straight, talking yourself out of it," he said. "And you've kept a crowd between us all day today. So this goes first. You didn't invent anything. I was one inch from kissing you in the middle of your own pasture and there is nothing in this county I've wanted more, before or since."

"Then why'd you stop?" It came out low and even and cost her everything in the envelope.

He was quiet a second. She watched him choose, actually watched it, a man going through his own pockets for the true thing.

"I was trying to do the right thing," he said. "That's the whole of it. And it was the hardest thing I've walked away from in a long time." He looked at her. "Maybe ever."

The lights hummed behind her. The waltz turned over. Lauren sat on a blanket she'd been bought at auction, holding a paper cup of sweet tea she had no memory of picking up, and understood that she had spent one entire day building a wall out of nothing happened and this man had just walked through it without even raising his voice, and the thing underneath the wall was still there, undamaged, exactly the size it had been in the pasture. Bigger. It had eaten all day and gotten bigger.

It scared her the way real numbers scare you. Not the wanting. The size of it.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I'm thinking." She set the cup down with great care. "I don't trust charming men. I want that on the record."

"It's on the record. Pearl has it notarized."

"And I came out here tonight fully intending to eat brisket and go home having felt nothing."

"How's that going?"

She looked at him. The grin was starting at the corner of his mouth, patient, one candle of it, and past his shoulder the string lights ended in a clean line on the grass, light on one side, dark on the other, and Lauren Merritt, who had spent twenty-two years being good at somewhere else, stood up off the blanket and put her hand down for his.

He looked at the hand. Then at her. Then he took it and came up, and she walked him the four steps past the line where the light quit, and turned, and took a fistful of his jacket in the dark, and kissed him.

She felt the surprise go through him, one hitch of breath, and then his arms came around her and the surprise was gone and so was the rest of the county. He kissed her back slow and thorough and sure, one hand spreading warm at the small of her back right where the print had lived for two weeks, the other coming up into her hair like he'd been thinking about it since the diner, since the wrench, since a gate, and he took his time about it, all his time, and there was nothing easy in it anywhere. That was the part that undid her. She'd been kissed plenty, by men who kissed the way Mason charmed, currency spent smooth on everyone. This wasn't spending. His mouth was hungry and careful at once, and his hand had closed in her hair not hard enough to be anything but honest, and he kissed her like a man who'd been standing at a locked door a lot longer than three weeks and had quit expecting anybody to open it.

She pulled back an inch just to breathe and his forehead came down to hers and stayed, both of them loud in the lungs, his heart going under her fist where it was still full of his jacket.

"For the record," she said, not quite steady. "That's me taking it back. The misreading."

"Taken back." His voice was wrecked and quiet, and the laugh under it was hers now, nobody else's. "All of it?"

"Every version."

He kissed her again, softer, shorter, a signature at the bottom of a page, and behind them past the light line the band played to the whole gathered county, and somewhere in that yellow glow half of Soluno was settling up with Earl.

Lauren had never placed a bet in her life. Standing in the dark in a bought man's arms, she'd won anyway.

CHAPTER NINE

Mason lasted until Tuesday.

Two days. He'd have called it discipline if anybody asked, except nobody had to ask, because the whole county had watched a woman kiss him past the string lights Saturday night and the whole county knew exactly where his truck would be pointed the minute he got off work. Monday he shipped the last of the cull cows and took the ribbing at the pens, Knox conducting it, Jace guest-starring, both of them enjoying themselves at a volume the cattle objected to. Tuesday he worked until five like a man serving out a sentence, cleaned up, and drove into town, where Pearl packed him two suppers in a paper sack and said nothing at all, which from Pearl was a standing ovation.

Lauren met him on the porch with her hair down.