Page 102 of Forbidden Protector

"You called it the best night of your whole life. Asked if we could do it again right then, hooked up to a drip, ten pins in your hand." I lean forward, close enough that my mouth is an inch from his. "I never corrected you. I let you keep it."

"Why?"

"Because you've never once let yourself say anything like that to me sober, and I wasn't giving it back for free. Because some nights a woman gets to keep a secret that isn't a threat to anyone, for once, and I wanted that one."

I straighten up, reach behind me for the hidden zipper at the small of my back, and let the dark blue silk slide down off my shoulders. "And because I bought this dress and the matching set three weeks ago, Blackwater. Purple lace. I've been waiting for the right night to actually give you the real thing."

His breath goes out of him rough, both hands landing on my hips like he needs somewhere to put them.

The silk pools at my waist and I let it keep falling, no rush to it at all, exactly like he promised it would look on the floor tonight. His eyes go from my face down and stop there, black and entirely still. The same stillness I first learned to read in a truck from an airport a hundred years ago.

"You're wearing it right now."

"Have been all night." I stand and let the dress finish its fall to the floor. I watch him take in dark purple lace against skin that's had his hands all over it for hours and none of the parts that count yet. "Every second of that dance, Holt. Every time you told me what you were going to do to me once we got home. This was under it the whole time."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. He just looks, and his breathing changes, and there's nothing contained left in it now, nothing held back, nothing tucked away for later.

My desire rushes straight to my clit, hot and insistent, and I'm sure he can smell exactly how soaked I already am for him.

Then he comes up off his knees, and I don't get another word in for a long time.

Later, tangled in his sheets with the window cracked to the cold mountain air, his heartbeat slow and even under my ear, Sage's face keeps surfacing behind my closed eyes, the light going out of it behind a smile that never dropped.

Two families spent a whole night proving marriage could bind them back together.

Gideon watched Knox and Maren dance and said it out loud, standing right beside us. Three words he didn't bother lowering his voice for. Whatever he said to Sage an hour later, standing at the edge of the tent line where nobody else could hear it, wasn't spoken like a choice at all.

I don't know what either of them was told. I know it came from both fathers within minutes of each other, on the same night the county watched one marriage get celebrated in the open. That kind of timing isn't a coincidence a person gets to ignore.

McKenna Group didn't exist until 2011. Everyone agrees on that. It's in the filings, the incorporation documents, every clean paper trail the Bureau's ever pulled.

Josephine told me not to pull on the date, 1962. Told me to wait until someone asked me for it.

But who was paying for a survey on Broken Sky Mountain in 1962, in the high country neither family has ever actually owned, thirty years before a company in Canada came into existence to hide what's been killing people ever since, including my grandfather?

EPILOGUE

PART ONE: MACKENZIE

The U-Haul trailer rattles behind Holt's truck the whole way up I-15, and every mile marker north feels like shedding a coat I didn't know I was still wearing.

"You're quiet," he says, one hand draped over the wheel same as it was the first time I ever saw him, except now I know exactly what that hand can do to me and the knowing changes everything about watching it.

"I'm doing math."

"Dangerous pastime for you."

"Nine years in an apartment and it all fit in one trailer with room to spare. Skis, a kayak I haven't paddled since the academy, a few boxes of books, and the cast iron, which I refuse to apologize for." I watch Idaho thin out behind us, the Montana line coming up somewhere past the next ridge. "That's either very Zen or very sad and I haven't decided which."

"It's neither. It's efficient." He glances over. "I like efficient."

"You would."

We stop in Butte to visit John and Miles for a quick hello. Miles comes flying out of the house in socked feet, already narrating something about a rope swing he built without permission. It takes Holt exactly four seconds to get pulled into a wrestling match on the lawn that ends in peals of tickling screams from Miles.

"You married into a circus," John tells me, handing me a coffee I didn't ask for and clearly needed.

"I'm not married."