Page 35 of Knot the Plan
“I gave them a logistics solution to a phone call.”
“You held Finn Morrow's hand in public. Finn Morrow has never held anything in public except a grudge.” She licks cracker dust off her thumb. “You've gone and made the manlegible,Josie. The whole town's been trying to read him his whole life and you handed them the subtitles. Of course they're losing it.”
She's not wrong. And the part under that, the part I'm not saying out loud to anyone including myself, is that the practice is working. Not on the town. On me.
That was the part I didn't plan for.
I built this whole arrangement like a scheduling problem. Three alphas, a month, a calendar, all of it neat and containable. And somewhere in the middle of a kayak and a half-built deck and a diner booth my body stopped reading from the same page. Now I've got a week of them under my skin and no way to get them back out.
Hudson's scent, juniper and rain, came off him in a wave the second he hauled me up out of the lake. The embarrassing little sound my instincts made about it before I could stop them.
The way some old quiet part of me leaned toward Logan over a board of pine. Just leaned, like a plant toward a window, before I caught it and straightened up.
And Finn. Finn's thumb on my knuckles. The way his hand closed over mine before he'd decided to do it. The woodsmoke and clove of him close enough to taste.I've got you,and the slow warm pull low in me that had nothing to do with selling anything to anyone.
Three alphas, on a schedule, doing exactly what I asked. Being close. Being convincing. And every single time, the wanting forgets it's pretend a half second before my brain catches up and hauls it back.
I keep telling myself that's just biology. Put an omega in arm's reach of three alphas for a week and of course something hums. It doesn't mean anything. It's not allowed to mean anything.
The telling keeps not taking.
Which is how I end up at The Tipsy Berry on Friday night, because Lily decides what I need, after a week of being publicly adored for a relationship I invented, is a beer and a dark corner and no one asking when the wedding is.
The Tipsy Berry is the good kind of loud. Warm light and old wood and the smell of hops and somebody's fries, half the Hollow packed in on a Friday with the day shaken off them.
Ethan's behind the bar. Lily's Ethan, who gives her a look across the room that could power the place. And behind him, working the taps with the brisk economy of a woman who built this room with her own two hands and will not be having a single bit of nonsense in it tonight, is Scarlett Blake.
I know Scarlett the way everyone in the Hollow knows Scarlett, which is to say everyone knows her and nobody would dare claim they'reclose.She owns the place.
Dark auburn hair stabbed through with a pen, a bar rag over one shoulder, a tattoo of something leafy on her forearm, and an expression that has personally ended several conversations before they started.
She's pouring a beer and saying something over her shoulder to a man at the end of the bar that makes him laugh and then look wounded, which from Scarlett is apparently the same gesture.
“Two of whatever's local,” Lily says, leaning in. “And tell me everything. But first” , she tips her head toward the end of the bar , “watch the brewer for a second. Tell me what you see.”
The brewer. I follow her eyes.
There's a big quiet man at the far end with a beanie and a beard and forearms like he wrestles the kegs personally, nursing a half-pint and watching Scarlett the way Logan watches a level come true, like the most important thing in the room is whether the line sits right. Rowan. I crossed his name off a list last week for being hung up on somebody.
I am abruptly, deeply certain I know who the somebody is.
“He's not even pretending,” I say.
“Nobody here is pretending,” Lily says cheerfully. “Except you.”
Scarlett slides Rowan a fresh half without being asked, and doesn't look at him while she does it. He says something low. She says, clear enough to carry, “It's a beer, Rowan, not a love letter, drink it before it judges you,” and turns away, and the back of her neck goes the smallest bit pink, which she would deny under oath.
And I sit there watching the whole slow, ridiculous, tender thing of it. This woman behind her bar insisting with her entire body that she hasn't noticed a thing, while the big quiet brewer orbits her like she's the only warm thing in winter.
And I think,oh.Look at her. So sure she's fine. So busy not feeling the thing she's obviously feeling. I'd find it a lot funnier if I hadn't spent all week doing the exact same act in a different costume.
“She'd sooner die,” Lily says, following my look.
“Than what?”
“Than admit any of it. That man's been quietly in love with her since the day she hired him. Brings her coffee she doesn't drink, fixed her walk-in cooler twice this year for free, and she stands there telling the whole bar it's not her problem.” Lily sips her beer, content. “It's the best show in town. Better than yours, no offense. Yours has a deadline.”
“Mine has a deadline,” I agree, and the word catches on something on the way out.Deadline.Because that's exactly what it is.
