Page 39 of Desired

"Come dance with me," he said, against her mouth. "Before Pearl comes out here and sells tickets."

And she laughed, and his arms tightened like he'd caught it, and they went back in together.

She'd spent her whole life learning what the good things did, which was leave, early, all at once, without signing anything. And she stood in the door of that barn with the heat and the music rolling out over her, Mason's hand at her back, a corner piece of cake saved on a table with her name on it, and she knew it, sure as a plumb fence line: this one was staying. Nothing in that golden room was going to be taken away from her.

She'd have bet the ranch on it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

There was a moment late in his cousin's wedding when Mason quit hearing the band, and it had nothing to do with the speakers.

Lauren was across the barn with a little county girl who'd claimed her lap, and she was laughing at something with her whole face, her hair down and golden under the string lights, and the green dress doing what the green dress had been doing to him since four o'clock, and Mason stood in the middle of his cousin's wedding with a drink he'd forgotten he was holding and understood that he was watching the rest of his life sit on a hay bale.

He'd heard men talk about this. Dean, lately, when Dean talked at all, which was a new development the whole family was still adjusting to. His whole life Mason had stood at the edge of other men's weddings and other men's kitchens and felt the glad-for-them run a half inch deep over the cold question underneath, where's mine, what if it never comes, and tonight the question was sitting on a hay bale in a green dress teaching a six-year-old girl how to fold a napkin into a bird.

Thirty-one years the charm had bought him everything except this. He'd have traded every easy year of it for tonight and called the price low.

Dean and Lara had their first dance to a song the whole county would be humming for a month, Dean moving like a man who'd practiced in a barn with his sister shouting instructions, Lara laughing up at him the whole time, and then the floor opened to everybody and the night got loose and golden. Mason danced with the bride once, because that was the job, and with Giana twice, because she asked, standing on his boots for the fast parts. He watched John catch Dean's eye across the barn in the middle of a song and the two of them have a whole conversation in one nod. He watched Pearl run the cake table like a border checkpoint. He watched his little sister spend the afternoon stitching Lauren into everything she passed, and then spend the night out on the floor with Remi, the two of them working through the county's supply of brave young cowboys one dance at a time, and he made a note to buy Ainsley a horse or a car or whatever she wanted, ever, for the rest of her life.

He was at the bar rail getting two bourbons when his father's voice came up behind him.

Clay wasn't talking to him. Clay was talking to Jace and Knox, the three of them bunched at the end of the rail with their glasses, and Clay's voice had supper-table ease all through it, pleased and unhurried, a man reviewing a good year.

"Look at him out there tonight. Told you boys back in November he had the face for it." A swallow, glass coming down. "That little place on the seam's good as in the family, and it never cost me a dime of earnest money. Your granddaddy'd have needed lawyers. All I needed was Mason."

The bourbon arrived. Mason stood with a glass in each hand and the whole golden night going cold through the middle of him, one clean drop, like stepping through ice on a stock tank.

Knox laughed, easy, no harm in it anywhere. Jace lifted his glass an inch in Mason's direction, found him standing there, and grinned wider, a brother's grin, delighted, proud even, and that was the part that went in deepest. They didn't think they were watching a crime. They thought they were watching a courtship with a bonus clause, and there wasn't a scrap of malice at that rail, just his father's arithmetic and his brothers' faith that Mason was exactly the man Clay described.

Owen wasn't laughing. Owen stood half a step out of the group with the line cut deep between his brows, and Mason met his brother's eyes over the top of the whole misunderstanding.

Now, he thought. Right now. Six words in front of the three of them and their father, I told him no in November, and the wheel comes off the machine tonight, at a wedding, with everybody too happy to fight about it.

His father raised his glass to him, warm, approving, not one ounce of shame anywhere on him. "Fine work, son."

Mason took his two bourbons and walked back across the barn, and said nothing at all, to anybody, which by now he could have done professionally.

Lauren read something off him when he handed her the glass. She read everything off him lately, faster than he could put it away, and her eyes went over his shoulder to the rail and back, one pass, palest blue and not fooled.

"Everything okay?"

"My father's enjoying himself."

"That sounded like a weather report."

"It is one." He set his glass down and held out his hand, because the band had finally dropped into something slow, and because five more seconds of her looking at him like that and the night was going to cost him more than he had on him. "Dance with me."

"You've been holding that hand out all day," she said, taking it.

"I'll be holding it out a good while yet," Mason said. "Fair warning."

The floor was crowded and slow and half-lit, and she came in against him without any of the negotiation there'd been in November, her temple at his jaw, his hand spread at the small of her back where it belonged by now, and they didn't dance so much as sway inside the crowd, and Mason shut his eyes and put his father's voice down at the bottom of the deepest hole he had and stood on it.

She was warm and real and here. Dean's happiness was banging away joyfully all around them like a loose shutter. The band's singer was flat on the high notes and nobody minded, and somewhere in the middle of that song Mason understood, plainly and finally and much too late to do anything about it, that thirty-one years of making his peace with the long steady life had been thirty-one years of a man practicing to lose the only thing he'd ever actually want.

"Hey." Her voice, low, against his collar. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere," Mason said, and meant it for once. "I'm right here."