Page 101 of Forbidden Protector

Dawson doesn't come back for a while. When he does, he's got his jacket back on, which nobody else at this party has bothered with, and something in the set of his shoulders has gone rigid enough that even from here I can see it.

He shakes one man's hand on his way past the bar, says something that makes the man laugh, and I watch his jaw tick twice while he does it. A muscle firing under skin that never once matches the smile on top of it.

Nobody announces anything. The band doesn't stop. Finn's already halfway into another story to somebody near the bar, and Kathleen is directing a server toward the cake table like nothing in the entire evening has shifted at all.

But I watch two people get pulled out of Knox and Maren's engagement party and handed something that isn't a gift, and I watch them both put their faces back together fast enough that only somebody trained to catch exactly this kind of thing would ever notice.

A dynasty doesn't run out of tools. It just goes back to the oldest one it owns and uses it again, on whichever child is standing closest when the fear gets bad enough.

"Holt." I keep my voice pitched down, my eyes still on Sage across the lawn.

"I saw it." His hand tightens at my waist, and for one second the man holding me isn't the one who danced two songs ago. His eyes track Declan across the lawn with the same flat, patient stillness, marking exits, and then it's gone, tucked back behind the black shirt and the easy shoulders, like he never let it show at all. "Don't ask them tonight."

"I wasn't going to."

"I know you weren't. I'm telling you anyway."

I let it go, because he's right, and because a server's already angling toward us with a tray of fresh champagne, Kathleen's silent signal from across the lawn that everyone's glass needs topping off.

But I don't forget the look on Sage's face. I keep it, the way I keep everything now. Quiet, patient, and waiting for the day someone hands it back to me and asks what I'm going to do with it.

The house is dark when we finally get in, past midnight, many glasses of champagne and a pair of heels conspiring against me on the gravel until Holt's hand closes around my arm and steadies me up the porch steps.

Gus meets us at the door, tail going, entirely unbothered by the late hour or the dress or any of it.

"Best part of my whole night," I tell the dog, crouching to scratch his ears despite the silk, "and you didn't even have to make small talk about hay futures."

"Traitor," Holt says, but there's no heat in it, just a man watching his dog love someone he loves too.

Upstairs, the loft's dark except for moonlight coming through the west glass, Broken Sky standing black against a sky gone clear and star-heavy. I sit on the edge of his bed to unbuckle the heel and he crouches in front of me, takes over the job himself, easy, taking his time, his thumb dragging up the arch of my foot before he sets it down.

"I've been sitting on something," I tell him, before I lose the nerve I spent half the party building up. "Since the hospital. I should have told you weeks ago."

His hands go still on my knee.

"That sounds ominous for a man who just danced in front of his entire family," he says, but there's nothing light in his eyes anymore, just the same total attention he gives me now, both eyes gone black.

"Not ominous." I hold his gaze, my thumb drifting along his jaw before I let myself keep going. "The night you came off the anesthesia. You don't remember most of it. I know you don't, because you've never once brought it up, and if you remembered you absolutely would have."

My face goes warm, and it has nothing to do with the champagne.

"You told me a lot of things that night, Holt."

"Like what?"

His hands leave my knee and start climbing, slow, deliberate, fingers trailing up the outside of my thigh and under the hem of the dress where the slit already gives him an opening. My next sentence comes out a half-beat late, breath catching before the words do.

"You said I was wearing purple." I hold his eyes, watch something flicker there, uncertain, waiting. "Purple lace. You said you took your time with it. Said I looked like you'd been handed the best gift of your whole life."

His fingers freeze against my thigh.

"You told me you flipped me over," I go on, quieter now, watching every inch of his face while I say it. "Slow. In my ass. Until I couldn't tell if I was crying or coming."

"Christ." It comes out of him rough, half laugh, half something else entirely, and his hands tighten on my legs. "I said that? Out loud? To you?"

"You said a great deal more than that, actually."

"Mackenzie."