Page 49 of Desired

"Went home." Jace's voice had nothing in it, which for Jace was a siren going off. "Little while ago."

"What'd he go home mad about?"

Nobody answered. Knox turned the bottle a quarter turn, read the rest of the label.

"She was in here and now she won't answer her phone." He put his knuckles on the table's edge and leaned onto them, and looked at his brother, and his voice came out very quiet. "Jace. What was this table talking about at eight o'clock?"

He watched it land. Watched Jace go back through it, sentence by sentence, watched him do the arithmetic of the pool table and the high booth back and the door letting cold in, and watched all the blood leave his brother's face at once.

"Mason—"

But Mason was already gone.

Every light in her house was on and she didn't come to the door.

He knocked. He called her name at the wood, once, twice, easy at first, less easy after, and stood on the porch he'd stood on a hundred times, on the step that didn't grab anymore because he'd rebuilt it in the dark of a Tuesday, and inside somewhere a chair moved on the plank floor, so she was there, twenty feet away and not coming, and Mason had a moment of understanding what it would mean if that just went on. If the door stayed a door. If twenty feet became the fixed distance for the rest of his life.

"Lauren." His forehead nearly on the wood. "I'll stand here all night. I've got nowhere in the world to be."

The bolt went over. The door opened, and she came out instead of letting him in, coat on over her clothes like armor she'd planned, and she crossed her arms and set her back against the doorframe and looked at him, and Mason had spent six weeks learning every register that face had, the guarded one, the fighting one, the unguarded laugh, the way she looked five seconds after waking, and he'd never seen this one. This one was closed like a business.

"Whatever you heard—" he started.

"Don't." One word, level, and it stopped him like a fence. "I'll ask, you'll answer, that's what this is now." She kept her arms where they were. "The morning the estate cleared. Your father's kitchen. He told you to come out here and charm me into selling to him before your uncle or a realtor got to me. He said you had the face for it. He said, go woo her." Her voice didn't shake at all, which was worse than any shaking. "True or not true."

"True. But⁠—"

"True." She nodded, once, like a stamp coming down. "That's all. That's the whole question."

"It's not the whole anything." The panic was trying to come up his throat and he shoved it down because panic read as guilt, and then he heard how calculating that thought was and hated himself fresh. "Lauren, I told him no. That morning, in that kitchen, before I ever drove out here. I stood there after my brothers left and I told him I wasn't wooing anybody, I'd fix your gate because it needed fixing and tell you the truth about the land if you ever asked, and that was all, and if he wanted you worked he could come do it himself. I told him no."

And she laughed.

He'd heard her laugh a hundred ways. Guarded, unguarded, breathless, disgraceful, into his shoulder in the dark. This one was none of them, this one had glass in it, and it did more damage going through him than shouting could have.

"Of course you did," she said. "Of course you told him no. That's the beauty of it, isn't it, there's always a no in there somewhere. You told Owen no too. First week. At my tailgate, ten feet from my well, he asked you straight out if this was your father's play and you looked him in the eye and you said no, and Owen believed you, because everybody believes you, that's your gift, and tonight I got to sit behind a booth and listen to what Owen believes now." She tilted her head. "Your own brothers, Mason. The men who love you most in the world sat in that bar and laid it out like a court case, and not one of them said that's not him. Your father raised a glass at a wedding and said fine work. So when you stand on my porch and tell me about a no that nobody on this earth ever heard but you, you tell me. How does that sound? What would you call a no like that?"

He had the answer. The answer was the exact size and shape of the hole he'd dug, and he'd known it since the bar, since the booth went quiet, maybe since November, and it was this: a no nobody hears sounds precisely like a lie a caught man tells. He'd built it that way. Brick by brick, six weeks, with his own hands.

"It was real," he said anyway, because it was all he had, and he heard it come out and land on the porch boards between them like something dropped from not high enough to break, just high enough to prove it wouldn't bounce.

"Prove it."

Silence. The windmill he'd braced turned over once in the dark, and he stood there with the whole conversation happening on a step he'd fixed, and he had nothing. She watched him have nothing.

"You can't," she said, softer now, and the soft was the cruelest thing yet, because it wasn't cruelty, it was arithmetic. "And here's the part I keep getting stuck on, because I'm good with numbers, Mason, I ran a business, I can find the error in a column. Say I believe you. Say the no was real, say every fence post out here was real, say all of it." She came off the doorframe, one step, into the porch light, and her eyes were wrecked and dry and terrible. "You knew. You knew what he sent you for before you ever saw my face. You stood at my gate that first morning knowing, and you sat in my kitchen knowing, and you read that letter over my shoulder in November, standing interest, no name, and you knew exactly whose name it was, and you watched me put it in a drawer like it was junk mail. Six weeks. Every day of six weeks you knew, and you never said one word." Her voice finally moved, just once, in the middle of it, like ice going. "That's the charge. Not what your father wanted. What you didn't say. Tell me I have that wrong."

Mason stood on her porch in the cold, and everything he'd ever been good at was worthless here, the charm dead weight, the hands no use, and there was nothing on the other side of her question except the truth, so he gave her that, for whatever it was worth at this hour.

"You don't have it wrong."

She nodded slowly, and looked away from him for the first time, out at the dark where her land ran to the seam, and when she spoke again it was almost conversational, which was how he knew they'd passed through the fight into whatever was on the far side of it.

"I asked you once what I should do with this place. You remember? Your bed, three weeks ago. I asked you straight out, sell or stay, what should I do with my land. And you kissed me." She looked back at him. "I ran that kiss all the way down tonight. You want to know what it comes to? A man who couldn't say sell, because his father wanted it, and couldn't say stay, because then I'd be staying next to a lie. So he kissed me. It was a good kiss, Mason. It was such a good kiss I forgot I'd asked a question." She pulled her coat tighter, one hand at the collar. "That's what you are. You're the best kiss I ever got instead of an answer."

"Lauren." Her name came out of him wrecked. He took a step, and his hand came up, the stupid hand, the hand that had fixed her gate and her pump and her fences and learned every inch of her in the dark, it came up on its own toward her face the way it had a hundred times, and she didn't flinch and she didn't step back.

She just looked at it.