Page 23 of Desired

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to⁠—"

"You're not interrupting a thing." He tipped the glass an inch at the stretch of rail beside him, which was the invitation. She leaned on it. Up close he had Dean's jaw and the careful diction of a man who'd had to fight to get his words back, and his eyes went over her once, not unkind. "Getting loud in there?"

"A little. It's a good loud."

"It is." A dry flicker there, almost a smile. "Never got a word to you at dinner past hello. A table full of family will do that to a conversation." He looked back out at the dark. "Your granddad and I traded maybe six words a year for forty years, and I counted him a friend. That was about his ration for everybody. He kept that place alone longer than a man ought to keep anything alone." He turned the glass once in his hand. "Men came around over the years wanting to buy him out. He never even priced it. You know why?"

"No."

"Because some ground doesn't have a number." He said it the way other men said the weather, no sermon in it at all, and looked back out at the dark. "My wife's on that rise yonder, under a tree she picked herself. I made her a promise about this land, and I've kept it through every offer and every argument my own brother's got, and I'll keep it from a wheelchair if it ever comes to that. Land's how I keep my word to her. That's all it's ever been. The money people can't figure that, and it makes them crazy." He glanced at her, level. "You mean to keep yours?"

The question went in under her coat. Out in the dark her hundred and sixty acres sat somewhere past the rise, empty tonight, the gate latched, the barn shut, the porch step quiet.

"I don't know yet," she said, because he'd been honest and lying to him felt like it would show.

"That's a fair answer." He finished the glass, done with the subject, done maybe with talking altogether. "Go on back inside before Helen sends a search party. She counts heads like a schoolteacher."

Later, driving home with leftovers Helen had packed for her in a box that could have fed the volunteer fire department, Lauren looked out at the dark and heard it again, in the old man's plain voice. Land's how I keep my word to her. A whole family of money on one side of her fence line, and on the other side of the table sat a man who'd turned down every dollar of it to keep a promise to a grave. She hadn't known Roystons came in that denomination.

She fell asleep on the ride and woke in her own yard with Mason's jacket over her, and he walked her to the door and kissed her at it, and left, because they were going slow.

Two more days, it turned out, was all the slow she had left in her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Hen night at Harvey's," Pearl said, boxing up the pie Lauren hadn't managed to stop ordering. "For the bride. That sister of hers is running it, and she's been to the party store in Midland twice, so eat something first, honey, and wear what you don't mind glitter on."

Pearl was not wrong. Addi had organized it like Addi did everything, at full volume with a props budget: the corner booth pushed together with the next one, pink TEAM BRIDE sashes in glitter for the entire booth, a veil for Lara built out of a headband and half a bolt of tulle, and a tiara from the Midland party store that Lara wore for exactly ninety seconds before transferring it to her sister, who never took it off.

Harvey's on the Friday after Thanksgiving was full and warm and loud, the stage dark, the jukebox carrying it, and the man behind the taps looked up when Lauren came through the door and gave her the long unhurried once-over from under his eyebrows, mid-seventies and sour as a lemon about it.

"Two-fifty," Harvey said, to nobody in particular, and set a beer on the bar and pushed it two inches toward her, and went back to his tap.

"That's Harvey saying welcome," Remi said, steering her past. "Frame it."

They put the bride in the middle and Lauren on the inside, which she now understood was assigned seating, and the night got up to speed fast. Elena came straight from the clinic and ordered soda water, and Remi ordered her the ceremonial one and a half margaritas anyway, which sat untouched at her elbow all night like a court exhibit, because the legend was that at one and a half margaritas Elena Santos told every secret in three counties, and no one had ever gotten one and a half margaritas into her, and they kept buying it in case. It didn't matter. Stone sober, over soda water, Elena informed the table that Deputy Ryder Davis had fainted at his own blood draw in the church parking lot in front of forty witnesses, that this was public record and therefore not a violation of anything, and that he'd gone down, quote, gracefully, like a folding chair.

"You don't even need the glass," Remi said, betrayed. "I've been paying for nothing."

Addi ran the table like a woman born to it. She toasted her sister twice, made Ainsley laugh hard enough to knock the tiara sideways when Ainsley finally claimed it, interrogated Lauren for ten straight minutes about the auction with the focus of a trial lawyer, and declared, on hearing the syndicate's version, that two hundred and fifty dollars was criminally low and she'd have gone to four. "For the fire department," she said, hand on heart. "I'm a giver."

And somewhere in the second round they got to Denver, because Addi asked what everybody else had been too polite to circle back to.

"I had a flower shop," Lauren said. "Four years. Mine, my name on the lease, the whole thing. Little corner spot, weddings paying the rent, me at the flower market at four a.m. fighting old ladies for peonies." She turned her glass once on the table. "I loved it. I was good at it."

The booth had gone quiet around her, the jukebox and the bar carrying on beyond it, and nobody hurried her.

"Then an UltraBlooms opened next door. It's a chain, flowers in a cooler the size of a gym, drive-through window, loyalty app. They price-matched everything I did. I'd run a special, their app would beat it by dinnertime. Brides would photograph my mock-ups, very apologetically, and get them built for thirty percent less." She said it plain, no shine on it, no performance. "I held on eleven months. Then I closed. Their app still sends me a coupon every year on the anniversary of my closing sale."

Nobody said anything for a second. The whole table was watching her with their smiles gone quiet at the eyes, even Addi, who'd known her two days, and not one of them reached for something to fill the silence with, which was its own kind of respect.

"It worked out for the best, though." Lauren picked her glass back up and looked around the booth, and let the corner of her mouth go. "I mean, look at me now. I'm a Texas rancher, out on the town with you fine folk."

"To UltraBlooms," Remi said instantly, glass in the air. "Idiots. Best thing they ever did."

The booth drank to it, the whole ridiculous toast, and Ainsley's hand landed on Lauren's wrist once and lifted, and Elena said, flat, to her soda water, "Their arrangements are terrible, incidentally. I ordered some for the clinic opening. They came with a barcode on the vase."

"Thank you," Lauren said, and meant it about several things at once.