Page 211 of Knot in the Wedding Cards
The runaway bride, the woman who counts the exits in every room, the one who was so certain love was a thing that leaves — I brought three Alphas to open tears in a tent full of flowers, just by choosing them out loud.
The officiant rises —a kind-faced woman I recognize now as someone from the county clerk's office, someone Wren Callahan must have sent— and she lets the tears settle for a moment before she speaks the old words over us, the vows and the pledges, the wills-you and the I-dos that come tumbling out of four throats gone hoarse.
She turns to the little gathering of my whole heart in their white chairs. She announces us to them, and then she says the words that break the last thing left in me to break.
"By the power vested in me, and witnessed by all present, I now pronounce you Omega and Pack." She smiles at four sobbing adults. "Alphas — you may kiss your bride."
The tent detonates.
Sawyer gets to me first, because he engineered the whole thing and he has never once in his life failed to close a deal — he takes my face in both hands and kisses me long and slow and thorough, until Beckett makes a rumbling noise of protest and physically turns me by the shoulders to claim his own, gentler and deeper and tasting of salt. Then August, who waits his turn like the patient man he is and then makes absolutely certain his is the longest of the three, dipping me back over his arm until I'm laughing into his mouth and Beckett and Sawyer are both loudly complaining about hogging the bride.
"Time," Beckett rumbles, hauling me back upright by the waist. "You've had your minute, flower boy."
"I waited five years," August says serenely, refusing to let go. "I'm taking my minute."
"You'll take a minute and thirty seconds, and then I'm cutting in," Sawyer informs him. The whole front row howls.
I stand in the middle of my three bickering husbands, breathless and laughing and thoroughly, completely kissed, and I think my heart might actually give out from the sheer overfull weight of being this loved.
Cameras flash — my own team, not a decoy in the bunch. Someone's throwing petals. My mother is openly wailing, and my father has a hand pressed over his mouth.
Marlowe has given up entirely and is crying into Juniper's shoulder.
Little George is doing a victory lap.
I stand in the middle of it, ringed by three husbands and a room full of everyone I love, in a dress that weighs a ton and aheart that weighs nothing at all, and I cannot believe this is the life I'm about to walk into.
Warm mornings and brushed hair and a baby with somebody's eyes. A house on the outskirts with acres of flowers grown from a bouquet I once dropped in the rain.
A whole future, waiting.
To think I spent five and a half years certain that marriage simply wasn't in the cards for a woman like me.
Now she's finally been proven wrong.
Epilogue: Left Behind
~CADE~
The last light in my mother's house goes out while I'm still standing beside my truck, and I make myself watch it happen.
The kitchen window goes dark.
That's the one that matters.
The window she leaves on latest, the one that used to glow gold across the gravel when I'd pull in past midnight from a job, a small lit square that meant somebody was still up, somebody was still waiting.
It's black now.
She's gone to bed without saying goodbye, and I don't blame her, because we already said the only goodbye either of us could stand a few hours ago, over a plate of pot roast I could barely swallow.
My whole life is loaded into the bed of this truck.
Two duffel bags, a milk crate of tools, a garment bag, the good boots. Thirty-one years compressed down to what fits under a tarp. Theo isn't here to see me off. He made sure of that — took the truck out around four and hasn't come back, which ishis way of telling me exactly how he feels without having to look at my face while he does it.
I don't blame him for that either.
I taught him, once, that you can love somebody and still refuse to watch them hurt you. He learned the lesson better than I ever did.
