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"It's Pearl's show. Anything I tell you, she'd have my hide for spoiling the theater." He came back to the splice, and she came and held the wire off the ground for him without being asked, bare-handed, and he noticed she'd remembered how to hold it low and clear of her face, and he had one absurd flash of pride about it that had no business being the size it was.

They finished the fence together in the late-morning quiet, the herd drifted off deeper into Wainwright grass, the wind laid down out of the north. She'd gotten better with her hands in two weeks, steadier, surer where to be, and the work went easy, and somewhere in the easiness the talk fell away, and that was the mistake, because with the talk gone there was nothing left in that pasture but the two of them and the thing that had been sitting in every silence for two weeks.

He tied off the last wrap. She let the wire down. And neither of them stepped back the way the finished job called for.

She had a fleck of dried mud on her cheekbone, high up, where the tank had gotten her, and she was flushed from the work with her hair coming loose across it, and Mason reached up and thumbed the mud off before any part of him voted on it. Just that. His thumb at her cheekbone, her skin cold and warm at once under it, and she went absolutely still, and so did the pasture, and so did he.

Her chin came up. Her eyes were on his mouth, gone dark at the middle, and her breath had picked up and so had his, and there was one clean inch of November air left between them and it was closing on its own, without instruction, the way water finds a gap, and Mason's whole life had narrowed to the warmth coming off her and he could not for the life of him remember a single reason to be anywhere else.

Attaboy, said his father's voice, warm as the kitchen. Better than fine.

It went through him like a bucket of tank water.

Because the play, the actual play as ordered, looked exactly like this. A charming man, a broken ranch, a repaired gate, a fence line drawn up singing, and the new heir easy and warm and one inch from kissing him in the middle of the land his father wanted, and Mason stood inside that picture and for one second, one poisoned second, he could not have sworn to whose script it was. His or Clay's. Wanting her was his. Every mile of it was his. But the shape of it, the shape was the thing his father had drawn in that kitchen with all four of them standing there, and if he couldn't tell the difference from the inside, God help him, how would she ever tell it from where she stood.

He pulled up. Stepped back. One clean step, the hardest single physical act of his adult life, and put his attention on the spool of wire like a man checking his work.

The air where they'd been standing seemed to hang there a second, unspent.

"Splice'll outlive both of us," he said, and his voice came out wrong, too even, a poor imitation of a man discussing fence.

She didn't say anything right away. He made himself look up, and watched it happen, watched her run the last ten seconds back and reach the wrong sum, watched the shutters come down behind her eyes one slat at a time, the flush going from work to something with shame in it, and there was not one thing he could say to stop it that didn't start with my father sent me, and that sentence had sat unsaid so long it had set like concrete.

"Great," she said. Light as a receipt. "Well. Thanks for the cow rescue. Tell Jace he owes me a garden."

"Lauren."

"I've got paint on a wall drying wrong." She was already moving, gathering the broom off the fence like a woman collecting her things from a table, and her voice had gone friendly in the way a shop bell is friendly, the same for everyone who walks in. "You can square the fence post with me at the picnic. Apparently I'm going."

She walked back to the house across her own pasture with her spine straight and the broom over her shoulder, and Mason stood at the splice and let her go, because the alternative was calling out the truth across forty yards of grass, and he'd just learned in one second flat that the truth had gotten too big to fit in his mouth.

The kitchen door shut before he'd got the truck turned around.

The drive home up the seam road took nine minutes, and he spent all of them in a court of his own convening.

He'd done the right thing. That was the maddening part, the part that made him want to put his fist through the dash. A man who can't tell whose move he's making has no business making it. She'd been one breath away with her whole guard down, and the kindest thing in that pasture had been the step back, and he'd take that trade again every time, her stung and safe over her kissed and played. If it was played. It wasn't. He knew it wasn't. He'd known it standing there and stepped back anyway, because knowing a thing and being able to hand it to her with clean hands turned out to be two different jobs, and the second one had a requirement he kept declining to meet.

Tell her. That was the whole of it. My father wants your land, he sent me to charm you off it, I told him no before I ever saw your face. Say that, and the second's doubt never comes back, because there's nothing left under the floor for it to live on. It would've cost him four words in his father's kitchen, said loud enough for his brothers to hear. The price had been going up every day since, and it never once went down, and he drove and felt it climb, and told himself he'd find the right afternoon for it, after the picnic, some quiet hour when it wouldn't land like an ambush. He listened to himself make that promise. He'd made it before, and the road ran out from under him the way it always did.

She thought she'd misread it. That was what he'd bought with his decency. Somewhere down the seam behind him, in a kitchen that smelled like fresh paint, a woman who trusted nothing she wanted was standing at a sink teaching herself she'd imagined the whole thing, adding him to the pile of things that looked like hers and weren't, and she'd do it well, because she'd had practice, and every bit of it was his handwriting.

The Wainwright gate came up in his headlights, his mother's name in iron over the cattle guard, the works humming beyond it in the dark, steady as ever.

He drove under the name, and hated the whole quiet mile of it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

By ten o'clock Saturday morning Lauren had thought about the fence line seventeen times, and every time it ended the same way: nothing happened, you imagined it, wave at the man like a neighbor and eat your barbecue.

She'd had a whole day of painting to get the story straight. A thumb on her cheekbone, one leaning second she'd have sworn on her mother's grave was going somewhere, and then a man stepping back to admire a fence repair, and if there was one skill Lauren Merritt had mastered before she could drive, it was talking herself out of wanting things. She'd had years of practice, and it had never once failed her.

So when Lara's truck came over the cattle guard with the horn already going, Lauren walked out in clean jeans and her good coat, hair down because she felt like it and for no other reason on earth, carrying a store-bought pie she was embarrassed about, ready to attend a picnic like a normal woman.

There were two other women in the truck.

"Elena Santos," said the one in the front, turning around. Dark-eyed, contained, the calm of a person who'd been awake since five and expected to be awake at five tomorrow. "Town doctor. Before you ask, yes, I know things about everyone here, no, I won't tell you, and yes, it ruins parties."

"She'll tell you eventually," said the one in the back, who was already scooting over and patting the seat, somewhere barely past twenty with dark Royston hair and a grin that had never once been told no. "You have to get her one and a half margaritas in. I'm Remi Royston." She smiled like a choir girl. "Mason's cousin."