Page 157 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Distantly, past the roaring in my own ears, I'm aware of the fire popping, of the low murmur of Sawyer and August's voices gone quiet on their bench, of the marsh breathing salt into the dark beyond the reach of the light.

The whole world is still turning out there, patient and ordinary.

It's just that none of it can quite reach me here — wrapped up in cedar and smoke and the mouth of a man I spent five years trying to hate and never once managed to.

I'll have to deal with all of this in the morning.

I know it even now, even drunk, even melting into the heat of him.

I'll have to look every piece of it in the face when I'm sober and clear-eyed and nowhere near this willing to be honest with my own heart.

But right now, tonight, with the fire warm on one side of me and Beckett warm on the other, a whole bottle of whisky standing between me and every wall I usually keep bolted upright — right now I get to be truthful. Come morning, I get to blame the entire thing on the tequila. It's the most beautiful loophole I have ever stumbled into.

He groans into my mouth, low and rough, and kisses me like he's making up for every single day of the five years he didn't. His hand splays wide across my waist and pulls me further onto his lap, dragging me in tight, tucking me against the solid heat of him like he's decided I'm something that needs securing before the wind can come along and take me.

We break apart only when we're both out of air, chests heaving, and he presses his forehead hard to mine and holds it there. His breath is whisky and warmth against my lips.

"I'm sorry," he whispers.

I go still.

Beckett doesn't apologize. Beckett does his penance in a hundred silent, stubborn ways and never once lets the actual word out of his mouth — but here it is, plain and unhidden, spoken into the single inch of firelit air between us.

"I'm sorry, Amber. For that day. For leaving you standing there in front of the whole town." His voice is low, wrecked, certain. "For ever letting myself believe walking out that door was a reasonable thing for a man to do — without so much as an explanation owed to you. Without one single word." His hand tightens at my waist. "You didn't deserve one second of it. You didn't earn it, not in the slightest. I'm going to carry the regretof what I did to you every day for the rest of my life on this grand green earth." He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes are wet at the rims, utterly unashamed of it. "But I am not making that mistake twice. I swear it to you on everything I've got."

Something in my chest —some old locked room I've kept sealed shut for five years— cracks open at the sound of it. Not the speech. The small, plainI'm sorryunderneath it, the one I stopped ever letting myself expect to hear.

I've imagined this apology a thousand furious ways. Screamed it into pillows. Rehearsed the cutting, perfect things I'd fire back the day he finally dared. Now that it's here, warm and real against my mouth, I find I don't have one cutting thing left in me.

Just the ache. The relief.

The whisky making the whole of it glow gold at the edges.

He isn't finished. The words come faster now, fiercer, tumbling out of a man who never says three where one will do.

"I don't care who comes crawling out of the woodwork to try and wreck this thing," he says. "I don't care what they threaten, or who they are, or how much they reckon they've got over us. I amdone.Done sitting on my own two hands while my happiness walks out a door I could have barred with my body. And you—" his voice catches, just barely, and it undoes something in the center of my chest to hear it "—you are the whole equation, Apricot. You're the entire reason the math ever works. I am not losing you to my own cowardice a second time. Not in this life."

"You keep saying cowardice." I whisper it, searching his face. "You.The man who once put a stranger through a table in the Driftglass parking lot for grabbing Juniper's wrist too hard."

"Wasn't scared of him." His jaw works, tight. "I was scared of your father. Of what one phone call from that man could do to every last one of us." He holds my eyes, and he makes himselfsay the rest of it. "There's a difference between the brave that throws a punch and the brave that plants its feet and fights for something soft when a powerful man is telling it to walk. I only ever had the first kind, Amber. I'm learning the second one now. Slow and late and clumsy as all hell. But I'm learning it."

He has no idea how close the woodwork already is.The thought drifts up uninvited, and I press it back down under the whisky, because tonight is not for that. Underneath even that, quieter, is the thing I won't let myself look at straight: that there are three men at this fire tonight, and the fourth is across town pouring drinks for strangers. That Beckett is on this bench swearing he'll never run again — and Cade didn't even come. I let it surface for exactly one heartbeat. Then I let the fire have it.Not tonight.Tonight I am only going to let myself have the ones who showed up.

He kisses me again before I can scrape together a single word — slower this time, taking the lead, every ounce of that certainty poured into the drag of his mouth over mine. When he finally pulls back, his lips brush against mine as he speaks.

"So," he murmurs. "Would you take me back?"

I let a slow, wicked smirk climb up my face.

"Hmm." I pretend to weigh it, tilting my head, tapping one finger thoughtfully against my own bottom lip. "I don't know, Mr. Shaw. That's an awfully big ask. I'll have to think it over carefully. Give me a minute or two."

I shift on his lap as I say it —a slow, deliberate, absolutely-not-innocent roll of my hips— and I feel it land exactly where I aimed the thing.

His hands flex hard on me, and a groan drags out of him from deep in his chest. "You're gonna torture me," he says, half a growl against my jaw. "Aren't you?"

"Wouldn't that just beworth the plot,though?" I grin down at him, drunk and thoroughly delighted with my own self. "Thebig, bad, granite Beckett Shaw, brought all the way down onto his knees,beggingme to take him back." I hum, savoring the picture of it. "Nowthat'sa story worth telling."

"A story." He repeats it flatly, though the corner of his mouth is fighting a hard, losing battle against a smile. "You want a whole story out of me now, Apricot?"