Page 100 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

She fists a hand in the front of my ruined shirt, the way you grab the one solid thing in a fast current, holding on like I might get pulled under too. I'm not going anywhere.

I press that fact into the top of her head without saying a word of it out loud, because she has had a lifetime of men saying it, and one dark road's worth of proof that saying it and staying are not the same word.

Her apricot floods the cab, unhidden now, every note of it, bruised and salt-soaked and impossibly sweet. It winds up through my magnolia and pepper until the two of us smell like one confused, aching thing that doesn't have a name yet.

I don't shush her.

I don't tell her it's fine.

It isn't fine.

She'd know I was lying. I am done being lied to, and done doing it to anyone else.

I just hold the most competent woman I have ever met while she shakes apart in a parked truck down a dirt road. I rest my chin in her hair.

I understand, with a clarity that scares me worse than the flutter did, that for this one stolen moment we are not two professionals who met on a Tuesday. Not a producer and a planner.

We're two people who learned the same lesson in two different states, years apart, and carry it in the identical place under the ribs.

We're the ones who get left.

The ones who leave first, sometimes, so at least the leaving belongs to us.

The ones who build the entire beautiful celebration, who hand everyone else the vows and the forever and the golden hour out on the cliff.

Who make certain, every single time, that every last person in the room gets their happy ever after.

While we're left with the crumbs…

CHAPTER 17

The Threshold Rule

~AMBER~

Awoman who lives alone learns to treat her own front door like a border crossing.

You can be perfectly warm about it and still not wave everyone through. I have rules about my threshold the way other people have rules about their savings — old ones, firm ones, written in a currency I paid for exactly once and don't intend to pay again. It's near midnight. My feet are ruined. My eyes are swollen from crying in a stranger's lap on a dirt road. I'm standing on my own crooked front path in Seabriar with that stranger's truck idling behind me. So the rule is the first thing out of my mouth, because the rule is the last solid thing I've got left tonight.

"I'd invite you in," I say, turning at my gate. "But I'm not the type to invite Alphas I've known for seventy-two hours into my home. Not without at least a week's written notice and two references."

Sawyer leans an arm out his open window and grins at me — tired, slow, unfairly good at it.

"I love a woman with boundaries," he says.

"You'd be the first."

"Then every other man in your life has appalling taste. Which we already established today, in a public building, at volume." His grin softens at the edges. The teasing peels off it like a coat handed to a hook. "You okay, Blooming Apricot?"

Nobody has asked me that tonight and meant the version that actually wants an answer. My friends asked it like an alarm going off. The men would ask it like a debt they were trying to pay down. He asks it the way you test a floorboard — one careful degree of weight at a time, braced to catch the whole thing if it gives under me.

I make myself think about it, since he's the sort who can tell when you don't.

"No," I say. "But I will be. That's the honest one."

"Only kind worth having." He nods, like I've settled an invoice in full. He doesn't rush to fix it. He doesn't tell me it'll be fine, or that I'm strong, or any of the other things people say to a crying woman to make her stop being a problem. He just lets thenostand there between us, allowed.

The night's gone properly cold, the way harbor nights turn the second the tide does, the salt air sliding down off the water to pool in the low streets of Seabriar. My rose garden is a black tangle along the fence, unpruned as ever, breathing out the faint green rot-and-sweetness of blooms a few days past their best. I'm warm, though. Absurdly, impossibly warm. Because I'm wrapped to the chin in his plaid shirt.