Page 173 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I finally said every quiet thing out loud, and the ceiling didn't cave in.

Even Beckett, drunk on me and running his mouth about altars, had held his one stubborn line — he wouldn't lock his knot inside me until there's a real ring involved.

The memory makes something in my chest go warm and exasperated at once.

The man will rearrange my whole spine at midnight, then turn into a Victorian widow about a wedding band.

My bladder and my brain reach a quorum at roughly the same moment:I need to get up, and I need to do it without waking three Alphas who will absolutely conscript me back into this bed if given the chance.

This is a logistics problem.

Logistics, I can do.

I start with Sawyer's arm. I lift it by the wrist, slow as defusing a bomb, and ease it down onto the warm dip I'm about to vacate. He makes a low, grumpy sound and his hand immediately fists in the sheet where I used to be, which — I press my lips together hard to keep the laugh in. I slide down toward the foot of the bed inch by inch, off the mattress, onto cool hardwood.

Beckett's snore stutters.

I freeze, one foot on the floor, heart in my throat. He smacks his lips, rolls his head, and settles back into the rhythm. August never so much as flickers.

The gray robe is puddled on the floor where it got abandoned. I scoop it up and shrug it on, and even it smells like all of them now, like I could never again wash the four of us fullyout of one piece of fabric. I tie the belt, take one last look at the ridiculous, beautiful sprawl of them, and slip out the door.

The new house is quiet in a way my little cottage never manages.

Big, rambling, all creaking bones and morning light, the marsh out past the windows still wearing its dawn fog.

I pad down the stairs on bare feet and let the kitchen receive me.

I put the kettle on.

I am, contrary to persistent rumor, a tea person — coffee makes me feel like my heartbeat is trying to escape through my eyes— and there's a decent loose-leaf situation in the cabinet that somebody thoughtful stocked before we moved in.

I spoon leaves into the strainer, lean against the counter while the water climbs toward a boil, and do the thing I always do in an unattended quiet moment.

I check my phone.

There's the usual overnight sediment. A rescheduling note from the linen vendor. A photo from Priya of two nearly identical shades of blush that she needs me to choose between by Monday. A voicemail from Paloma Crane, the celebrity publicist, that I decide with great maturity to ignore until I've had my tea.

My thumb is halfway through a reply about the blush —the left one, always the left one, the right one photographs gray— when I feel it.

A soft press of lips to the top of my head.

I tip my face up.

Sawyer's standing over me, shirtless, hair a disaster, wearing nothing but a pair of low-slung sweats he must have found on the bedroom floor. He's smirking down at me with that slow Charleston warmth that could talk a bride out of a tantrum at forty paces.

"Now that," he drawls, "looks an awful lot like working."

"It's not working." I lock the phone against my chest, guilty as a kid caught with a cookie. "It's checking emails."

"Blooming Apricot." He plucks the phone right out of my hands and sets it face-down on the counter, unhurried, like he's confiscating contraband. "Checking emails is working with extra steps. Today's our day off. Remember? We shook on it. There was a whole ceremony."

"There was not a ceremony."

"There was a handshake. Handshakes are binding in this house. I plan weddings. I know a contract when I see one." He leans a hip against the counter and folds his arms, and the morning light does something unfair to the lean cut of him. "You hungry?"

My stomach, traitor that it is, chooses that exact instant to growl loud enough to echo.

Heat floods up my neck and into my face.