Page 123 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

There are only so many ways a morning can go sideways before a man stops being surprised by any of them.

I thought I'd hit my limit last night, caught between hiding an Omega under my steering wheel and telling three furious Alphas over the phone to enjoy the peace before the chaos.

I was wrong.

The limit was here, in this kitchen, at this ungodly hour, and it arrives in the form of Amber Whitlock setting those big honey-warm eyes on the pair of us over the rim of her coffee mug and asking — casual as a woman commenting on the weather —

"So. You two fucked?"

I inhale my coffee.

There is no dignified way to describe what happens after that.

The mouthful I've just taken goes straight down the wrong pipe, and I'm coughing into my fist at Amber's little two-seater table while directly across from me — parallel, unbothered, oneankle hooked over the opposite knee — Marshall grins from ear to ear like the cat that got into the whole dairy.

He is enjoying this. He is enjoying this enormously, the cocky son of a bitch.

"We were very playful," Marshall says into his tea, in that unhurried drawl of his that hasn't shifted an inch in five years, "back when he was still in our pack. Yeah." He takes a slow, deliberate sip and lets it hang there, watching me wheeze for it. "But he pulled himself out of the packship. On account of the fact that we don't, as a general rule, encourage incest under one roof."

I finally get my throat working again through sheer stubbornness and level a look at him that he ignores with the ease of a man who's been ignoring my looks since we were both too young to know any better.

Marshall looks the same, and he doesn't.

Same lean, unbothered sprawl, like every chair he's ever lowered himself into was built to his exact specifications. Same dark, patient eyes that read a whole room in one slow pass and file it away for later use.

He's let his hair grow out some, and there's a new quiet settled into him — the particular settledness that five straight years of being loved right will put into a man. His scent rolls across the little kitchen the way it always did, cool and composed: bergamot and strong black tea, worn leather, an undernote of wet slate after rain.

The exact opposite of mine, which my grandmother always swore smelled like a man about to start something he couldn't finish.

Seeing him should ache more than it does. I keep waiting for the old wound to reopen, for the grief of everything I set down. It doesn't come.

Looking at Marshall this morning just glows, low and steady, like a coal you keep around for the warmth and not the fire.

We were good together, once — the easy kind of good, the kind you don't notice you're standing in until you're standing outside of it looking back.

Marshall was the one who taught me a pack didn't have to be loud to be a home. He was also the one who told me, flat and kind over a kitchen table not unlike this one, that I ought to get on a plane to Italy and chase the work that lit me up, back when I was still pretending I didn't want it badly enough to ask. I've thought about that more than I've ever let myself admit.

Then there's Amber.

She's leaning against the counter of her cozy little kitchen in a long floral dress I would very much rather be peeling off her than watching her drink coffee in, sipping from a mug that is unquestionably still far too hot for a person to be doing that with.

She looks —I genuinely don't know how she's managed it, on the sleep she got, which was next to none and most of that squarely my fault— unfairly good this morning.

Refreshed. Damn near glowing.

She went from thoroughly-wrecked bedhead to all of this in the time it took me to locate my own boots.

The thing that keeps snagging me is her hair.

She's wearing it down. Loose, falling in soft waves past her shoulders, and I'd bet the deed to my dead truck that I've never once seen a photograph of this woman with her hair down. It's always a bun. A twist, a chignon, something controlled and pinned and professional.

She wears her control in her hair.

So this is new.

This is deliberate. I know exactly why she's done it, too, because I can see the edge of my own handiwork peeking outfrom under those waves anyway — the sea of marks I left down the back of her neck and over her shoulders last night, most of them tucked away now under all that hair. What the hair can't cover are the ones riding the side of her throat. The one sitting just above her collarbone, plain as a signature.

Those are going to make three grown men lose their entire minds.