Page 18 of Reluctant Bride

“You could just say thank you,” I say.

“I could. I won’t. It ruins the effect.”

“What effect?”

“The one where you keep thinking you have to earn it.”

She lets go of the box first. I let her have that.

“For the record,” she says over her shoulder, already heading back to the trailer for another load, “the county clerk’s a day late. Holt isn’t.”

I find her an hour later, on the back porch, knees pulled up, watching Cricket chase something imaginary through the grass. The afternoon’s finally cooling down, shadows stretching across the meadow toward the line of blue spruce and aspens. A trail follows the creek up into the drainage behind the house, steep enough in places to earn something, and I start up it, planning on an hour run to clear my head.

I don’t decide to take my shirt off before I go. I just do it. My body doesn’t care what audience it has, and neither do I. Usually.

Sage is still there when I return and I catch her watching me on the way back.

She doesn’t look away fast enough to pretend otherwise. Neither of us moves, sweat cooling on my skin, her eyes tracking down before she catches herself and drags them back up to my face like she’s been caught reading something she wasn’t supposed to see.

I don’t smile. I don’t reach for a joke to defuse it, no tack room move this time the night of Maren’s wedding. That was still safe enough to joke about. This isn’t.

I just look back. Level. Unbothered. The same way I’ve looked at her since that night, except there’s no lantern light to blame this time, no champagne excuse, just the two of us and the quiet that comes right before someone crosses a room they shouldn’t.

Her breath changes. I watch it happen, the shift from steady to shallow, and the want in me pulls tight and stays there, coiled, patient, entirely unconcerned with the fact that I promised her restraint in the kitchen two days ago.

“You’re doing it on purpose,” she says, quiet.

“Doing what?”

“Standing there like that.”

“I just finished a run, Sage. This is what finishing a run looks like.”

“Liar.”

She doesn’t move. Neither do I. The porch is maybe eight feet across and it feels like the tack room again, like the truck cab, like every room this house has apparently decided to hand us.

Cricket gets there first.

She trots up the steps and plants herself directly between us, staring up at me with the flat, unblinking judgment of a dog who’s appointed herself the last line of defense.

Sage snorts, short and surprised, and the moment loosens into laughter. I can’t tell which one of us is more grateful to the dog for doing it.

“Good girl,” Sage says, scratching Cricket’s ears, not looking at me.

“Traitor,” I say, to the dog.

Sage’s mouth twitches like she’s fighting a real smile and losing.

“You should go shower,” she says. “You smell like a man who just ran a mountain.”

“I did run a mountain.”

“I noticed.”

She says it too fast, like she meant to keep it to herself and didn’t quite manage it, and this time I’m not the one who has to walk away first.

I go inside before either of us finds out what happens if nothing interrupts us next time.