Page 133 of Desert Rain
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“But you’ll be safe,” I said. “That much I can give you. And I swear I won’t touch you unless you ask me to.”
That landed harder than the rest.
I saw it.
The way her throat moved. The way her eyes searched mine like she was trying to find the catch. The trick. The thing men said right before they took more than they were given.
There wasn’t one.
Not with her.
Not ever.
For a moment, nobody said anything.
Then Sienna blinked hard and looked away, but not fast enough to hide the shine in her eyes.
“That was rude,” she said.
A soft laugh moved through the chapel.
I frowned. “My vows were rude?”
“Yes.” She looked back at me, trying for glare and landing somewhere closer to wrecked. “You blindsided me with sincerity.”
Regan sniffed from the front row. “Hate when they do that.”
Sienna exhaled unsteadily, then turned toward me fully.
“I don’t know how to do this either,” she said.
Her voice was quieter now. Not weak. Just honest.
The room faded around us.
“I don’t know how to be someone’s wife. I don’t know how to belong to a club. I don’t know how to wake up tomorrow and make sense of the fact that I’m married to a man who bought me vanilla vodka because club girls like it.”
The men cracked up again.
I rubbed a hand over my jaw. “I apologized for that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I implied regret.”
“That is not the same thing.”
A laugh slipped out of me. Hers almost followed, but then her eyes softened and it got caught somewhere between us.
“But you came for me,” she said.
That shut me up.
All of me.
“You came into the desert when you could’ve decided I was too much trouble. You found me. You held on. You made the world feel less…” She swallowed. “Less impossible.”
