Page 62 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I've built the one thing I know how to build, which is a room with no trap in it.

The truck comes up the lane at six exactly.

Not a minute early, which would look eager. Not a minute late, which would concede she'd thought about being late.

Six on the nose, the way she taps a pen three times before a ceremony, and I feel the old tenderness rise so fast I have to press my lips together against it and look at the dahlias until it passes.

She gets out with Marlowe Kealoha, which is a message in itself. I have to acknowledge and respect it.

"Bellamy." Marlowe reaches me first, gray eyes already cataloguing the barn, the greenhouse, the beds, appraising my whole life at market rate. "I'm told you've got old greenhouse tables somebody was going to burn. Cast iron, wood tops, pre-war?"

"Carriage house, back left. Four of them. My grandfather's." I tip my head toward the path. "The legs are sound. The tops need you."

"Everything needs me." She's already moving. "I'll be inspecting furniture and pointedly not listening. Amber, I'm forty feet away, and I have excellent hearing."

That leaves the two of us in the gold light, ten feet of cut grass between us, and I make myself keep the distance because the contract says I will and because she strung it there on purpose.

Amber Whitlock at golden hour is a thing I trained myself for five years not to picture, and the picture was wrong anyway; too soft.

The real one is sharper. She's in a wrap dress the color of a ripe peach, her auburn hair coming loose from its pins the way it always loses that war by evening, a clipboard against her chest like a breastplate. Freckles out from the summer. Her eyes doing the hazel-to-green thing they do, which right now reads guarded, braced, ready to catch me being exactly who I used to be.

Her scent barely reaches me.

Neutralized, careful, the apricot pressed down to a rumor.

She armored her own body to walk through my fields. Note that. Don't ever let yourself think this is easy for her.

"Ms. Whitlock." I keep my voice where I keep it, low and level. "Thank you for coming to the farm instead of making me send samples. It's a different decision when you can smell the place."

"That's why I came." She's scanning past me already, the table, the notebooks, the water. Her eyes stop on the emptycenter of the table where a lesser man would have put a bouquet, and something crosses her face, gone before I can name it. "No flowers on the table."

"You'll see four acres of them. Seemed redundant to hand you six in a vase and tell you they were meaningful."

"And no music."

"No."

"No little tart from Sabine's." She says it flat, testing, watching my face for the tell.

"I thought about it."Honesty. Always, now, even the unflattering kind."For about a minute. Then I understood that a tart would be a sentence about the past wearing an apron, and you didn't drive out here to be reminded. You drove out here to decide if my flowers can carry a wedding. So." I gesture at the plain table, the blank notebooks. "Water, paper, and the truth about my growing schedule. That's the whole seduction."

Something in her shoulders drops a quarter inch.

I doubt she knows I saw it.

She probably doesn’t realize how hard it is for me to do this to her.

Do dare disappoint her.

This is for her own benefit…or maybe mine as well, but my actions — or lack of actions— is what’s going to make this as professional as possible.

Where we potentially both survive the madness this wedding is going to ensue by the end of it.

"That's certainly an option," she says, which I happen to know is what she says when she's caught off guard and won't admit it. She sets her clipboard down on the table and picks up the schedule instead. "Walk me through it. Ceremony to last dance. Convince me you can do local at scale without it looking like a farm stand threw up on a celebrity."

There she is.

I have to look at the dahlias again.