Page 112 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Oh, no you don't.My traitor heart does something entirely undignified against the cage of my ribs. I hate it. I feel the heat come crawling up my throat before I can slam any door on it.

I grab for the lifeline of suspicion, because it's so much easier to hold than whatever's gone warm and dangerous in my chest. "Okay. Hold on. Time out." I narrow my eyes at him over the demilitarized zone. "Isthatwhat all this is? The whole—" I flap a hand at him, at the pasta, the rescue, the story, the wet eyes, every impossible piece of the night "—gallant fourth-man routine. Are you making yourself into a love interest onpurpose?Playing the shiny new pack in my rearview mirror, so my three finally get their heads on straight and realize I'm the one that got away?"

"Could be," he says, entirely unbothered, and the plain honesty of it knocks the wind clean out of my accusation.

"Could — you can't justadmitthat?—"

"Why on earth not? You asked me plain. I answered you plain. I find it saves everybody time." He shifts. The mattress dips. The distance across my sacred demilitarized zone quietly shrinks by an inch he does not apologize for. "But let me hand you one question right back, since we're being so plain with each other tonight." His voice stays soft, so careful, a man setting a fragile thing down on a table with both hands. "If there were room in that guarded heart of yours for a fourth Alpha — a real one. Not a prop. Not a lever to pull against the other three. An actual fourth." He pauses. "Would that be up your alley? Even a little?"

The question just sits there in the lamplight between us, patient, taking up all the air.

I think about it. I genuinely think about it, the way I turn over the hard vendor contracts, hunting every line for the hidden clause, the trap in the fine print, the cost buried under the courtesy — except there's no clause here. There's just a man on the far side of my grandmother's quilt who ran a full mile in ruined dress shoes to reach me tonight and hasn't asked me for a single thing since.

"You're the first," I hear myself whisper, and once the sentence starts I find I can't stop the rest of it from coming. "In five years. You're the first one to make me feel like I could be loved by somebody new. Appreciated by somebody who wasn't standing at that altar. Somebody who doesn't owe me an apology to get through the front door." My eyes sting hot, and for onceI just let them. "It hasn't even been seventy-two hours. I have aruleabout seventy-two hours, Sawyer, an actual ironclad rule, and you blew straight through the middle of it like it was tissue paper. But you fought for me. You chased me down a black road in the dark and hid me under your own steering wheel and cooked me dinner and put my neutralizer up where I can't reach it." A wet, cracking laugh escapes me. "You've done things in one single day that the three men I was going tomarrycouldn't manage to do in years."

He doesn't say a word. He just lets me have the whole floor, which is somehow far worse, because it means the rest of it keeps spilling out.

"I thought I was used goods." The word comes out cracked straight down the middle. "That's the — that's the ugly little sentence that's been living in my chest for five whole years. Who wants the woman who gotleft?Who lines up for the leftovers — the reject, the return, the cautionary tale standing there in the nice white dress with nobody at the other end of the aisle?" I swallow hard around the stone lodged in my throat. "But then you came out of absolutely nowhere andinterferedin my entire life without so much as asking my permission, and somehow the side effect of all your meddling is — they see it now. All three of them. That I can be wanted. That I'm not stuck, and I'm not unlovable, and I'm not—" my voice wobbles and drops clean off a cliff to nothing "—I'm stillattractive.Apparently. To somebody."

The heat floods my face all the way to the tips of my ears, and I stare down into the sheets, mortified past speech.

He moves.

He crosses it. The demilitarized zone — the line I drew straight down the center of this bed not two hours ago, the border I swore up and down I would defend with my dying breath — he crosses it slow, like it was never truly there. Hishand comes up. His warm palm cradles the side of my face. His thumb tips my chin up until there is nowhere left on earth for me to look but at him.

"And who," he says, low and rough, "ever told you that you weren't attractive?"

The magnolia in his scent has opened all the way now, warm and dark and blooming, the aged bourbon underneath it deepening into something that curls hot and low in my belly. The black pepper's gone knife-sharp over the top of it — restraint, I understand dimly through the haze, the unmistakable scent of a big man holding his whole self on a very short leash.

"Well," I manage, and it comes out mortifyingly breathless. "It was a — a personal assessment. Internal review. Annual, actually. I'm my own harshest?—"

"Mm." His thumb drags slow and deliberate along my bottom lip, coaxing it to part, and every single clever thing I have ever known in my life evacuates my skull at once. "And what," he murmurs, so quiet I feel it more than hear it, "would it take, do you think, to enlighten you otherwise? To make you believe — really, truly believe it, down in the marrow — that you are attractive, Amber, and that you can be loved by somebody altogether new?"

I am scarlet. I can feel the whole tomato-red truth of it blazing under the warmth of his palm. Maybe it's the wine, loosening the knots I keep tied so cruelly tight. Maybe it's the ungodly hour. Maybe it's the long dry year of empty evenings I filled up with a grape instead of a person. Maybe it's every single bit of it braided together.This could be the moment. The one I have never once let myself have. I haven't signed a thing yet — not the federal papers, not the terms with the three of them, nothing's inked, nothing binds me till the sun's up.If I try this — tryhim— tonight, and it turns out wrong, there is still a door.There is always a door. I count the exits in every room for a living.

But God help me, I don't want the door right now. I want, for one reckless stolen hour, to find out what it feels like to be chosen by a man who chose me on purpose. When nobody made him. When there was no altar, no contract, no father in the wings pulling the strings tight.

I swallow the stone in my throat. My hand comes up, and it closes around his wrist — not to pull it away from my face. To keep it exactly where it is.

"Show me?" I whisper.

It's a dare. It's a plea. It's the bravest thing I've said out loud in five long years, all of it folded down small into two little words.Let me find out that I'm desirable. Let me find out that I'm loveable. Let me find out I don't have to stay stuck forever with men who never once, not one time, went over and beyond for me — that better exists in this world, and that I am allowed to reach out and want it.

I hold his dark, steady, patient gaze, and I say it.

"Show me that you can do better."

CHAPTER 20

The Slow Unfolding

~AMBER~

The wine sat forgotten on the nightstand, half a glass each, the bottle tipped on its side like it had given up trying to keep pace with us.

My bedroom felt smaller than it ever had, the lamplight carving soft gold across the quilt and the man stretched beside me on the far side of the line I had drawn so carefully hours earlier.

Sawyer watched me with that unhurried Charleston patience, dark curls mussed from the long night, the open collar of his shirt revealing the strong column of his throat.