Page 31 of Desired

Ainsley leaned across the table then, and topped up Lauren's glass, and said, in the pitched-under-the-band voice of a woman making a formal announcement to a very small parliament, "Before you got here we took a vote. You're in the circle. It was unanimous, and you weren't needed for it, so don't bother appealing."

"What circle?"

"This one." Ainsley gestured around the booth with the pitcher, at Remi and Lara and Elena and Addi, two Royston sides and three imported women and a doctor, and it occurred to Lauren, looking around it, that not one of the women at this table had been born within five hundred miles of another one of them, and that somehow this was the tightest booth in the county. "Meetings are whenever. Dues are gossip. Ainsley chairs," said Ainsley. "Congratulations. There's no way out and nobody's ever wanted one."

Lauren looked down at her beer for a second, because her eyes had filled without warning, and Remi, who missed nothing and had the kindness to be loud about the wrong things, declared it time to dance and dragged the whole booth onto the floor by main force.

She learned the two-step the way she'd learned the fence stretcher, badly and then suddenly.

Jett taught her the first one, because Jett appointed himself, materializing out of the crowd with a bow so deep it endangered his hat. He was the youngest of Dean's brothers, long and loose-jointed with a grin that had clearly never once been punished adequately, and he steered her through the basic step yelling instructions over the band like a man landing a plane. "Quick quick, slow, slow. You're counting. Stop counting. It's walking, if walking had any ambition." He spun her out and reeled her back and she stepped on him twice and he swore both were his fault, and by the end of the song she had it, roughly, the way you have a language you can order coffee in.

"You'll do," Jett pronounced, handing her off with ceremony. "Chase. She's past the dangerous stage."

Chase danced her one steady circuit of the floor, and it was like being walked by a well-broke horse, nothing flashy, nothing missed. He was the third brother, the one she'd met at Thanksgiving, a working man's quiet on him even in a bar, and he two-stepped in silence for half the song before he produced, with evident preparation:

"Family's glad it's you."

Five words. He didn't elaborate and he didn't repeat it, and when the song ended he tipped his hat and delivered her back to the booth like a parcel he'd signed for, and Lauren watched him go and understood that by this family's arithmetic she'd just been handed a speech.

The band took a break. She took her beer to the end of the bar to breathe, and that was where Owen found her, or where she found Owen, who had been holding the same corner of the bar all night the way a post holds a fence.

"They're a lot," he said, nodding at the floor, where Remi was making even the break feel loud.

"They're wonderful."

"They're both." He turned his bottle a quarter turn on the wood. He was watching the room, not her, and she'd learned by now that this was Owen's way, that he came at things sideways and only once. "Place of yours looked good when I drove past Tuesday. Garden's cleared. Porch is painted."

"There's still a list."

"There's always a list. That's not what I'm saying." He was quiet a second, and then he said it, plain, the way he'd said the thing about her grandfather at the well pump a month ago. "Wells and fences, anybody can do. That's just work. But that place was dying of being empty, and it's not anymore, and that part's got nothing to do with any of us." He tipped the bottle an inch toward her, his eyes still on the room. "The staying's yours."

Lauren stood at the end of the bar with her heart doing something complicated, and before she could decide what to say to that, the band came back, and Owen straightened off the bar and gave her the smallest nod, conversation complete, done, and moved off toward the pool table, and she thought, not for the first time, that of all of them it was the quiet brother who kept leaving the deepest prints.

Then she looked for Mason, and found him, and forgot what she'd been going to think next.

He was at the corner of the bar with Dean and Jace, the three of them in a loose triangle with their hats pushed back, and whatever the story was, Dean was telling it, and Jace was contesting it on procedural grounds, and Mason was laughing, head back, unguarded, one boot up on the rail. She'd seen him charming, seen him careful, seen him wrecked and reverent in lamplight, but she'd never once seen this, Mason inside the oldest friendship he had, two families deep, thirty years of shorthand flying between the three of them, and she stood across the bar and watched the man his people got and fell the rest of the way in without any music at all.

He felt her watching. Of course he did. His head came around mid-laugh and found her over the crowd, and the laugh settled into something that was hers and not theirs, and he said something to Dean and Jace without looking at them, and put his boot down off the rail.

The band, with the timing of a band that had played this county for years, went into something slow.

Dancing with Jett had been geometry. Dancing with Mason was not geometry.

He gathered her in at the middle of the floor with one hand spread at the small of her back and the other folding hers against his chest, and they fit the way they'd fit since the first time on the picnic blanket, and for the first turn or two they behaved. The floor was crowded. The county was watching, in its benevolent way. Dean and Lara swayed by, one week out, wearing one expression between them. Somewhere at the floor's edge Addi and Jace were circling each other, and Lauren truly meant to keep an eye on that development, but Mason's jaw came down against her temple and his hand moved two inches lower on her back and she lost the plot of everything that wasn't him.

"Been watching you all night," he said, against her ear, under the band.

"You've been swapping stories with Dean and Jace all night."

"I'm a talented man." His thumb traced the seam of her spine, slow, and her breath went uneven at exactly the rate he intended. "Watched you learn to two-step. Watched Chase make his speech, he practiced that in the truck, I'd bet the truck. Watched every man in this county figure out he was a day late and a dollar short." He turned her, unhurried, and his mouth grazed the hinge of her jaw on the way, barely, deniably, and nothing about it was deniable. "Watched you the whole time."

"That's a lot of watching, cowboy."

"You want to know what I was thinking?"

"I can feel your heart going under my hand," she said. "I know what you were thinking."

The song had another verse in it. They didn't stay for it. He walked her off the floor with his hand at her back and her pulse going like the fiddle, and the booth watched them collect their coats with eight raised eyebrows and total approval, and Ainsley called something after them about the circle expecting a report that Lauren pretended not to hear, and the cold hit them in the gravel lot like a bucket and did nothing at all.