Page 164 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Telling him will only make the grin worse.

"You remind me of Amber," I say.

That does it.

Sawyer pulls back a fraction, one brow climbing, delighted and affronted in equal measure.

"You'd best mean that as a compliment, Bellamy, or this is going to go a real different direction."

"In the bedroom." Heat crawls up my neck, but I'm committed now, and there's a reckless freedom in finally saying the thing instead of filing it. "She takes command. Always has. You learn fast that it's rare…an Omega who'd sooner run the whole operation than be run. Most people fold the second you hand them the reins. She never folded once in her life."

I hold his gaze. The wrists he's still pinning flex once against his grip, testing, learning the shape of it.

"You've got the same thing. You walk into a room and you've already decided how it's going to go. I've been trying to figure out for four days whether that would drive me insane or?—"

"Or," Sawyer supplies.

"—or," I drawl out the word but have no intention of continuing.

He hums, low and pleased, the magnolia going molten between us.

"For the record. I find it downright tragic how hard it is to come by. A partner who'll take the reins."

His mouth ghosts along my jaw, unhurried, cataloguing.

"Amber wouldn't fold for God himself. You"—his hand tightens, testing, and my breath goes ragged—"you're a different animal. You bend so everybody around you stays comfortable, then you go home and call it being easygoing. That's not the same as folding, Bellamy. Folding's a choice. You've never once made it on purpose."

He sees the whole courthouse. Every brick of it.

It should feel like exposure. It feels, instead, like a door coming unlatched.

I've spent five years learning to read people so I could stay a step ahead of them, so I could hand them the exit before they knew to want it. It unsettles me down to the soles of my boots that Sawyer got there first.

He read me, beat me to it, then set the door in my own hand and folded my fingers shut around the knob.

You take it, or you don't.

Nobody's handed me a choice that clean since I was young enough to believe I'd always get to keep the good ones.

"Here's my worry," he goes on, conversational, as if we're discussing the seating chart and not the fact that he's got me flat in the grass with my wrists in his fist. "Two Alphas is a whole lot of front-of-house in one bed. I've watched packs come apart over less. So I've got to ask you a serious question, and I want an honest answer, none of your smoothing." He looks down at me. Under the tease, there's something real in his face, something checking. "You got a submissive bone anywhere in that body? Because if you don't, we are going to butt heads for the rest ofour natural lives, and I'll enjoy every minute of it, but I need to know what I'm signing."

"You always this romantic, or am I special?" I ask.

"I'm this thorough. You'll learn the difference, and you'll learn to like it." His weight settles a fraction heavier, pinning the point home along with the rest of me. "I plan weddings for a living, Bellamy. I don't walk into anything without reading the whole contract first. Call this the venue walkthrough."

"That's the least romantic thing a man has ever said with his knee between my legs."

"And yet." He rolls his hips, slow, just the once, and whatever I meant to say next dissolves into a sound I'd deny under oath.

The frogs saw away. The fire ticks.

His weight is a warm certainty holding me to the earth, and I take stock of myself the way I take stock of a room — honestly, for once, without the management running interference.

"I don't know," I tell him.It's the truest thing I've said all night."I've spent five years not finding out. Nobody's ever—" I stop. Start over. "I bend for everyone. I've never once wanted to bendforsomebody. There's a difference. You said it yourself."

Sawyer goes still above me.

Then something in his face shifts, softens at the edges without losing an ounce of its certainty, and he lowers his forehead to mine for a second, just breathing, letting the magnolia and the iris tangle up in the smoke.