Page 172 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

My eyes crack open to gray morning light and the slow-turning ceiling fan, then drift sideways to take inventory the way I take inventory of everything.

Beckett is on my left, flat on his back, one arm flung up over his head and the other lost in the tangle of sheets.

He's snoring.

Not a delicate, romance-novel sort of snore either — a full, rattling, chainsaw-through-old-oak snore that I somehow sleptstraight through. His chest rises and falls in slow swells. Cedar and smoked vanilla roll off his skin in the drowsy, banked-coals way a scent goes when a man is deeply, thoroughly unconscious, the black-tea note underneath gone soft as steam.

There's a bruise blooming purple-gold on his shoulder that I'm fairly certain I put there.

Sawyer is on my right, and Sawyer is a snuggler.

This is new information. He's got himself curled into my side with his face half-buried in my hair, one leg hooked over both of mine, and that heavy arm across my waist belongs to him. His hand rests splayed over my ribs, fingers loose in sleep. Magnolia and black pepper drift up warm from the crook of his neck, the aged-bourbon undertone mellowed by hours of sleep into something closer to vanilla and oak.

Every few breaths his nose twitches against my scalp like he's checking I'm still there.

Past Sawyer, in the far corner of the enormous bed, is August. He's the reason I almost laugh out loud and give the whole game away.

The man has stretched himself out along the very edge of the mattress, one arm tucked under his pillow, and he has not moved a single inch.

Beckett could apparently roll a semi truck through this bed and August would stay exactly where he landed, composed as a marble effigy, breathing so quietly I have to watch his shoulders to confirm he's alive. Iris and pear blossom reach me faintly from all the way over there, threaded through with green sage.

Five years I've known that man, and I never once caught him sprawling.

We are, every one of us, completely naked.

The sheet has migrated south during the night, and the evidence of how we spent it is written all over me — a row of faint teeth marks along my collarbone, fingerprint bruises pressedinto the soft inside of one thigh, the honey-warm, well-used ache that settles into a body that got exactly what it wanted several times over.

My own scent has gone syrup-thick and satisfied, apricot ripened all the way to jam, roses blown fully open, and it mingles with theirs until the whole room smells like a garden the morning after rain.

For a long moment I don't do anything at all.

I lie there in the middle of them and let myself feel the weight of it — three separate rhythms of breathing, three scents I could pick out of any crowd on earth, the particular gravity of being wanted by more than one person and trusted enough to be left asleep among them.

The house ticks and settles around us. Out past the window a heron lifts off the marsh with a slow, patient beat of wings.

A few days ago, I woke alone in my cottage and counted it a good night if I didn't dream about a ballroom.

I press that thought down before it can spoil the morning.

Even now, hours later, I can smell all three of them layered over my own skin, and the wild part is I don't want a shower.

I want to keep them there a while longer.

Last night comes back to me in pieces.

Sawyer working the blow dryer through my hair in long, patient passes while Beckett sulked about being demoted from hair duty. The way that quiet, domestic little scene had tipped, the way everything with these men tips, into hands and mouths and the four of us learning the new shape of what we are.

I'd been tipsy.

Fine — I'd been drunk, the good and reckless kind, the kind that unlatches all the doors I keep bolted.

Partway through the night I'd stopped managing the moment and let it simply happen to me.

God, that had felt like setting down a bag I'd hauled uphill for five years.

Liberating.

That's the word.