Page 151 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Beckett.

"Sorry — Brady, was it?" The voice rumbles out low and lazy over the top of my head, warm and easy and absolutely lethal. "But this one here's my Sweet Apricot."

The old name lands in me like a struck bell, low and resonant and complicated.Sweet Apricot.The name they gave me, before. The name I made all three of them swear off in a contract with my own lawyer's signature drying at the bottom of it. Here's Beckett Shaw, breaking that particular clause without a single flicker of hesitation, in front of a total stranger, like the rule was never anything more than a dare I set down for him to pick up. Part of me wants to elbow him for it. Part of me — the traitor part — goes warm at the sound of it in his mouth. I file the whole confusing thing away for later.

"You know the type," he goes on, conversational, his arm a warm iron band across my middle. "The one that got away, on account of you fumbled her the first time, and now you spend the rest of your life trying to reclaim the territory." A pause I feel rumble straight through his chest into my spine. "This here's the only shot I get at her all night. So."

I tip my head back to look up at him — and I have to bite down hard on a laugh, because Beckett is wearing acowboy hat.

A genuine, well-worn, brown felt cowboy hat, tipped low over those serious dark eyes, and it should look ridiculous on him. It does not look ridiculous. It looks, against every law of God and good taste, like a problem I'd very much like to have.

His eyes drop and lock onto mine, and a slow smile tugs at one corner of his mouth. "Evening, Miss Whitlock," he drawls, thick as molasses. "Right dandy, meeting you here. Hmm?"

I let the smirk come, arching an eyebrow up at the brim of that absurd, wonderful hat. "Why, Mr. Shaw," I say, matching him beat for beat. "Dandy seeing you here too, I'm sure."

He chuckles, low and pleased, and I can smell the shot or two on his breath, warming the black tea of him. Whatever he's had has loosened the bolts he usually keeps torqued down bone-tight, and the sheer boldness of him tonight lights something up under my ribs. He leans in, close against my ear. "Please tell me I'm allowed to call you Amber," he murmurs. "Seeing as we're well and truly outside of work hours."

I snicker, narrowing my eyes at him. "Well. Since you've correctly identified the operating principle," I say, "I suppose I'll allow it."

He grins and lifts his gaze to Brady, who's been standing there this entire time watching his odds evaporate into the rafters. "My pack mates are floating around here tonight, friend," Beckett tells him, easy. "And they're a good sight more anal than I am about the whole possessive-ego business. So you'd be a wise man to go find yourself a different Omega to charm."

Brady laughs and lifts both hands in surrender. "Hey, I ain't fighting nobody tonight." He looks at me, and there's genuinely no heat left in it, just an easy grin. "She's worth it, though — and I don't mean that in a hitting-on-your-Omega way. I mean it as a straight-up compliment to the whole situation you got here." He tips an invisible hat at us. "Y'all have yourselves a good night." Then he's gone, swallowed back into the churn of the crowd.

I twist around in Beckett's arms to squint up at him properly. "Okay. Where in thehelldid you come from? You don't even like drinking."

"Now who told you that?" He looks deeply affronted.

"Youdid!" I poke him square in the chest. "Verbatim. Years ago. 'I don't see the point of it, Amber.'"

"Mm. That may have changed some, these last five years." He says it lightly, but there's a whole apology folded up small inside it, the kind Beckett will never once say out loud in plain words.

There it is again — that thing all three of them keep doing lately. The apology tucked neatly inside a joke. The sorry they can't seem to spit out with their whole chests. Five years ago it would have been enough. A crumb, and I'd have called it a banquet.Not anymore. Show me. Don't hint at it under your breath — show me.His hands find my hips and turn me fully to face him — and then, with zero preamble whatsoever, because he is Beckett Shaw and subtlety was never among his gifts, one of those big hands drops and takes a frank, unapologetic handful of my ass.

I arch an eyebrow at him. Slowly.

He groans, low in his chest, and leans down until his forehead is nearly resting against mine, the brim of the hat shadowing us both. "Okay. Look. I'm supposed to be working. I'm supposed to behelping out." His voice drops to a rough growl. "But I have had two full shots already, and if I have to stand here and watch you in a sea of strange men eyeing you up from every possible angle for one more second without kissing you, I am going to lose my entire goddamn mind."

My heart stutters and skips. It clicks into place — Beckett's hereworking,pitching in behind the scenes tonight, and he stopped whatever he was doing the very second he clocked another Alpha leaning over my table. Some things a man simply can't stand to watch. "Then what," I breathe, "are you waiting f?—"

He doesn't let me finish.

He kisses me, right there, in the dead middle of the packed Driftglass, and his free hand comes up and wraps around the front of my throat — not squeezing, justthere,a warm, claiming collar of a grip that tips my chin exactly where he wants it and leaves me absolutely nowhere to go. I'd forgotten this about him. I'd let myself forget it on purpose. Beckett does not fumble at a thing he's certain of. When Beckett Shaw knows what he wants, he takes it clean and sure and without one word of apology — and right now, his mouth slanting hot over mine, his hand at my throat, he is reminding me, in no uncertain terms whatsoever, of exactly that.

My knees do something unforgivable. Five whole years I spent quietly convincing myself I'd misremembered him — that no one actually kisses like this, that I'd gilded the memory in hindsight the way you gild anything you've lost. I did not gild it. If anything, I undersold the man to myself, just to survive the missing of him.

He only breaks the kiss when a hand lands on my hip.

A second hand. A second man. A kiss presses soft to the side of my neck, unhurried, and a new scent rolls in over both of us like a flood tide — blue iris and pear blossom, white musk and cool green sage, so thick and sudden anddeliberatethat it isn't so much an arrival as a forced introduction. It's so obvious, so pointed, so completely unlike his usual careful gentleness, that a giggle bubbles straight up out of me and breaks the kiss clean in two.

I look back over my shoulder, already knowing. "August."

"Now where thehelldid you come from?"

He's pouting. A full, wounded, flower-boy pout. "I cannot even let you walk into a single establishment by yourself," he laments into my hair, "before you've gone and gotten yourselftaken."

"He's on your team, you know." I point a finger at Beckett, who's still holding me in his arms, entirely unrepentant.

"It doesn't count." August sniffs, magnificently.