Page 22 of Desired

"I'm not going anywhere."

The quiet came down soft. Her hand was curled on his chest, right over the second button, and the lamplight found the rust-colored streak of an old scrape on her knuckle, three weeks of this place written on her hands already, and he lay there warm and wrecked and happier than he had any right to be, and into that exact happiness, same as at the fence line, came his father's voice. No warning. Attaboy.

Tell her.

Now. Tonight. This was the quiet hour he'd promised himself, the one after the picnic, and here it was, delivered, gift-wrapped, her weight trusting on his chest and the whole truth four sentences long. My father wants your land. He sent me to charm you off it. I told him no before I ever saw your face. And I should have told you all of it three weeks ago. Four sentences into her hair and the floor under them never has to be checked again.

"Lauren."

"Mm."

Her breath had already gone long and slow. Her hand twitched once on his chest, some small dream carrying her, and the lamplight sat gold on her lashes, and Mason lay there with the four sentences loaded and looked at the ceiling of her grandfather's house.

If he said it now, she'd wake to it. Wake half-asleep and warm on his chest to the words my father wants your land, in the first hour she'd ever trusted him with her sleeping weight, and whatever came after would come with her half-dressed and unarmed in her own living room. She deserved daylight for it. She deserved to have her boots on. He'd tell her whole and standing up, after the holiday, when it wouldn't land like an ambush in the dark.

He listened to himself arrange it, the way he'd arranged it on the seam road Friday night, and some cold corner of him did the arithmetic anyway: that made twice.

"Nothing," he said, soft, into her hair. "Sleep."

He stayed until her breathing told him she was all the way under, and then a while past that, because leaving felt like putting down something he'd waited his whole life to carry. Then he eased out from under her an inch at a time, got a pillow where his chest had been, pulled the quilt to her chin, and let himself out into the cold with his boots in his hand like a thief stealing nothing.

He was back at quarter to six.

The sky was still black at the bottom and thinking about gray at the top, her kitchen window dark, the county road empty behind him. He parked short of the cattle guard and walked in so the truck wouldn't wake her, carrying the short crowbar and a handful of deck screws and the good driver, and he knelt at the porch in the freezing dark and found the third step by feel.

The board had pulled its nails at one end, twenty years of West Texas doing what it does to softwood, riding up a half inch proud of its stringer, just enough to grab a boot heel or catch a woman's shoe every single trip and get itself kicked for it. He seated it flat, sank four screws where the nails had given up, and ran his palm across the edge in the dark. Smooth. He set his boot on it and gave it his whole weight, twice.

Quiet.

He gathered his tools and went back down the drive the way he'd come, and the sky was going gray for real now, the windmill standing straight against it, and he was on the county road with the heater running before her kitchen light came on.

CHAPTER TEN

Lauren rode to Royston Ranch on Thanksgiving with her hands in her lap and a store-bought pie she'd sworn never to repeat, and Mason drove with one wrist over the wheel and told her names the whole way like a man cramming her for the quiz. She lost track somewhere around the second Chase story. It didn't matter. The moment they came through the door into the noise, warmth and woodsmoke and a table running the whole length of a room built for it, half the names came attached to faces she already knew, and the faces looked up and said her name back.

Both fathers were there. That was the thing she watched all afternoon, once she knew to watch it: John Royston at one end of the table, upright and careful in the way of a man rebuilt from something, and Clay at the other, silver and expansive, and between them sixty feet of family working like a bucket brigade to keep anything from passing directly between the two. They didn't argue. They didn't speak, either, except once, about rain, and the whole table held its breath through four sentences of weather and exhaled when it ended. Mason had called it the family's one great annual performance. He hadn't been joking, and nobody was laughing.

Addi arrived at half past one, straight from the Midland airport, preceded by her own voice.

"Do not get up," she announced to a room in which nobody had gotten up, dropping two bags and opening her arms at the assembly like a returning astronaut. "I've been traveling since five a.m. and I love everyone here. Where's my sister? Lara! You look disgusting, you're glowing, I hate it. Is that Helen? Helen, I've thought about your cornbread dressing on three separate legs of this journey."

"My little sister," Lara said to Lauren, already crossing the room. "Addi. She's an actress. Small parts, so far, but the Oscar speech is already written. It explains most of it."

"I heard that," Addi called across the room, mid-hug, over somebody's shoulder. "And it's a beautiful speech. You're barely in it."

Then her attention came down the room like a spotlight and stopped.

"And you must be Lauren." She said it with the deep satisfaction of a woman confirming a rumor she'd been enjoying for weeks, and then, with no shame anywhere on her person, she looked past Lauren at Mason and winked.

Which meant somebody had been talking. To Boston. By phone, at length, evidently with detail, and Lauren felt the heat come straight up her neck while Mason, no help at all, stood there looking like a man being congratulated.

"Don't look at me, I'm a vault," Lara said, passing with the bread. "She and Pearl text now. I couldn't stop it and I've quit trying."

Dinner was loud and long and the best food Lauren had eaten in years, and she sat between Mason and Ainsley and got passed dishes she hadn't asked for by people who'd decided she needed them, and at some point in the middle of it, with the noise washing around her, plates and elbows and Remi telling the bull story over Jett's objections and two feuding old men eating the same woman's cooking at opposite ends of one table, it came over her quietly and completely that she was at a family table, at a holiday, for the first time since she was small enough to need the stool by her grandfather's sink. Somewhere between the dressing and the pie, without asking her permission, Soluno had quit being somewhere else.

She slipped out to the porch when the pie went around a second time, needing one minute of cold and quiet to put her face back in order.

John Royston was already out there, standing at the rail with two fingers of something amber, looking at the dark coming down over his land.