Page 158 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I want the entiresaga," I inform him primly. "Groveling and all. Especially the groveling."

He arches an eyebrow, and something dangerous kindles to life behind it.

"Is that what’s going to get me forgiven?" His voice drops low. "Me. On my knees."

The question sends a bolt of something hot straight down my spine, because he doesn't ask it the way a man plays along. He asks it the way a man takes notes.

Like I've just handed him a specification, and he fully intends to meet it to the letter.

I loop my arms around his neck and lean in close — close enough to feel the warmth radiating off the line of his jaw, close enough that my nose brushes his.

"Beckett Shaw does not go down on his knees for a living soul," I inform him, matter-of-fact, because it is simply a fixed law of my universe. "That's an August thing…or hell, a Sawyer thing."

I can picture the two of them easy — August folding down like devotion is a language he was born already fluent in, Sawyer dropping with that wicked grin like kneeling is just a dare he's decided to win.

"But not you. You're granite and tradition and old-school Alpha straight down to the marrow. You don't bend. You're not built to." I pat his broad chest, fond. "It's one of the handful of things I know for absolute certain about you."

He goes quiet at that.

Studies me a long, unreadable moment, the fire snapping and shifting between us.

"Is that right," he says at last, low, and there's something moving behind his eyes I can't quite put a name to — something that looks an awful lot like a man being handed a challenge he has already, privately, decided to win.

So when he kisses me again —hard, sudden, hungry, one hand fisting lightly in my curls— and then rises, scooping me clean up off his lap like I weigh less than the whisky bottle, I know exactly what comes next.

He's going to carry me straight into that house, up the stairs, and take me apart in a proper bed, the direct and certain and ceremony-free way Beckett Shaw does absolutely everything under the sun.

That is not what happens.

He carries me three whole steps…and sets me down. On the wide, flat stone bench we've been perched on all night, the fire crackling warm and gold at my side. Then Beckett Shaw — granite and tradition and old-school clean down to the bone, the man I'd have bet the entire harbor and my own cottage besides would never once bend for a living soul…

— gets down onto his knees in the grass in front of me.

My eyes go wide.

My whole brain stalls out mid-thought.

I'm dreaming. I've had too much whisky, I've dozed off against the warm stone, and this is a very lovely, very drunk dream.

Because that cannot possibly be Beckett kneeling in the wet grass at my feet, tipping that ridiculous, wonderful cowboy hat back off his brow to look up at me.

But it is.

It's him. On his knees.

For me.

The firelight catches the sharp planes of his face and tips his dark eyes to warm amber, and he looks up at me from down there in the grass with no shame in it whatsoever — no performance, no awareness of the two other men gone dead silent across the yard.

Just me.

Like I am the only thing in the whole wide dark world worth getting down on his knees for.

"I'd do anything for you, Sweet Apricot," he says, low, rough, and dead serious, both of his big warm hands settling over my knees. "And if that means getting down here in the dirt and begging you, then I'll beg. I'll beg all night if that's what it takes."

His thumbs stroke slow, steady circles over my kneecaps.

"I'm tipsy as all hell right now. I'll grant you that much freely. But I am not one bit stupid enough to lose you a second time. So forgive me, baby. I mean every word of it. I am never sinning again when it comes to you. Not once. Not ever."