Page 134 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Because, Amber…a man like that, falling for youthishard andthisfast? It proves something. It proves you're desirable. That you're not damaged goods, not some sad cautionary tale the town whispers about. That you can be wanted…completely, entirely wanted…inside the span of a single weekend." She lifts one shoulder. "And it lights a fire under those three. It's competition. And those men need to feel every last inch of it, sothey finally,finallyunderstand how staggeringly lucky they are to have even been handed a second shot at you."

"Men," Marlowe says, with the weary authority of a woman who has rebuilt a great many stubborn old engines, "need healthy competition. Otherwise they get comfortable. They start to believe they can coast on anything, skip any step, and you'll just — be there. Waiting on them. Grateful for the scraps." She levels a paint-flecked finger at me. "Sawyer walking in reminded all three of them, in one clean stroke, that you are not a sure thing. Best possible thing that could've happened to this whole situation."

I pick at the hem of my sleeve.

The laughter's drained out of the room now, and I feel the question rising up in me before I can talk myself back out of it, small and unsteady in a way I've always hated in myself.

"Do you think I should?" I ask. It comes out quiet. "...Give them the chance. Actually give it to them."

They both go still.

I feel their eyes land on me, feel them catch the wobble I couldn't keep out of it, the thing sitting underneath the words.

"Amber." Juniper sits forward, all the play gone. "Are you okay with all of this? Actually, genuinely okay?"

I sigh.

I set the sweater down. I let myself sit in the question for a second instead of outrunning it.

"Sawyer's the opposite of that," I go on, softer. "He reads the writing on the wall like it's painted six feet tall. He's going over and above, every single second, just togetit. And August…August gets it too, I think. He always felt the most of the three of them. Beckett's starting to pick up on it, slow, the way Beckett does everything, like weather rolling in." I stop. "But Cade. Cade, I can't read at all right now. Something's turning over in that man, and I don't have the first idea what it is."

Juniper slides off the couch and comes to kneel in front of me, both of her warm hands landing on my shoulders.

Marlowe frowns — the specific frown she wears when she's worried and refuses to show it — and settles in close on my other side.

"Amber," Juniper says, soft and direct, searching my whole face. "Do you not want to do this? The pack thing. Any of it. You can say it out loud to us. Right here."

I think about it.

I think about it long and hard, longer than I've let myself think about anything since Sawyer Devereaux ran a full mile in ruined shoes to reach me.

When I finally speak, it comes out barely above a whisper.

"The night I spent with Sawyer," I say, "was the most loving, mostliberatingthing I've felt in five years. It cracked something wide open in me." I swallow hard. "And it made me realize I've spent all this time…all theseyears…grieving three men who left me at an altar to save everyone's skin but mine. I've been loyal to a wound. Faithful to the people who made it." My voice frays down the middle. "And I don't know if I can move past that. I don't know if I—" The word catches in my throat like a hook. "I'm not even certain Iwantto."

They both go still.

A single tear slips loose and rolls down my cheek before I can stop it —hot, startling, unwelcome— because I don't do this.

I don't cry.

I wipe it away fast with the back of my wrist. Another follows it. Then another.

I keep wiping them because I'm half-afraid of what happens if I stop.

"I want to give them a chance," I whisper. "I do. I want these ten weeks to maybe reignite whatever it was we had, once, before everything. But let's be honest with each other." I look betweenthem, my two oldest friends in the world, through the blur. "I'm not the same lover I was five-plus years ago. Back then my heart was…it waspure.I knew, without a single solitary doubt in my body, that those three men would never, ever hurt me." I let out a wet, cracked laugh. "And then they did it anyway. So now? Now it's different.I'mdifferent. And I honestly don't know what I want anymore."

Juniper and Marlowe share one of their looks over the top of my head, and this once I don't mind being shut out of it, because whatever passes between them comes straight back to me as each of them folding one of my hands into both of theirs.

"Then," Juniper says, squeezing tight, "let these ten weeks be exactly that. The arc that decides who you keep…and who you don't."

I frown, looking between them.

"...What?"

"Nobody said you have to walk out the far end of this still tied to all three of them," Marlowe says, blunt and steady as a keel. "Or to any of them, for that matter. You're proving you're a functioning pack so the wedding goes off clean and the government crawls back out of your business. That is theentire assignment." She arches a brow. "What you choose to do with your actual heart, inside that assignment, is nobody's business on this earth but yours."

"So here's how you play it." Juniper's got the gleam now, the one she gets when she's decided to go fierce on my behalf. "Ten weeks. This istheirwindow. Their one and only shot to give you everything they've got — to communicate, to show up, to love you the very best way they each know how. And if they can't manage it?" She shrugs, cool as sea glass. "Then they get left behind. Fair and square, no apologies owed."