Page 126 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The kitchen goes quiet. The kind of quiet that carries weight, that leans on your chest and asks something of you.

"Thanks, Marsh," I say. Low. It isn't near enough. He knows it isn't. He takes it anyway, the way he's always taken the things I couldn't find the size of.

He shrugs one shoulder, already turning the handle.

"Three minutes," he says, all business again, offering mercy in the shape of a subject change. "I'll go start the car. Once your paperwork's signed and the government's off your back, I'll swing back around and help you get that sorry truck of yours running again, so you can get on with all that wedding nonsense you love so much." A ghost of a smile. "Can't have the great Sawyer Devereaux kept from his flowers and his seating charts."

He's gone before I can assemble anything worth saying back to him.

The door clicks shut.

Then it's just the two of us, the low hum of her old refrigerator, and the smell of coffee slowly going cold on the table.

"You really loved each other," Amber says, soft. Not a question. A thing she's turning over gently in her hands.

I think about it.

About Marshall, about the four of them, about the whole shape of a life I set down five years back and mostly stopped picking up to look at.

When I go looking now, I find it doesn't cut the way it used to.

"We'd have walked down that aisle," I tell her. "All of us. Bonded the Omega of our dreams and built the whole beautiful thing, if the cards had fallen our way." I meet her eyes. "They didn't. Turned out the Omega of the pack's dreams shared half my blood, and, well. That was that."

She watches me, quiet, letting me get where I'm going on my own.

"But maybe it was never in my cards to begin with," I say slowly, working it out even as it leaves my mouth. "Maybe I spent all those years feeling nothing because the thing I'm actually built for was never being the groom." I huff, rueful. "Or…maybe my whole calling is to be a part of somebody else's love story instead. To help the cards fall right for other people, since they wouldn't fall for me."

The way they might just be falling, this very minute, in this little kitchen.

I keep that particular thought behind my teeth.

Amber's mouth tips up.

"Well. If we're reading the cards this morning." She takes a slow sip. "I clearly drew the Tower straight out of some tarot deck, because my love life is a smoking heap of rubble with three exes standing around in it looking sorry."

"Second chances are worth it, sometimes," I say, and let the smirk build up nice and slow. "And if they're not — if those three manage to fumble you a second time — I'll just whisk you off myself. We'll go pack hunting, you and me. Start clean."

She laughs, bright and surprised out of her.

"Last resort, huh."

"Total last resort," I assure her. But my hand's already moving, tucking a loose wave of that down hair back behind her ear, my thumb grazing one of the marks on her throat as it goes. "You ought to wear it like this more often. The hair."

She goes a little pink.

It's a beautiful thing to watch happen on her, that color rising up under the apricot in her scent, tipping the whole of it sweeter.

"Do you..." She swallows. "Do you like it?"

"Mhmm." I cup her cheek in my palm and bring her down to me.

The first brush of her lips is soft, a question set against my mouth. I answer it slowly — one unhurried, deliberate, thorough kiss, the kind meant to be felt down in the soles of the feet.

She makes a small sound and gives in to it, setting her mug down blind on the table, deepening the kiss, shifting on my lap in a way that drags a groan clean up out of my chest before I've got any hope of stopping it.

"One minute!" Marshall's voice carries clear through the front door.

Amber breaks the kiss with a gasp, going scarlet to the roots of all that gorgeous down hair.