Page 25 of Desired

He was still sitting inside the cold clean relief of having finally picked a day when Remi's text landed on Jace's phone, and Jace read it, and stood up out of his chair with the unhurried purpose of a man who'd heard something worth moving for.

"Bar's peaking," he announced. "The maid of honor is standing on the furniture. Pearl's gone home, Harvey's outnumbered, and my sister says if we want to see any of it we've got till midnight." He settled his hat. "Boys. The women are undefended."

"The women," said Chase, pocketing his winnings, "have never been defended in their lives. It's the town that needs the help."

They took three trucks.

At Harvey's, by eleven, the booth had degenerated into wedding logistics and Addi standing on the bench seat to demonstrate the correct way to catch a bouquet, over Lara's dying objections, in front of a bar that had fully stopped pretending to do anything but watch, and that was the exact moment the front door banged open and the cold came in off Main Street and the bucks party arrived.

They came in loud and wind-bitten and pleased with themselves, seven or eight of them in their good hats, Dean in front wearing the unmistakable look of a groom who'd been toasted past his own objections, and Harvey put both hands flat on the bar and addressed the ceiling.

"There went the quiet."

"Harvey." Jace, arms wide, presenting the group. "We've come to check on our women."

"Your women drank you under the table by nine," Harvey said, pulling glasses anyway.

It was, Lauren would grant later, a very brief invasion. Dean crossed to the big booth and kissed his bride in front of everybody to a round of applause he did not acknowledge, and the boys fanned out to the bar for one round, under strict and instantly ignored instructions from Remi that this was a hen night and they were trespassing. Knox appeared at the booth to report that Mason had spent the whole bonfire useless as a fence post with no wire, staring at his phone like it owed him something. Chase shook Lauren's hand like a foreman meeting the new hire and said five entire words. And Mason came through the crowd to her the way he did everything, unhurried and inevitable, and stopped at the end of the booth with his hat in his hand.

"Evening, ladies."

"We're keeping her," Remi said. "Take a number."

"I'll wait my turn."

But it was Addi, up on the bench seat with the tiara flashing, who brought the room to order, because Addi had spotted Jace, and Jace had spotted Addi, and the two sightings happened in the same second with the whole booth between them like a fuse laid in the sawdust.

"Which one's this?" Addi said, to the table at large, looking at him down her nose from the throne of the bench.

"That's Jace," Lara said, in the tone of a warning label.

"Of course it is." Addi looked him over once, unhurried, a woman reading a menu she already knew her order off of. "The auction runner-up. You bid a hundred and fifty dollars on your own brother."

"For the fire department." Jace had come to rest against the booth's end post, hat back, grin arriving slow and sure of its welcome, and he looked up at the woman standing on furniture in a rhinestone tiara and visibly recognized his own species. "You're the sister. Boston. The one who does the voices on the phone."

"And you're the one Pearl told me about." She let that land from the full height of the bench seat, savoring it. "Last time I was out here I asked her one strategic question about this town, and she gave me a briefing, and you were in it, Jace Royston. Prominently."

For the first time in the exchange, Jace looked a degree less in charge of it. "In it how?"

"Mm," Addi said, and drank, and did not elaborate.

"I'm the maid of honor," she went on, with immense dignity, from the bench seat. "I outrank you."

"All week?"

"Through the last dance."

"Then I'll see you on the floor, your honor," Jace said, and touched his hat brim, and moved off toward the pool table like a man in no hurry at all, and Addi watched him the whole way with her head tipped, a woman watching a storm she wasn't sure was headed for her county yet.

"No," Lara said.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your face said it."

Lauren missed the rest, because Mason's hand had found the small of her back, warm through her shirt, and his mouth was at her ear under the jukebox.

"Harvey calls time at midnight," he said. "I'm told I'm your ride."