Page 101 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He'd handed it over around the second mile of the drive back, when the shakes set in and my teeth started chattering hard enough to hear. He hadn't made it a thing. He'd shrugged it off one-handed at a stop sign, dropped it in my lap like a napkin, kept his eyes on the road. I'd been too wrung out to argue. Now it hangs to my thighs and smells like the entire man — magnoliaand cracked pepper and that low bourbon warmth — wound so completely around me that every breath I take is basically borrowed from him.

You are standing in your own garden marinating in an Alpha's scent, Abercrombie. Locate your dignity.

I have, historically, all the dignity in the world. I appear to have left it in his footwell, next to my shoes.

"Keep the shirt," he says, catching me notice I'm still wearing it.

"I'm returning it. Laundered. Pressed."

"You're returning it whenever, or never. There's no clause on the shirt, Boss. Not everything comes with terms." He taps two fingers on the door. "It looks better committing crimes on you than it ever did on me, anyway. I'd be a fool to ask for it back."

"You're very smooth for a man who just sprinted a mile in dress shoes."

"I contain multitudes." He says it dry, then sobers. "Listen. If you need a ride in the morning, text me. I'll try to get here before the entourage — before your three Musketeers roll up on you."

I huff, and the huff fogs white in the cold.

"Don't," I say. "Don't put that into the universe. Don't tell me they're coming." I hear my own voice climb and can't stop it. "Because then I have to stand at my window at eight in the morning pretending I'm not watching the road. When they don't show, I'll be disappointed. I have a genuinely full calendar of things to be disappointed about already, so I'd rather not pencil in another."

"They'll show." He says it easy, like a forecast he's already checked.

"You can't know that."

"I can't." He tips his head. "But I heard the quiet one swear it on his own pack, in a truck, out loud, which is not a thing thatman does for effect. He had a message for you, actually. I told him I'd carry it."

Everything in me goes still. "I don't want a message."

"I know you don't. You're getting it anyway, because I said I would, and I don't drop things people hand me to carry." He holds my eyes across the dark. "August said to tell you they'll do whatever it takes to be worth a second chance. That they'll start over from the very beginning if that's what it takes to learn how to love you right. That they'll be standing on your road before eight-seventeen tomorrow. On their feet. Not running." A pause. "He said you'd understand the time."

I do understand the time. It's the exact minute a government envelope decided my whole life should end. Apparently three men have decided to plant themselves in front of it.

I press my lips together until they behave.

"That's a very good speech," I say, when I trust my voice. "They're always very good at the speech. The speech has never once been the problem."

"No," he agrees, gentle. "The problem's always been the follow-through. So we find out at eight-seventeen whether the man learned a new trick or just wrote a prettier version of the old one. Either way, you'll have your answer. You've been owed one for five years."

I hate how reasonable that is. I hate how much I want eight-seventeen to prove him right.

"Why did you even come after me?" I ask, before I can stop it. "You could have stayed in that room and kept flaying them alive. You were plainly enjoying it."

"I was, a little. Sue me." The humor thins out of him. "But flaying them doesn't get you off a dark road, and you were the only soul in that whole disaster who hadn't done one single thing to earn any of it. So I picked the errand that actually mattered." He says it like it's obvious. Like it isn't the kindest piece ofarithmetic anyone's run on my behalf in five years. "The men can wait for their lecture. You couldn't wait for a ride."

He pushes his door open and unfolds himself out of the cab — stiff from the run and the drive, all six-and-a-half feet of Charleston gone rumpled, cream shirt grey with the day, sleeves shoved up, dark curls flattened on one side. Even wrecked, the man photographs. It's rude, frankly. He walks me to the bottom of my three porch steps and stops there, a full body-length back, hands loose and visible at his sides. No looming. He learned my rules in a single afternoon and keeps them without being told, which is its own quiet, infuriating argument for him.

"Get some sleep," he says. "Big morning."

"Sawyer."

He'd already half-turned to go. He turns back.

The question's been sitting in my chest since the dirt road, and the cold and the exhaustion have finally sanded my filter down to nothing, so I let it out into the dark between us.

"Why do you have so much confidence in them?" I ask. "Truly. You've spent two days watching a pack treat me like the villain in their story — the tragedy that happened tothem, the thing they had to survive — and you keep talking about them like they're worth the wait." I pull his shirt tighter around me. "And you should know something, before you invest. If I go back to them —if— that doesn't guarantee you'd be joining anything. You do understand that."

He looks at me a beat. Then he glances back over his shoulder as he half-turns toward his truck. The smirk that crosses his face is slow and lazy and entirely too pleased with itself.

"So that means I'm an option, though."