Page 43 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Okay…now I’m really pissed off.

"No private meetings unless logistics demand it, and demand gets defined by me. No touching. Not a handshake, not a steadying hand, not a coat over a chair for me, nothing. No scenting, and I mean held, Beckett, the way you held it in that elevator, every day, every room. No references to anything before five years ago during working hours, and every hour is a working hour. No decisions about this event, none, down to a napkin, without my approval. And nothing, ever, that uses this town, those two people, or their budget as pressure. Sloane Carroway does not become the crowbar. If I so much as smellstrategy, the estate loses the booking and I will relocate that wedding to a parking lot and make it gorgeous, and you know I can."

"I know you can." He hasn't moved. "Put all of it in writing, and I'll sign it. Add anything you want later. I'll sign that too. Lena can have it notarized by Friday."

Just like that.

Every term, swallowed whole, no negotiation, no wounded counteroffer, pen practically uncapped, and the anger that goes through me is so fast and so wrong-footed I nearly miss what it actually is.

I came ready for resistance.

Some buried, humiliating cellar of me, five years cold, wanted resistance, wanted him to push back on no touching, to fight for one inch of ground, to prove the wanting still outweighs the obedience.

Now he's standing there agreeing with me out of every last pretext, and I'm furious about being given everything I asked for.

Which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.

Name it, girl.

You wanted evidence he'd still burn for you, and he's handing you fire safety codes.

Why did I think he’d grovel? That he’d fight for me? That they would regret what they did…what they continue to do even trying to give me the power slot like I’m some walking pity party.

To think I was yearning for this man in the elevator to the point I had to finger fuck myself in the truck on the side of the road to make it home without losing my fucking mind…

I can’t keep playing this emotional foolishness.

I have to throw this all away. Throw it in the mental cellar and lock it away…today.

"Friday," I say, and pick up my clipboard fence, and go find my army on the south lawn.

I’m so over this…and we’ve only just begun.

CHAPTER 8

The Scale Doesn’t Start At Zero

~BECKETT~

She still taps the pen three times before she writes.

Tap, tap, tap, against the clipboard edge, unconscious as a heartbeat, the exact metronome I listened to across a hundred kitchen-table nights of seating charts, vendor lists, and the first time she does it, over by the ballroom windows.

Five years fall out from under me like a rotten step.

I catalogue her all morning.

Can't help it.

It’s an instinctive effect that’s gotten to that level where I don't even try. It's the one trespass that happens entirely inside my own skull where the rules can't reach.

The bracelet is her grandmother Whitlock's, the thin braided gold one, the only jewelry from that family she ever loved, and she wears it on the right wrist now instead of the left.

There's a scar near her thumb I don't have the history for, a clean pale line, glass or a blade, healed years ago, a whole story of some ordinary Tuesday when she bled, and I was not in her life to know it.

Her shoes are suede flats built for ten-hour days on lawns and stone, chosen by a woman who learned the hard way what her work actually asks of a body, nothing about them for display, everything about them true.

And she doesn't ask anymore.