Page 122 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I told your ex-fiancé the truth. There's a difference, and I traffic mostly in the second one." He sounds insufferably pleased with his whole self. "Besides. He asked."

"He did not ask."

"He implied." A beat. "Loudly."

I drag a pillow over my own face and consider, seriously, smothering myself with it to escape this entire situation. It smells like him. That is the central discovery of my life as of roughly eleven hours ago — everything I own now smells like him, and I have alarmingly few complaints on the subject.

For a moment there's just the hush of my little room.

The gray dawn coming soft through the curtains. The two of us tangled in sheets that smell, frankly, like the best decision I've made in five long years. Then he presses one more kiss into my hair and slides out of the bed. I hear the soft shuffle of his bare feet crossing my floorboards, the whisper of a curtain drawn back an inch, a low and knowing hum at whatever it is he sees out there on my quiet street.

Then the shuffle returns. The bed dips under his weight, and his lips find the side of my neck — warm, open, dragging a slow line up to the spot just below my ear that he learned, with great and thorough enthusiasm, sometime around two in the morning.

"Up you get, Blooming Apricot," he murmurs against my skin. "Time's up. You strike me as a great many wonderful things, but the tardy type? No. I refuse to believe it of you."

"Go away," I groan, with absolutely no conviction, throwing an arm across my face.

He chuckles, low and warm against my throat — and that is the precise moment a knock sounds from the front of the house. Three raps, brisk and unbothered, carrying clean down my little hall.

My eyes come open. I blink up at the ceiling, my whole face folding into a pout of deep confusion.A knock. There is a knock. On my front door. At — I don't even know what unholy hour this is, but the light through the curtains is still gray, and nobody knows where I live. August said so himself, not four minutes ago.I take rapid, horrified inventory: I am wearing precisely nothing, in a bedroom that looks like a wine bottle detonated in it, with a half-naked Alpha unfolding himself beside my bed and my hair doing something I can physically feel defying the known laws of nature.Whoever it is, they cannot come in. I am not receiving guests. The inn is closed. There is, in point of fact, no inn.

"Relax." Sawyer's already pushing up on one elbow."You know exactly who that is."

I do not.

I arch one eyebrow at him — an impressive feat, given my eyes are functioning at roughly eleven percent capacity — and level him with my flattest, most unimpressed, freshly-hauled-from-sleep stare.

"I assure you," I rasp, "I have no earthly idea who that is. Enlighten me. Who is it?"

His smirk is a slow, playful, deeply dangerous thing, tugging at one corner of his mouth.

"Our ride back into town," he says, like it's the simplest answer in all the world.

Then he stands.

He rises off the bed in one unfair, unhurried motion, both arms lifting over his head to stretch. I am treated — at whatever ungodly hour this is — to the full, leisurely display of him: all that chiseled warm expanse of chest and stomach, the muscle shifting lazy under the skin, a fading pink mark near his collarbone that I have a horrifying suspicion I am personally responsible for, as he arches his back.

My mouth goes dry. Every last brain cell I had left abandons its post to file an urgent report about the view.

This is going to be a problem. An ongoing, recurring, deeply inconvenient problem, and I have signed no paperwork anywhere that protects me from it.For one long, stupid, wine-warm heartbeat, I forget entirely that I asked the man a question.

I make myself look away from him. It takes real effort, the kind I generally reserve for tax season.

I clear my throat, gather up the shredded remains of my composure, and try very hard to sound like a woman who runs a business and stares down the federal government, rather thana woman currently short-circuiting over a stranger's obliques at dawn.

"A ride," I repeat. "Fine. Good. Wonderful. Who did you call? Marlowe? Please tell me you called Marlowe."

Then he drops his arms.

He looks down at me, and that smirk tips into something almost apologetic —almost gleeful— the exact look of a man striking a match he knows full well is about to catch.

"And my ex."

CHAPTER 22

Old Flames

~SAWYER~