Page 163 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He'd only smiled and told me he'd give me the opportunity I was yearning for.

This is the problem nobody tells you about a man like Sawyer.

You spend years learning to read people so you can stay ahead of them, so you can hand them the exit before they know they want one.

Then a man comes along who is better at it than you, who readsyoulike large print, who takes the chin in his hand and the choice out of the air and hands it right back to you clean —you take it, or you don't— and the whole apparatus of your careful management just falls over sideways in the grass.

"I don't like you," I tell him.

It comes out lower than I mean it to.

Rougher.

Sawyer's mouth curves.

"No?"

"You're smug. You're slow on purpose to make everyone else feel frantic. You touched my tattoo like you had a right to it." My hand has found the front of his shirt without my permission, a fistful of soft flannel gone warm from the fire. "You've been observing us since you arrived, and acting like you already own the lease to this damn agreement."

"Mm." He hasn't moved. He's letting me hold him there, hanging on his own certainty like it's a doorframe. "That all?"

"No."This is the part where I manage it. The part where I let go and reach for a log."You smell like the inside of a bourbon barrel, and I've been trying not to notice."

"A shame that you can’t simply embrace what you’re afraid of admitting is a brewing addic-" Sawyer murmurs.

Then I kiss him.

I kisshim— that's what I keep coming back to, after, when I try to lay it out in order in my mind while everything is playing in real time. I'm the one who closes the distance. I'm the one who fists the flannel, hauls him down, and takes his slow, smug, certain mouth with mine before he can say another true thing about me.

It's the first bold move I've made, and I make it badly, all teeth and impatience, as though I’m cashing out all at once.

Sawyer lets me have it for exactly three seconds.

Then he takes it back.

One hand slides into the hair at the base of my skull andgrips, and the kiss stops being mine. He tilts my head where he wants it. He slows me down to his pace with nothing but the pressure of his fingers and the patient, punishing thoroughness of his mouth, and the sound that comes out of me is not a sound I have made in front of another person in a very long time.

He drinks it down like the last of the bourbon.

My back hits the grass. I don't remember deciding to lie down. I don't think I did decide it.

One moment I’m being reasonable, the next the man is over me, one knee planted between my legs, both my wrists gathered up in one broad hand and pressed into the cool grass above my head like he's done it a hundred times.

He breaks the kiss just far enough to look down at me.

His pupils have swallowed the firelight. His grin has gone crooked and wolfish and thoroughly pleased with itself.

"Yup," he says, breathing hard, entirely too satisfied. "The fucker's a top."

A laugh punches out of me before I can stop it.

"You're talking about yourself in the third person."

"I'm confirming a hypothesis." He shifts his weight, settles it, and I feel exactly how much of it there is. His nose drags along my throat, right over the pulse, breathing me in — iris and pear blossom and white musk, the sage I rub between my fingers all day, all of it kicked up hot and wanting under his mouth.

"You had a theory about me. I could see you running it back there. Go on. Say it."

I should not tell him.