Page 108 of Reluctant Bride

“He’s got a name, Laney. Use it.”

“Cole,” Laney says, going pink. “His name is Cole and he has excellent hands with a rope and I refuse to be interrogated about it at dinner.”

“Cole,” Tate repeats, not looking up from his phone. “Runs about four thousand head out past Choteau. Family’s solid. I checked.”

“Nobody asked you to check, Tate.”

“Somebody should always check.”

West’s got his camera out, same as always, and produces actual photographic proof mid argument between Finn and Cora over who won last year’s calf roping, settling it decisively in Finn’s favor and ruining Cora’s whole evening in one swipe of a screen.

“I want a recount.”

“There’s no recount. West has a timestamp.”

Knox and Wyatt are wedged in at the end, Wyatt already through half of Nell’s huckleberry pie before anybody else has ordered. Nell circles the table twice with plates nobody requested, sets them down anyway, and doesn’t ask a single question about what anyone wants, because at Nell’s you eat what she’s decided you need.

Then she climbs up on the same folding chair she used for the wedding toast, wipes the chalkboard clean with her apron, and doesn’t write a new line on it at all.

“That’s it,” she announces, to the whole diner. “Pool’s retired. Generations of this valley betting on who’d draw blood first, and both these families went and ruined the fun by being happy about it instead.” She looks straight at me and Dawson. “I expect a little more trouble out of you two eventually. Purely for business reasons.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Dawson smirks.

In the corner booth, Ashley’s husband sits alone over a cup of coffee gone cold, and nobody at our table says a word about it. I notice it anyway, like most things now, and let it sit where it is instead of picking it up. Not every thread needs pulling tonight.

Gideon and Declan hold down the far end, two men who spent thirty years hating each other on principle now splitting a bottle of good bourbon like old friends, though neither one will ever use that word out loud. Kathleen sits between them, half refereeing and half enjoying it far too much. Josephine’s tucked into the corner booth with Holt and Mackenzie, because Holt still won’t sit anywhere he can’t see every door in the room, and my mom looks entirely at home there, watching the whole table with the same quiet, missing-nothing attention she brings to everything, Holt’s eyes still doing their slow, automatic sweep of the diner even here, even now, Mackenzie’s hand resting easy on his knee like she’s long since stopped trying to talk him out of it.

“He said the rain wouldn’t hold off past Thursday,” Gideon says to Maren, quiet, like he thinks nobody’s close enough to hear it. “I told him Friday. Friday it is.”

“I heard that,” Declan says, not turning his head.

“You were meant to.”

Neither man will admit the other was right about a single thing. It’s the closest either of them knows how to come to peace.

Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, Dawson’s hand finds my knee under the table and doesn’t stay there, working slow up the inside of my thigh through denim while he answers a perfectly innocent question from his mother about our upcoming honeymoon, and by the time dessert shows up I’ve had to bite the inside of my own cheek twice to keep my face doing what a face is supposed to do at a family dinner.

The storm hits right on schedule, and by the time we’re home the whole western sky has gone the ominous grey of thunderheads lit from inside every few seconds by lightning already right on our heels, thunder chasing each flash close enough that there’s barely a beat between them.

We don’t make it up the porch steps dry. The first real sheet of rain catches us in the drive, and we’re both shrieking and soaked to the skin by the time Dawson gets the door open, and neither of us bothers with the lights.

“You’re drenched,” he says, dragging me in against him, water running off both of us onto the mudroom floor.

“So are you. I don’t hear you complaining.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m calculating how fast I can get you out of that shirt.”

“Show your work.”

He does. My shirt’s on the floor before we clear the kitchen, his right after, both of us peeling wet fabric off each other in a hurry that has nothing patient left in it at all. He backs me up against the island and lifts me onto the cold marble like I weigh nothing, spreading my knees with both hands, and I’m bare and open to him before I’ve even caught my breath from the run.

“Dawson.”

“I need you right now. Not upstairs. Right here.” His voice has gone rough and wrecked already. “I’ve been half out of my mind since diner, feeling how moist you were through your jeans and not able to do a single thing about it.” He drops to his knees on our own kitchen floor like it’s the only place on earth he wants to be.

“You were the one torturing me,” I say, and my hips already give me away, squirming at the memory of his hand working slow under that table while his mother talked honeymoon plans two feet away. “You started it.”

“I know what I started.”