Page 19 of Desired

"Seventy." A third voice, older. Somebody's mother, bidding with a raised pie server. Laughter rolling now.

"Eighty," called the good boots.

Lauren stood in the second row with her arms crossed hard and learned several things about herself in rapid succession, and hated every one of them. It went through her exactly the way Jace's arm had gone through Mason, she'd watched that happen and been dumb enough to enjoy it, and now here was the bill: half the single women in three counties bidding on a man she had no claim to, no bid in, nothing but a folded-up story about a fence line and a thumb on her cheekbone, and every number called out of that crowd landed on her like a small flat stone.

She could bid. That was the thing she could not stop knowing. Her hands stayed under her arms.

Because she couldn't afford it, for one. The envelope in her kitchen drawer was counted to the dollar and the roof was going to take all of it, and she'd been living on that arithmetic since Denver. But the money was the excuse, and she knew it. The real reason was simpler and worse. A bid was an announcement. Stand up in front of the whole county, call out a number, and let every soul at this picnic hear exactly how much Lauren Merritt wanted Mason Royston, one day after she'd decided she imagined the whole thing. She wasn't going to shout at a trailer what she couldn't say in her own kitchen.

Her hand came up anyway. Halfway, all on its own, before she caught it and turned it into fixing her hair, and only two people in that crowd saw it happen. One was Pearl, who missed nothing from a podium.

And Lara.

Lauren saw it happen. Saw Lara catch the hand, read it in full, and turn her head, unhurried, toward Remi and Elena and Ainsley. Saw the four of them have an entire conversation in one look, the kind of ballot that doesn't need words, and saw every one of those women reach for her purse.

"No," Lauren said. "No. What are you⁠—"

"One fifty!" Jace's voice, from the back, rich with joy, a man bidding on his own brother purely to raise the temperature. The crowd roared.

"You can't bid on your brother, Jace Royston," Pearl said into the microphone.

"Says where?"

"Says me, and I've got the gavel." But she let the number stand, because the fire department needed a pump truck, and the good boots said one seventy-five, and the pie-server mother dropped out with a gesture of blessing, and beside Lauren the purses were open and the bills were coming out and being counted into Remi's cupped hands with the speed of a crew that had drilled for this.

"Don't you dare," Lauren said. "Don't⁠—"

"Two hundred!" Remi's voice went up out of the second row like a flare, joy from boot to crown.

The county turned around. All of it. Pearl leaned on the podium with the deep satisfaction of a woman watching her own weather arrive on schedule, and up on the flatbed Mason had stopped performing mortification and gone still, and he wasn't looking at the bidders. He was looking at Lauren, standing in a knot of women with money moving all around her and her face on fire, and even at thirty yards she saw the moment he understood, and the grin that came up out of him then had nothing for the crowd in it at all.

"Two twenty-five," said the good boots, gamely.

"Two fifty," said Ainsley, without raising her voice, in the tone of a woman closing a gate, and something in it must have been audible clear to the back, because the good boots laughed and lifted her cup in surrender.

"Two fifty," Pearl said. "Going once. Going twice." The gavel hovered. Her eyes found Lauren's, one beat, and there was a wink in them that never reached her face. "SOLD, to the ladies' syndicate, acting on behalf of a party to be named directly, and God bless the fire department."

The gavel came down. The county cheered and hollered and turned, in one movement, all of it, every face, to look at Lauren.

She died. She stood there in her good coat holding nobody's hand and died in front of the whole gathered county, and Remi pressed the collected wad of bills into her fist and folded her fingers over it, and Elena said, dry as the county, "You'll want to pay at the table, it's deductible," and up on the trailer Pearl leaned into the microphone one last time.

"Prize is a picnic date, honey," Pearl said, to Lauren, personally, over the PA, into eight hundred ears. "Redeemable this evening. We packed the basket."

They gave her the basket and they gave her the man and the county, having eaten her alive, went back to its barbecue with the benevolence of a beast that was full.

The blanket was at the east edge of the grounds, past the last lawn chairs, where the light from the strings just gave out and the music arrived softened, and they sat on it in the blue end of the afternoon with Marge's basket between them, and for a while the basket got all the attention two people can give food they aren't tasting.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars," Lauren said, finally.

"County record." He said it gravely. "Old record was Harvey, 2008. Two hundred even. Pearl bid, story goes, and then claimed it was for her sister."

"Everyone watched. Everyone. I'm going to hear about it the whole ride home, and then at Pearl's every morning for the rest of my life."

"Yeah." No apology in it anywhere. He was leaning back on his hands, looking at her in the last of the light, and he had the nerve to look pleased about all of it, the flatbed, the gavel, the number, her. "Worth every dollar of other people's money."

"I didn't bid," she said, with the last dignity she had.

"I know." And then, easy, like it was nothing, like it wasn't everything: "Your hand came up, though."