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"And then Ainsley texted her."

"And then my phone went off," Lauren agreed, "and I raised my hand. To get it out of my pocket."

The booth was already going. Elena had her face in both hands.

"She raised the hand," Mason said, "with the bid card in it. Auctioneer's been doing this forty years, he's not going to miss a pretty woman in the third row waving a card, that man took her bid before her phone was clear of her coat. And here's the thing about my wife-to-be that I need this whole table to understand, because I watched it happen in real time. She knows immediately. Everybody knows. The ring man is grinning at her. And this woman looks the auctioneer dead in the eye," his voice came apart with pride, "and nods. Doubles down. Because Lauren Merritt will die before she lets an auction embarrass her twice."

"Once," Lauren said, "a county sells you a man for two hundred and fifty dollars, you learn to commit."

"Six hundred dollars," Mason said. "Sold. One geriatric Hereford. And she turns to me, calm as Sunday, like it was the plan the whole time, and says, 'He can keep the other one company.'"

The table went up. Harvey looked over from the taps to establish that nobody was breaking anything, established instead that Mason Royston was wiping his eyes on his wrist, and went back to pulling beers with the tinsel flashing.

"Tell them his name," Ainsley said, already laughing at what was coming.

"His name is Horatio," Lauren said.

"Of course it is," said Dean.

"It's a good name."

"It's a tradition is what it is," Jace said, tipping his bottle at her, and then he swung it around at Mason. "Second time this woman's gone to an auction and come home with a big animal she didn't plan on keeping. Last one worked out all right, so."

"I have a system," Lauren said, and put her chin up while the booth roared, and under the table Mason's hand found her knee and squeezed, and neither of them needed to say the rest of it out loud, not in this life.

"And the real one?" Olivia asked, when it settled. "Forty-one?"

"Got him too." And there it went, the thing Lauren loved to watch, Mason coming forward over the table with his whole face lit, thirty-one years of easy charm dropping away into plain, unguarded, boyish want. "Wait till you see him. Wagyu. Black as a stove and built like a bank vault, and gentle, that's the breed, they're calm as house cats if you raise them right. Everybody hears Wagyu and thinks Japan, snow, some pampered steer getting rice beer and a massage, and that's the steakhouse story. The cattle themselves are tough as anything on this ground. They'll handle our heat better than half of what's out here now, they do fine on dry country, and you're not selling pounds with them, that's the whole beauty of it. You're selling genetics. Papers. A hundred and sixty acres can't run a commercial herd worth anything, everybody knows that, my father's said it at every dinner for two years. But a hundred and sixty acres of the right ground running twenty head of registered Wagyu?" He turned his bottle, grinning at the whole shape of it. "You don't need to outgrow anybody. You just need to out-breed them."

"What'd Uncle Clay say?" Chase asked, and the table leaned in a little, because everybody knew what sat under that question.

"Offered to buy in." Mason said it easy, and let it sit one second. "I thanked him, and told him no."

"And?" Knox said.

"And he laughed." Mason shook his head slowly, a man still turning the moment over. "Laughed, and said, 'Course you did,' and told me to come get one of the good squeeze chutes out of the north barn before Jace inventories them."

"I already inventoried them," Jace said. "He gave you the second-best one. He loves you, but he's still Dad."

The band came back from their break, and the fiddle player said something into the microphone about forty minutes left in the year, and the floor filled up fast. Remi hauled Elena out of the booth by both hands. Addi appointed herself Olivia's escort and towed her into the crowd, and somewhere in the general rising Owen ended up on the floor within an arm's reach of them, entirely by accident, the way he'd been entirely-by-accident all night, and Lauren caught Lara watching it too, and the two of them exchanged the look of women adding the same column and getting the same sum and saying nothing.

Mason stood and held out his hand.

"Mrs. Nearly-Royston."

"That's not a thing."

"Pearl's already using it."

They danced. The floor was packed and the band was loud and nobody had room for anything fancier than a close two-step, which suited her fine, his hand spread warm at the small of her back, her temple against his jaw, the whole loud golden room turning slow around them. Dean and Lara. Jett spinning some rancher's daughter. Ainsley and Knox doing something to a waltz that should have required a permit. Harvey at the taps in his tinsel, sour as a lemon, watching his bar full of every person he'd poured for across forty years, and not fooling anybody.

"Ten minutes," Mason said, against her ear. "You got a resolution?"

She thought about it, swaying in the middle of the only bar in town. One year ago tonight she'd been in Denver, in a sublet with the boxes still taped, eating takeout alone over a sink, a woman with a dead shop and a dead mother and a plan to be nowhere in particular by spring. She had not made a resolution. There'd been nothing worth resolving.

"Finish the greenhouse by March," she said. "Open the shop by June. Teach Horatio not to lean on the fence, he doesn't know his own weight, he's going to flatten the west line just being friendly." She pulled back enough to look up at him. "Marry you. Whenever you get around to asking me properly."

His hand stopped moving on her back. The grin came, slow, arriving from somewhere deep, the one that had nothing for any crowd in it.

"That one's already handled," he said. "You'll know it when it happens. I'm waiting on spring."

"Why spring?"

"You'll know it when it happens."

The band wound down. Somebody killed half the lights, and Harvey rang the bell behind the bar, and the whole room took up the count, ten, nine, the women's circle screaming it from the middle of the floor, eight, seven, Dean's arms going around Lara, six, five, Addi on a chair, four, three, Owen and Olivia standing at the exact edge of each other's countdown, two, one.

The room went up like a wedding. The band crashed into something old and loud, and every soul in Harvey's was kissing or hollering or both, and Mason Royston took his time about it, both hands framing her face, and kissed her into the new year slow enough that the year was well underway before he was done.

"Happy New Year," he said, against her mouth.

One year ago she'd had a plan, and the plan was to be somewhere else by spring.

It was going to be a busy spring. The greenhouse, the shop, a bull with crooked ears learning the fences, a wedding hiding in it somewhere like a card up a careful man's sleeve. She was going to be right here for every single day of it.

"Happy New Year, cowboy," Lauren said, and kissed him again, and the band played, and outside the wide dark ran unbroken from the lights of Harvey's clear out to the seam, where a porch light was burning over an empty yard, waiting for them to come home.