Page 33 of Desired

"This isn't about the girl," Clay said. "You know that. I like her. Your mother likes her, and your mother hasn't liked anybody new in thirty years. The girl's the best thing ever happened to you, and the land is a separate line item, and grown people can hold both."

"They're not separate. That's the whole—" Mason stopped, jaw tight, and made himself say the next part level. "You've got forty thousand acres and a machine out there that prints money in its sleep. You don't need her hundred and sixty. You want it. There's a difference, and I'm done pretending there isn't. And while we're at it, I've watched that machine eat ground my whole life and called it progress because it paid for my boots, and I don't know when I stopped believing it, but I've stopped. You should hear that from me before you hear me quiet at another one of your dinners."

It was the most words he'd ever said against the operation in his life, and he watched them land on his father and change nothing at all.

"Huh," Clay said, finally. Genuinely surprised, genuinely unbothered, a man discovering his son had opinions the way you'd discover a horse could count. "Well. You've been spending time on the traditional side of the family, and it shows. Your uncle talks like that too, and he's a fine cattleman, and his outfit hasn't grown an acre in forty years. Ours doubled. Talk's free, son. Growth isn't." He said it without one ounce of cruelty, which was the entire problem with arguing with Clay Royston. He pulled the feed contracts back toward himself, done, patient as a saint. "We'll talk after the wedding."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"After the wedding," his father said, and smiled at him, warm, absolute, and picked up his pen.

Mason stood in his father's study with his hat in his hand and understood that he had just said no as loudly as he had ever said it to anyone, and that it had bounced. His father hadn't heard a refusal. His father had heard a delay. And the one sentence that would have made it real, the one with her name and the whole autumn in it, was the same sentence he owed somebody else first, and until she had it, his no would keep on bouncing off this desk forever, soft as a toast at a dinner party.

He drove to Midland with his jaw aching from what it was holding.

The western-wear store on Wall Street had a back room for fittings, and by eleven it held the entire male half of the wedding party in various states of starch and suffering.

"I look like I'm up for sentencing," Jett announced, turning in front of the triple mirror. "Handsome, though. The jury would waver."

"You look like a groomsman," said the tailor, through pins.

"You say that like I look normal."

Dean stood on the fitting block in the middle of the room in the groom's jacket, dark and clean-lined, and he'd gone quiet like a man does when something's got real all of a sudden, examining his own reflection like it belonged to somebody he was being introduced to. Chase, already fitted and re-dressed in his own clothes, sat by the boot wall drinking complimentary coffee with the satisfaction of a man who'd survived a medical procedure. Jace ran the room off a list on his phone: jackets, boots, kids' sizes, pickup times, boutonniere count, a ranch manager managing.

"Levi's boots," Jace said to the clerk, "the small ones. He's six. He will attempt to wear them out of the store. Let him."

The kid boots were the size of coffee mugs, and when Levi got them on he walked the length of the store twice with his heels ringing on the plank floor and his chin up like a rooster, and Giana, having been fitted for a dress she'd endured with the stoicism of her grandmother's line, stood beside Mason at the mirror wall and watched her brother with an eight-year-old's ancient weariness.

"He's going to sleep in those," she said.

"Yep," Mason said.

"Daddy said he can't."

"Your daddy said the same thing about his first pair and slept in them a week." He caught Dean's eye in the mirror. "I've heard the story from three separate aunts."

Giana absorbed this intelligence with visible satisfaction, the kind of ammunition a girl files away for the right family dinner, and marched off to inform her brother of something, and Dean stepped down off the block and came to stand beside Mason at the mirrors, the two of them in their good jackets like a pair of strangers wearing them.

"You're quiet," Dean said. "Even for you."

"Fought with my dad this morning."

"Mm." Dean adjusted his cuff, unsurprised. Everybody fought with Clay eventually; it was the family's weather. "About?"

"The operation. Some of the rest of it." True, and half, and the half sat in Mason's mouth like a stone while his oldest friend nodded slowly in the mirror.

"You know what I've figured out?" Dean said. "You don't win with the fathers. Either of them. You just get louder about your own life until they quit mistaking it for theirs." He clapped Mason once on the shoulder, and left his hand there a second. "Saturday, stand up there and don't lose the ring. That's the whole job. Everything else keeps."

"I'm not going to lose the ring."

"Jett's got the ring," Jace said, passing with a garment bag.

"Why does JETT have the ring?"

"Character development," said Jett, from the mirror, admiring himself.

He got back home and went looking for something to hit that would pay him for hitting it.