Page 36 of Desired

He held her after, both of them wrecked and breathing hard, until she reached past him without letting go of him and turned the burner off.

"We killed the chicken," she said.

"It died for something."

"So," she said, into his hair. "Your father."

"Mm."

"You want to tell me?"

The kitchen was warm. Her hands were in his hair, easy, undemanding, and the whole confession sat right there at the top of his chest, closer than it had ever been, one breath from daylight. He wants your land. He's wanted it since before I met you. That's what the fight was.

"He's got plans for the new year I don't like," Mason said, into her shoulder. "The operation. Where it's headed. I told him I was done nodding along, and he heard it like I'd told him I might take up the guitar. We'll talk after the wedding, he says." He huffed something that wasn't a laugh. "Everything in my family happens after the wedding."

Every word true. He was getting so good at it he frightened himself.

"For what it's worth," Lauren said, and pulled back to look at him, her palms coming up to hold his face, pale eyes steady in the kitchen light, "whatever it costs you to finally say a true thing to your father, I'll be on the other side of it. That's not going anywhere."

The clock over her stove ticked. The supper smoked faintly in its pan. Mason Royston stood between her hands, being promised she'd stand by him for exactly the thing he wasn't doing, and held her, and said nothing at all.

Saturday, he thought. Let her have the wedding. Sunday, this table, the whole of it.

He'd run out of Sundays before. But there were only so many left before the truth stopped being his to give, and some cold corner of him, the one that did the arithmetic, had started to understand that too.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The flowers came up from Midland on a refrigerated truck at seven in the morning, and Lauren had been awake since four thinking about them, which told her something she wasn't ready to hear yet.

She took the delivery behind the church fellowship hall in the cold, signed the driver's clipboard with numb fingers, and carried the crates in two at a time, white ranunculus and anemones with their ink-dark middles, spray roses and wax flower, eucalyptus sharp and clean in the cold air, winter stock the color of cream. She'd offered at the hen night, into the quiet after the shop story came out, before her head could talk her hands out of it, and Lara had cried on the spot and wrecked the mascara Addi had just fixed. The order she built the next morning at her kitchen table, off the top of her head, no catalog, straight down the page without stopping, and then she sat a long time looking at what her hand had done without asking her.

The hall was cold enough to keep them and quiet enough to hear the furnace tick, and she had it to herself until ten. She tied her hair back. She laid out the stem knife and the snips, filled the buckets with warm water because it was December and the stems would drink faster, stripped the first bundle of greenery, and that was as far as thinking got to come along.

Her hands took it from there.

They knew the angle of the knife without being told. They knew to cut under water, to strip a rose in one pull, to turn an arrangement a quarter at a time and let the flowers tell her where the hole was. Fourteen months since she'd carried the last box out of her own shop, and her hands had spent every one of those months waiting, apparently, right where she left them. She built the altar pieces first, big and loose and reckless with the eucalyptus, and the aisle markers, and the low table jars, and somewhere in the middle of the third hour the work quit being work and became the other thing, the thing she used to do fourteen hours a day for strangers and had loved so hard it nearly killed her to lose, and time went wherever time went when her hands were full of stems.

She was starting Lara's bouquet when the door opened behind her and let the cold in.

"They said the truck came early." Mason had a crate under each arm, her jars from the barn, washed and packed in newspaper like she'd asked. He was in work clothes still, due at Royston Ranch by noon to be put in a suit and photographed, and he set the crates down where she pointed and then didn't leave.

"You're staring."

"I'm allowed. I've never seen you do this."

"You've seen me do plenty."

"Not this." He leaned against the end of the table, out of her light, which she noticed he did without being taught, and watched her hands turn the bouquet. "You're not swearing at it."

"It's not a gate."

"You swear at fences. You swear at the water heater. What you called that windmill on Tuesday nearly peeled paint." He tipped his chin at the bouquet coming together in her fist, the ranunculus and the anemones and one early sprig of stock she'd stolen from the altar order because Lara's coloring wanted it. "You're really good at this. They're beautiful."

She looked at the bouquet instead of him, because her eyes had gone hot.

"Go get married," she said. "Not you. Dean. Go make Dean get married."

"Yes, ma—" He caught it, whole, mid-word, put it away, and the grin he replaced it with was worse. "Lauren."