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"Told by who?"

"Mostly Remi. Some Pearl, by text, with punctuation I didn't care for." His thumb moved once against her spine, and the whole loud room went a little far away. "No hurry. Watch the bouquet lesson. I've got all night."

She turned her head and looked at him, and the whole night added itself up. The margaritas, the toast, a booth full of women who'd closed ranks around her without one word of pity. This man, standing in the middle of the noise with his hat in his hand, patient, hers. And somewhere under her ribs, the last of the slow quietly ran out.

She stood up. She said her goodbyes, hugged the bride, got her cheek kissed by the maid of honor and both her hands squeezed by Ainsley, took her coat off the hook, and put her hand in Mason's hand in front of the whole gathered county, and led him toward the door.

"Early night?" he said, at the threshold, even, though nothing in him was even.

She pushed the door open into the cold, and the gravel lot and the dark and the truck were all out there waiting, and past them the seam road, and at the end of it her house with its lamp burning.

"Mason," she said. "I'm done taking it slow."

The words went through him the way the wind goes through a gap, all at once, every board of the fence he'd built around Sunday gone in one gust. Tell her first. That had been the whole shape of the promise, the truth on the table before ever this, before her, before everything, and the promise was two hours old, and she was standing in the door of a bar with her hand in his and the entire rest of his life looking out of her eyes.

He didn't do the arithmetic this time. He knew the number.

"Then let's go home," Mason said, and the door swung shut behind them on the light and the noise, and the truck started on the first turn like even it had been waiting.

CHAPTER TWELVE

He drove her home with both hands on the wheel, which she noticed, because he never drove with both hands on the wheel.

Neither of them talked. The radio stayed off. The dark ran by the windows, and the cab slowly filled with the thing they weren't saying until there was barely room in it for the two of them. Lauren sat with her hands folded in her lap like a woman riding to church, feeling her own pulse in her wrists. The margaritas were long gone, burned off somewhere between the door of Harvey's and the first cattle guard by something that worked faster than tequila ever had. She was stone-clear. That was the part she kept checking, the way you touch a pocket to make sure of your keys. Clear as morning, sure as arithmetic, and her heart was still going like she'd run here.

He parked where he always parked. Killed the engine. The quiet came down over the yard, the windmill standing straight against the stars, the porch light burning where she'd left it, and for a second neither of them moved, and the truck ticked as it cooled like something counting down.

"Lauren." His voice was low and even and cost him something; she could hear the cost. "It's late. If you want, I can⁠—"

"Mason." She unbuckled her seatbelt. "If you finish that sentence, I'm going to make you sleep in this truck out of principle, and neither of us wants that."

She heard him exhale, half a laugh with all that want banked under it, and then they were both out of the truck and the cold snapped at them and she didn't feel one degree of it, and he came around the hood and she met him at the fender because waiting for him to reach her door was suddenly a preposterous waste of a life.

The kiss at the fender nearly ended things right there in the yard. His hands framed her face and hers got up under his coat, and somebody made a sound, possibly both of them, and it was going in exactly one direction with the porch fifteen feet away when he broke it, breathing hard, forehead down against hers.

"Inside," he said, rough, against her mouth. "I've been thinking about this for three weeks, and in every version of it I take my time. I want all night."

They made the porch. At the door she stopped him, one hand flat on his chest, and reached up and took his hat off his head, and turned and hung it on the hook inside the door, the one that had sat empty since she'd moved in, and she heard what it did to his breathing, and neither of them said a word about it.

Then the door was shut behind them and his coat was on the floor and hers went somewhere she never did find out, and Lauren Merritt walked backward down the hallway of her grandfather's house with her hands full of the front of a flannel shirt, towing thirty-one years of patience toward her bedroom, done with slow, done counting, done.

The bed was a double that had been in that back room since before she was born, and neither of them cared.

She'd have expected hurry. Three weeks of wanting, a pact called off in a bar doorway, the way he'd kissed her against the fender like a man breaking a fast, she'd braced for hungry and fast and gladly. But Mason Royston crossed the little room with her in the lamplight, and set his hands to the top button of her shirt, and went slow.

Slower than slow. He undid her buttons like each one had cost him a personal fortune, and followed his hands with his mouth, her throat, her shoulder, the curve where her neck met it that made her breath stutter, and by the third button she'd lost her grip on the sass she'd carried in as armor and by the fifth she'd lost the armor. Her shirt went to the floor. Her bra followed it, his hands sure and unhurried, and he looked at her in the lamplight the way he'd looked at her across the auction crowd, like there was nobody else in the county, and then his mouth was on her breast and her hands were in his hair and the little room went very small and very warm.

"You've got a lot of buttons," she managed, working on his, "for a man who knew where tonight was going."

"Didn't know anything." His voice had gone to gravel. He shrugged the shirt off his shoulders, and she put her palms flat on his bare chest just to feel the heat of him, the work-built weight of him, the heart under it going anything but easy. "Hoped."

"Since when?"

"The gate," he said, no hesitation, and kissed her before she could do anything about what that did to her.

He laid her back on the quilt and got her jeans off her with a competence she'd have teased him for if she'd had the air, and then his mouth went traveling, collarbone, ribs, the soft of her stomach, the point of her hip, taking the long way with the patience of a man who worked with his hands for a living, and when he finally settled between her thighs and put his mouth on her she said something that would have made Pearl drop the coffee pot.

He was good at it. Of course he was good at it, she thought wildly, gripping the quilt, everything came easy to this man, but there was nothing easy in how he went about it, nothing practiced, he did it like he was learning her, adjusting to every catch of her breath, patient and thorough and merciless, and the heat built and built until she was up on one elbow gasping and her other hand was fisted in his hair, and when it broke it bent her whole body like drawn wire, and she came with his name and half a prayer tangled together in her mouth.