Page 37 of Desired

He pushed off the table. At the door, with the cold coming in around him, he stopped and looked back at her, at the hall full of white and green, at the morning's work standing in buckets down the length of three folding tables, and whatever he was going to say he didn't say it, and what he said instead came out plain as a receipt.

"They're going to remember this wedding for the flowers."

Then he was gone, and the truck was rolling out of the lot, and Lauren stood in the cold hall holding another woman's bouquet with both hands, steady as they'd ever been in the shop, the whole gift of it done and nobody had paid her a dime and her chest hurt in a way she had no complaints about.

She finished the binding and held it up to the light.

Lara was going to cry. Good. That was the job.

The church at four o'clock held every soul in three counties with a claim on the Roystons, which was every soul in three counties, and half of them were cowboys scrubbed and shaved and buttoned into suits, big weathered men gone stiff and handsome in dark wool as far as the eye could see. The girls from her old block of shops in Denver would have needed medical attention.

Mason was waiting on the steps. He'd been put in a dark suit that fit him unfairly well, and when she came up the walk in the green dress she'd bought in Denver for a life that never happened, he watched her the whole way with his hat in his hands and did not say one word, and the not-saying carried farther than anything he could have said. Then he put out his arm, and she took it, and Mason Royston walked her up the steps and down the middle of that church in front of God and the county and both sides of his family, and Lauren felt the arithmetic run down the pews ahead of them. The Merritt girl. On his arm. At the family wedding. Sold, then, the whole county settling it at once, and his hand came to the small of her back to steer her out of the aisle, warm through the silk, and stayed half a breath past steering, the way it had been doing since a diner door in November. She'd quit pretending she didn't lean into it. Some fights you lost early and called it strategy.

Pearl had a spot saved. Of course Pearl had a spot saved. She patted the pew like she owned the deed to it.

"Sit here, honey, the light's good and you can see everything." Pearl was in purple, magnificent, a hat that could have shaded livestock. She looked Lauren over once, the dress, the man peeling reluctantly away toward the front of the church, and inclined the hat one inch. "I called this in September. Ask anybody."

"It was November."

"I called it in September, honey. You just hadn't arrived yet."

Marge, on Pearl's far side, already had a handkerchief out, and the service hadn't started. "The flowers," she said to Lauren, and pointed her chin at the altar, at the big loose arrangements standing up there catching the late light, and couldn't finish, and pressed the handkerchief to her mouth, and that was the whole review and worth more than a write-up in any paper Lauren ever got one in.

Then the music started, and the church stood up.

The groomsmen came in from the side, Dean and his line, Chase and Jett and Mason and Jace, four big men in dark suits, and Dean at the front of them looking like a man who'd been serious his whole life and had run clean out of the ability that morning. Owen and Knox had seated the last of the county and stood at the back with their hands folded like it was a job requiring vigilance. The bridesmaids came down one at a time, Ainsley, Elena, Remi, and then Addi, maid of honor, crying already and not caring who saw.

Giana came next, scattering petals one at a time, placed rather than thrown, like each one had to be signed for, checking her coverage as she went. The county held its laughter respectfully. Levi came after with the rings on a pillow at a dead sprint, was recaptured by an usher, and finished the aisle at a walk that wanted the whole way to be a sprint, beaming so hard at the front of the church you could have read by him.

And Lauren watched the kids instead of the doors, that was the thing she'd remember, she was watching Giana and Levi when the music changed, and so she saw it hit them. Saw Giana's chin come up and start its fight and lose it. Saw Levi's whole face open like a window. They weren't looking at the dress or the county or the show of it. They were looking at Lara, coming down the aisle with a parent on each arm, her big Boston father weeping openly and her mother beaming with pride, carrying a bouquet Lauren's hands had made, and the two of them looked at that woman like the sun had finally agreed to come up in their house for good.

Lauren's eyes went and stayed gone.

The vows were short. Dean's voice cracked once, on the word keep, and he stopped and breathed and did not look away from his bride, and the whole church leaned in and held him up. Lara laughed through hers, the unguarded laugh, the dimple out, and it turned the last line into something half wept and half sung. Up at the altar Lauren's flowers stood on either side of them, white and green and reckless, framing the whole thing, and for one long minute she let herself have it, the work of her hands standing witness at the front of a church while two people got the ending they'd bled for.

Then the kiss, and the cheer, loud as a stampede, Pearl on her feet, Marge gone entirely, Harvey somewhere back left applauding like it was allowed, and the bells let go overhead, and somewhere in the middle of all that noise Lauren looked to the front and found Mason already looking at her, palest green across a churchful of celebrating county, steady on her.

She looked back. She didn't make it a fight.

The big Royston barn had been emptied of equipment and scrubbed down to the boards for the occasion, and it held half of Texas now, strung to the rafters with lights, propane heaters going down both walls, long tables dressed in white with her jars burning gold down the middles of them, and a band in the corner tuning up.

Mason brought her in with his hand at her back, and it stayed there through the receiving line, through the finding of chairs, through a plate of prime rib, warm and spread and unhurried, five fingers of a running conversation neither of them needed words for. Her body kept the count it had been keeping all day. She'd quit arguing with the total.

Addi's maid-of-honor toast ran six full minutes, required a chair at one point, and left the room wrung out and roaring. Chase ran the evening the way Lauren had watched him run the branding in November, a checklist in his head and no visible hurry, materializing wherever a thing was about to go wrong just before it went. Jett had the bar and the volume. And Dean and Lara held the middle of it all, touching at the shoulder, at the hand, at the hip, like they were each making sure the other was still there, and every time Lauren looked at them her chest did the thing and she let it.

The chair beside her scraped out during the cake.

Levi climbed into it with a plate he'd loaded himself, sat, arranged his fork, and looked up at her with frosting already on his face and the sated joy of a boy at the exact center of the best day of his life.

"Lara's my mom now," he said. "It got legal today."

"I heard."

"She's staying forever. Dad said." He ate a piece of cake roughly the size of his own fist and considered her while he worked on it. "She does the notes now. In my lunch. Dad used to but now they take turns and you can't tell whose is whose till you open it." He said it like a plain proven fact. "Forever means she does the notes even when I'm old. Like fifth grade."

"That's a long time," Lauren said, around the thing in her throat.

"Yeah." He was quiet a second, working on the cake, six years old and completely certain of the ground under him, so full of happiness it was spilling out of him onto strangers. Then he leaned his whole weight sideways into her arm, companionable, staying, and went on eating, and Lauren sat very still under the warm nothing weight of him and looked out at the lights so her face had somewhere else to be.