Page 159 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Every word of it lands in a place I haven't let a single living person touch in five years.

Here's the thing I understand, kneeling-drunk man and all:this is not the whisky talking.

Whisky-induced talks are different. I've been swimming in it all night — it slurs, rambles, or forgets its own name halfway through a sentence.

This is the clean opposite of that.

This is a man who thought every one of these words through stone-cold sober, hours ago, days ago, and is only now finding, at the bottom of a bottle, the nerve to say them out loud, in the dirt, in front of everyone he knows.

I'm speechless.

Completely, catastrophically speechless — which, you can ask anyone who's ever met me, is not a common condition I find myself in.

A low, appreciative whistle cuts clean through the dark from the direction of the far bench.

"Well,damn," Sawyer says, pure delight soaking every letter of it.

"Hold on. Hold on, I need to document this for posterity." August's voice, bright and wicked. "I'm getting this on a recording. For the archives. So that the very next time Beckett Shaw stands there insisting he 'doesn't do grand gestures,' I can produce hard, timestamped evidence in a court of law."

Beckett doesn't so much as glance away from me.

"Fuck off, ‘flower boy’," he says, pleasant as a Sunday. I guess the nickname has to go with August which is kinda of amusing to acknowledge. "Or better yet — go fuck Sawyer. Put all that energy toward something useful for once in your life."

There's a beat of pure, ringing, stunned silence — and then August makes a strangled little noise, and even by firelight I can watch the blush go tearing straight up his neck to the very tips of his ears.

Sawyerlosesit.

He laughs so hard he nearly tips off the back of the bench, the warm rolling sound of it carrying clean across the whole yard, and August shoves at his shoulder, which does precisely nothing to help either of their cases.

"You're both children," Beckett informs the fire, still not looking away from me.

"Andyou'rethe one down in the mud on his knees, cowboy," Sawyer calls back, wiping at his eyes. "People in glass houses."

"It's grass. And I'd do it again tomorrow." He says the last part quiet, just to me, and it lands square in the middle of my chest.

"God, they really are going to be insufferable about this," August murmurs — but he's smiling, soft and undefended, watching Beckett watch me.

I catch the exact moment Sawyer notices him smiling like that — the laughter draining right out of him, something far warmer settling in to take its place.

I look back down at the man kneeling in front of me — this stubborn, traditional, granite-hearted man who just bent all the way down for me in front of God and his packmates and the wide indifferent night — and I let myself smile.

Really smile, the whole of it, no armor left on it anywhere.

"I forgive you, Beckett," I say softly.

The words cost me more than I braced for.

Five years I hoarded them. Told myself I'd never once spend them, that he hadn't earned the currency and never would. But sitting here with him kneeling in the grass and the fire warm at my hip and the truth loosened all the way out of me by whisky and want — I find I don't want to hoard them anymore.

A grudge is a heavy thing to carry…

I've been holding this one so long my arms had forgotten they were ever tired.

Something eases in his entire face at that. He smiles up at me, slow and stunned, and it takes a decade clean off him, turns him young in the firelight, turns him into the boy I first fell for a whole lifetime ago.

Then he rises — smooth, unhurried, all that easy banked strength — and scoops me right back up off the bench and into his arms. He turns to face the house and announces, to the yard at large.

"I'll be upstairs. Fucking Amber. In an actual bed, like a gentleman." He pauses, deadpan. "You two are more than welcome to join later. If she'll have you both."