Page 73 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Three scents start to climb at once — cedar and storm-dark tea, cut sage and cold iris, salt and caramel scorched toward smoke. Sawyer, magnolia-calm, doesn't move an inch. He isn't impressed. That, more than anything, is what tips me from amused into decisive.

"Enough." I stand. "Contracts are not decorative. Beckett, west wall, the rigging survey. August, stage the sample table in the banquet hall. Cade, the bar sightlines. Go."

They go. Not gracefully. Cade goes muttering that he was standing there first. Beckett picks up two floor-plan boards when I assigned him one. August gives Sawyer a smile so polite it could etch glass, with no welcome anywhere inside it.

I take Sawyer through to the main banquet hall to walk the ceremony-to-reception line. The second we're a few steps ahead, he glances back at the three of them watching me from their assigned corners.

"They love you," he says, quiet, certain. "They're just still in the coward stage."

I should correct him. I pout instead.

"They're attractive stalkers with useful professional licenses," I say. "That's the honest listing. Five years, and the boldest thing any of them has managed is a very good beverage projection. They apologize in floor boards. In flowers. In load-bearing beams. Anything except the sentence."

"Men who hesitate," Sawyer says mildly, "shouldn't act wounded when somebody else knows how to make a decision on time."

"They had five years." I'm enjoying this more than I should. "They had weeks in this town. They had a whole meeting. If another player at the table can actually read his cards, that's not my tragedy to fix."

"Careful." Sawyer's smile goes sly. "That's the kind of speech a woman gives right before she talks herself out of the thing she plainly wants."

"What I want is a wedding that lands on time and under budget. Everything else is negotiable, and none of it is your business."

"Fair enough. I produce events, Ms. Whitlock. I'd never presume to produce a person."

That one lands. It's the exact thing the three of them spent years doing — producing me. Staging what I could handle. Quietly editing the parts of the truth they'd decided I couldn't carry.

He stops by the tall windows, unhurried, and asks it plainly.

"Then have a drink with me. This week. After work."

I blink.

There's no committee in it. No history to litigate. No three men deciding in a corner what I can survive. A man is simplyinterested, so he said so, out loud, in one sentence. The first complete one anybody's offered me in five years.

Five years of waiting for three cowards to locate a full sentence was, apparently, my limit.

I could say yes to punish them. I won't. That's not the reason, or not the whole one. The whole one is that I'm tired of guarding an empty chair for men who won't sit down. I'm allowed to be wanted without it becoming a hearing on my past. I'm allowed to find out how it feels when someone decides he wants something and just asks.

"Thursday," I say. "Eight o'clock works."

Sawyer takes out his phone. We trade numbers, easy, ordinary, a thing adults do.

Behind him, I watch three men come apart in three different keys. Beckett's scarred hand closes on the edge of a display table until his knuckles go pale. August snaps the pencil he forgot he was holding — a small, clean crack that carries the length of the hall. Cade drops the pretense of measuring anything at all and just stares, the light gone out of his whiskey eyes the way it only goes when he's genuinely hit.

Their scents roll across the room in one hot wave before they haul them back.

I feel it. God help me, I feel all of it — the old pull, the remembered safety, the ugly sweetness of knowing they still care this much. I let myself feel it for exactly as long as it takes to not act on it. I'm not rescuing them from this. They built the silence. They can stand in it awhile.

I turn back to Sawyer with a calm, pleasant smile.

"Thursday at eight," I confirm, and slide my clipboard back into my arms.

Then I return to the layout like nothing happened at all, because the wedding doesn't plan itself and I refuse to give three jealous Alphas the satisfaction of a scene. Sawyer just did in oneclean sentence what none of them have managed in five years. He asked. He's watching them realize it, too — that standing near me, fixing my floorboards, projecting my beverages, was never going to hold my place for them. Proximity isn't a claim. Patience isn't a proposal.

I let the silence sit until it's good and heavy. Then I look at the three of them, still rooted where jealousy left them, and I point my pen at the far end of the hall.

"Now that everyone's rediscovered the concept of urgency," I say sweetly, "perhaps we can apply some of it to the west terrace."

CHAPTER 13