Page 106 of Reluctant Bride

“The clean exit clause. The one from the very first contract you wrote me.” I watch her read it, the same language she had drawn up and we’d both agreed to a month ago, before either of us understood what we were signing up for. “It still stands, Sage. Legally. If any part of you wants out of everything that just happened, the danger, the families, the sole liability mess I still owe you an actual conversation about, you get to take it. No penalty. No custody fight over the coffee maker.”

“You’re offering me an exit?”

“I’m offering you a choice.” I hold her eyes, and there’s nothing composed left in my voice at all. “I don’t want you staying because a wedding already happened and leaving looks like defeat. I want to know, out loud, tonight, after everything, that you’re choosing this because it’s what you actually want.”

She sets the folder down on the porch rail, slow, deliberate, and doesn’t pick it back up.

“What do you want, Dawson?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want.”

“It matters completely. Ask me again.” Something in her cracks open, the same rare, undefended voice I’ve only heard from her a handful of times, the porch, the Ledger floor, the night she finally told me she never stopped either. “Not the exit clause. The real question. Ask me if I want to stay married to you.”

I turn to her on the same porch where I proposed for real a few weeks back, and I take her hands in my good one, both of hers in the one of mine that still works.

“Sage Sullivan,” I say, her name in my mouth like the only prayer I’ve ever actually meant. “Do you want to stay married to me? Not because of a contract. Not because you were being used to end a war between our families. Because you choose it, tonight, with everything you now know about what that asks of you.”

She doesn’t hesitate.

“Yes.” She pulls me in by the collar of my shirt, and her mouth finds mine, fierce and certain and entirely unafraid. “Yes, Dawson. I choose you. I’ll keep choosing you every single morning for the rest of my life, and I’m not signing another contract to prove it.”

Somewhere behind us, past the tree line, an old letter rests in The Ledger where Knox put it back this evening, two men’s handwriting promising something neither of us has fully understood yet. Third keeper. Agreement of ’68. A war two dead men built on purpose, for reasons neither Elias Blackwater nor Seamus Sullivan ever wrote down plain enough for six generations of their own descendants to solve.

I kiss my wife on a porch that’s finally, completely ours, and somewhere under all of it, quiet and patient as the mountain itself, one question keeps humming, unanswered, exactly like it’s been humming since a hundred and fifty years before either of us was born.

What were two founders really protecting, the night they decided their own families should learn to hate each other on purpose?

EPILOGUE

TWO MONTHS LATER

SAGE

Dawson’s alarm goes off at five-thirty, and I have a better use for his discipline than a mountain trail.

I feel him reach for the phone before the second beep even finishes, thumb already moving to silence it, and I catch his wrist in the dark and press it flat to the pillow instead.

“You weren’t planning on running today.”

“I run every day, Sage. Discipline’s the whole brand.”

“Discipline can wait an hour.” I’m already straddling him before he’s fully awake enough to argue the point, and whatever protest he had loaded dies the second I sink down onto him. He groans my name into the dark, both hands finding my hips and holding on.

“Christ, Sage, you’re going to end my whole cardio routine.”

“Cardio’s overrated. This burns more calories.”

“That’s not a peer reviewed statistic.”

“I’m the only peer whose review matters right now.”

He flips me halfway through, laughing when I swat at him for cheating the pace, and by the time the sun’s fully up neither one of us has said one more word about running.

Afterward, his fingers moving slowly through my hair repeatedly, I let myself drift with the luxury of being in bed with this man I adore. I trace the sagebrush inked into his wrist like I do most mornings now. The bullet scar on his other arm has gone from angry to pink, fifteen tiny stitches of my own handwriting on either side of it, and I’ve stopped checking it every morning. I still look. His hand finds the road on my hip in the same easy rhythm, thumb following the line of it into the mountain like he’s done a hundred times without ever asking again what it means.

“You never finished explaining this one,” he says, quiet.

“You never asked twice.”