Page 28 of Desired

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sunday was the day he was going to tell her. He'd thought about it since the bonfire: daylight, her kitchen table, boots on, the whole truth laid out plain.

It didn't happen. Saturday refused to end, and Sunday came up gray and slow with her asleep on his chest. They surfaced around ten. He made eggs in her grandfather's skillet wearing yesterday's shirt while she sat on the counter in his flannel, bare legs swinging, stealing bites off his plate and arguing with him about nothing, and somewhere in the middle of the argument she laughed with her whole head back. Mason stood there with a spatula in one hand and knew he wasn't going to wreck this day with his father's name.

He knew what it was. He wasn't fool enough to call it anything else. Every hour of that weekend was borrowed against a conversation he still hadn't had, and the debt grew by the day, and he lay in her bed on Sunday night with her hair across his arm and promised himself the new version: before the wedding. Firm. Absolute. A man had to be able to stand up in a church next to Dean and hold rings with clean hands.

Monday his mother called, which was its own message. He lived three hundred yards from her kitchen and she never phoned him, she waved him in off the porch. But he hadn't slept in his own bed since Friday, and Stephanie Royston did not waste a trip on an empty house.

"Dinner," Stephanie said, in the voice she used for things that were not invitations. "Tuesday. Bring her. Your father's been insufferable about meeting her properly and I'd like to see for myself what's had you useless since October. Seven o'clock. Tell her not to bring anything. If she insists, tell her wine."

She hung up before he could arrange a defense. That was Monday. Tuesday, driving to the Merritt place ahead of the dinner to collect Lauren, he came over her cattle guard and found Ainsley's car already parked in the yard.

His sister and his woman were at the kitchen table with coffee and a notebook between them like a pair of generals over a map, and they both looked up when he came in, and neither of them looked caught.

"We're busy," Ainsley said, and turned back to Lauren, tapping the notebook. "Three forks. She'll watch which one you pick up and she'll pretend she didn't. Work from the outside in and you're fine. If she offers you the tour, take it, it means she's considering you. If she shows you the garden, you've won and I'll want to hear every word."

"What if she shows me the garden and then the wine cellar?"

"She has never once toured a guest through the wine cellar. Not the governor's wife, not the bishop. If you get the cellar, start planning your speech." Ainsley flipped the notebook shut and stood, and collected her coat, and on her way past Mason she patted him once on the chest, sisterly, terrible. "I came to warn her about the table settings."

"You came because you're the nosiest woman in this county."

"Pearl exists, so no. But top three," she said, unbothered, and let herself out, and through the window he watched her drive off his girlfriend's ranch like a woman leaving her own property, and when he turned around Lauren was watching him from the table with her chin on her fist and an expression he was learning to be afraid of.

"I like your sister."

"Everybody likes my sister. It's how she gets away with everything." He looked at the notebook, the two coffee mugs, the whole conspiracy of it, and something in his chest went warm and heavy at once, because his family kept doing this, kept walking into her house and claiming her one by one, all of them, every last Royston except the one who'd sent him down here in the first place. "You don't have to pass anything tonight. You know that."

"Mason." She stood, and smoothed her shirt, and looked up at him with those pale blue eyes full of something braver than the joke she put over it. "I ran a retail business for four years. I've handled brides' mothers on wedding mornings. Your mama doesn't scare me."

"She scares me."

"That's because you're her son. Sons are meant to be scared." She reached up and straightened his collar, entirely unnecessarily, and left her hands on it. "Three forks. Outside in. Wine but not the good kind, Ainsley says the good kind reads as trying."

God help him, he thought, they've unionized.

The Wainwright house did what the Wainwright house did to people, and he watched her take it standing.

The gates, the long lit drive, the works humming out past the horse barns with every pond light burning, and then the house itself, tall and white-columned and glowing like a courthouse, Irene taking coats at the door as she had for thirty years. He watched Lauren absorb the scale of it, the money moving under everything like the brine under the county, and watched her decide, somewhere between the door and the dining room, to be exactly herself in the middle of it, and he had never wanted to kiss anybody more in his life.

Dinner was his mother's full parade. Three forks, standing rib roast, candles down a table that could seat sixteen and tonight held seven: his parents, himself and Lauren, Jace, Knox, Ainsley. Owen wasn't coming; he'd promised Olivia Bateman weeks ago that he'd help her clear the storm damage off her mother's fence line, and with Owen a promise outranked a dinner, even one of Stephanie's. And Stephanie Alexandria Wainwright Royston sat at the foot of her table in pearls and silk the color of good bourbon and ran the evening the way she ran everything, polished and warm and unreadable, and measured Lauren Merritt from the soup on down.

She did it beautifully. That was the thing about his mother, she never once asked a question that sounded like the question.

"Denver," she said, over the soup, the way she'd say the name of a horse she was considering. "You were there long?"

"Most of my life."

"And you had a business. Flowers, Pearl tells everybody."

"I owned a flower shop. Four years, my own lease, my name on the window." Lauren's chin came up a degree, the steel showing under the company manners. "A chain moved in next door and price-matched me until it was over."

"They do that," his mother said, with something in it that might have been respect and might have been arithmetic. "Weddings would have carried you, I imagine. What were your margins, if you'll forgive an old ranch wife her bookkeeping?"

"Mother," Ainsley said.

"It's a compliment, dear. I don't ask about hobbies."