Page 149 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Herscent, cutting clean through the fog of spilled beer and packed bodies and forty warring perfumes like a blade drawn through still water — apricot and garden roses and warm spun vanilla, that low golden amber running underneath it that I'd know blind, that Ihaveknown blind, through five years of dreams I had no right to be having.

My head comes up.

My heart forgets its one job for a beat.

Then two…three.

There she is.

Coming through the crowd like the crowd was set there for the sole purpose of parting to let her through.

Amber.

But no Amber I have ever laid eyes on.

Her hair isdown.Down and loose and falling in these heavy, perfect curls I have never once seen her wear — not in five years, not in the entire time I've known her, when it was always pinned up tight and severe and all business.

Tonight it spills over her bare shoulders like something out of a dream I got told, in no uncertain terms, I wasn't allowed to have anymore.

She's poured into a corset top — strapless, black lace laid over cream, cinched in a way that does profoundly unfair things to a man's composure, that makes the soft curve of her look delicate and devastating in the same breath.

Leather pants that appear to have been painted onto her legs. Boots with a heel that hand her a height she's never needed and an attitude she has always, always had. Her makeup is barely there —she's never needed the help— save for her mouth.

Her lips are painted a bold, dark, blood-deep red, and heaven help me, the instant I see them my mind is gone, straight into the gutter, straight to the thought of exactly what that red mouth would look like?—

I bite down on the inside of my cheek, hard enough to taste copper. I drag my eyes up before I disgrace myself behind my own bar.

Get it together, Mercer.

But my pulse is slamming, my mouth's gone bone dry, and there's a heat crawling up the back of my neck that has no business being anywhere near me tonight.

What is she even doing here?

The question knifes clean through the fog of wanting her. She doesn't come to the Driftglass. She has never once walked into this bar dressed like a wish a lonely man makes at midnight.

Why tonight, of all nights? Why now? Why?—

Then, cold on the heels of all that heat, it comes back to me. The phone in my apron pocket, face-down and heavy as a river stone. Those two sentences glowing in the dark.

Should I prove to you that marrying this omega would be a mistake?

I stand there behind my bar, in the dead center of a hundred people celebrating a hundred kinds of love, and I feel my entire life narrow down to a single fork in the road.

Two paths, laid out plain right in front of me. One of them is safety — keep my head down, do whatever the voice on that phone wants, protect everyone the way I've always protected everyone, and run for the exit like my father's own son.

The other is redemption — walk out from behind this bar, cross that whole crowded room to her, fight like hell for the woman I destroyed, threat be damned, and gamble every last thing I have all over again.

Two roads, right there at my feet.

I know exactly which one a brave man takes. I've always known which one.

But with her scent in my lungs, a threat sitting heavy in my pocket, and the whole joyful room roaring on around me, I can't make my feet move toward either.

Truth be told…I’m scared to pick the road that will give me safety or redemption…

CHAPTER 28

Try To Keep Up