Page 45 of Devoured

"Ainsley." She put out her hand and shook Lara's warmly, both of hers, the family way. "I've been hearing about you for weeks. Levi will not shut up. He told me at Sunday supper you make the apples the right way, which is apparently a whole thing, and that you know about a woman named Brenda who's a good egg, and that you're 'not a babysitter, she's Lara,' very firm on the distinction." She grinned. "So. I had to come meet the famous Lara who makes the apples right."

Something moved through Lara's chest, warm and a little stunned. Sunday supper. This girl was a cousin — she could see it now, the Royston in her, though softer, on the other side of whatever the family thing was that nobody quite explained to her — and somewhere across whatever divided this family there was a Sunday table where a six-year-old talked about Lara and the apples and Brenda the good egg, where she had apparently been a topic, been claimed, been folded in, on a side of the family she'd never even met.

"He cut the apples wrong his whole life," Lara managed. "Dean. Quarters. A six-year-old can't get his mouth around a quarter of an apple. It's slices or it's nothing."

Ainsley pointed at her, vindicated, to the group. "Slices. See. I keep telling Uncle…" she caught herself, some small family reflex, and just grinned wider "…I keep telling everybody. Slices." She squeezed Lara's arm. "I like you. I'm very glad you're here. Come find me later, I want the whole story, Remi only tells me the parts that make her look good." And she was gone, swept back into the crowd by a knot of people calling her name, bright as a struck match, and Lara stood there holding the warm strange knowledge that she'd been a guest at a table she'd never sat at.

It was later, near the food tables, that she saw the other thing.

John was there, home only a few days and not supposed to be on his feet this long, parked in a chair near the edge of it all with a plate he wasn't eating and a king's-eye view of his whole gathered family, and Lara had gone over to say hello and been waved into the chair beside him with the particular pleasure of an old man who liked her. They were talking easily — he was telling her something about the pavilion, about the year the roof blew off, about Kelly-Anne organizing the rebuild — when Jett came by to check on him, and the air changed.

It was nothing. It was almost nothing. John said something about the late shift Jett was working, and was Clay running him ragged over there, and it came out clipped — Clay's payroll — with something underneath it that wasn't quite anger, that was sadder and heavier than anger, a father not able to quite look straight at a son. And Jett's easy face flickered, the grin going thin, and he started to say something with an edge starting up under it.

Dean was there. Just there, the way he apparently always was, a hand landing on Jett's shoulder and a beer pressed into his other hand and some easy nothing of a sentence about the band, about Chase losing a bet, about anything, the subject turned so smoothly that a person who wasn't watching closely would have missed there'd been anything to turn. The eldest son doing the thing the eldest son did. John let it go. Jett's grin came back, thinner than before. The moment closed over.

But Lara had been watching closely, and she saw the shape of it now, the thing she'd half-seen for weeks, Jett leaving the ranch every morning in clean clothes pointed the wrong direction, sleeping under his father's roof and drawing another man's check, and she understood she was sitting in the middle of a family that loved hard and was tearing somewhere down a seam she couldn't fully see. She didn't ask. You didn't ask, not yet, not when you'd been folded in this new. She just understood it now, alongside the rest of what she was learning about the Roystons: that the love and the fracture ran in the same blood, and that Dean stood in the gap of it with a hand on everyone's shoulder, holding a thing together that was bigger than he was.

The band slid into something slower, and men started asking her to dance, because apparently that was allowed now, apparently being seen with the Roystons made her a person you could ask.

She two-stepped with Chase, who was a liar, he danced beautifully and steered her around the floor like it was nothing and used the whole three minutes to tell her increasingly improbable stories about Dean as a teenager. She danced with Jett, who was exactly as good as a man that charming would have to be, and who spent the song being delightful and watching his brother over her shoulder with frank enjoyment. She danced with a broad quiet man whose name she didn't catch, something to do with Burchall, somebody said, a contractor, and she felt, the whole time, from the edge of the floor, the weight of Dean watching her, a beer in his hand, not dancing, his eyes never once leaving her.

She let him watch. God help her, she'd learned last night exactly how much she liked being watched by that man, and she danced with three other men and let Dean Royston stand at the rail and feel every second of it.

Then the song ended, and another started, slower still, and Dean set his beer down on the rail.

He crossed the floor.

He didn't hurry. Of course he didn't, he never did, he came across that crowded pavilion the same unhurried way he'd come across Harvey's the night before, and the broad quiet Burchall man took one look at what was coming and found somewhere else to be, and Dean didn't say a word. He just took her hand out of the air where it had been, and put his other hand low on her back, and pulled her in against his chest, and they were dancing.

He could two-step. Of course he could. Chase had been lying about that too, or maybe Chase had been telling the exact truth — never could when it mattered — because maybe it had never mattered before, and it mattered now, and Dean Royston moved her around that floor slow and sure with one big warm hand spread low on her spine and the other swallowing hers up against his chest, and she followed like her body had been waiting her whole life to be led by exactly this man and had simply never met him until now.

Neither of them talked. There was nothing to say that the dance wasn't already saying. His thigh moved against hers with the steps. His jaw came to rest against her temple, the faint rasp of him, the warmth, the clean soap-and-skin smell of him under the beer and the night, and she turned her face the half-inch it took to put her cheek against the open collar of his shirt and felt him breathe out, slow, the whole big frame of him, like something he'd been holding for four years had finally been allowed to set down.

She was undone before the song ended. Thoroughly. Standing up in a public pavilion with her whole body lit and her cheek against a man's collarbone and three hundred of his neighbors two-stepping around them, and she did not care even slightly who saw.

He drove her home. The cab was quiet and full, the windows down, the warm night coming in, the radio low and neither of them listening to it. He drove with one hand and the other resting open on the seat between them, not reaching, just there, and somewhere on the dark road into town she put her hand in it, and he closed his fingers around hers and didn't say anything, and that was the whole conversation, the entire thing, and it was more than she'd gotten out of five years in Boston.

He walked her up to her door.

"Lara," he said.

"Yes?"

He looked at her a long moment under the porch light, and whatever he'd built his whole careful life to keep behind the wall was out, now, in his face, unhidden, terrifying and plain.

"Tomorrow night," he said.

It wasn't a question. It didn't need to be. They both knew what tomorrow night was.

"Okay," she said.

He brushed his thumb once across her knuckles, and let her hand go, and waited — she understood now that he would always wait, that he'd stand on a porch until she was safe inside, that it was bone-deep in him — until she'd stepped through and turned the latch.

Then she heard his boots on the stairs, and the truck, and the engine going off down the dark toward the ranch and his sleeping children and the bed he'd slept in alone for four years.

Lara closed the door. And then, because her legs had stopped being entirely reliable somewhere around the second verse of that last song, she slid down the back of it until she was sitting on the floor of her own little entryway in her one good dress with her heart going like something with wings.

She hadn’t felt this in her body in years. The wanting, yes — but more than the wanting, under it: the being chosen. Out loud. In front of everyone. By a man who'd told her exactly what he couldn't give her and then danced with her like she was the only fixed point in a turning world.