Page 51 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Dark hair, longer than it used to be, and caramel-amber warmth drifting to me across the street. A jacket too good for this town and shoulders I'd know in any light or none at all.

In five more years of trying not to, the fog moves between us, and Cade Mercer does not cross the street. Doesn't call out, or smile that genuine grin that lights his whole face up in excitement.

He doesn’t deploy one watt of the four seconds that work on everyone alive.

He stands beside his suitcase like a man who has just walked up from the harbor road with his whole life in one bag. He liftsone hand, not a wave, just a raising —here, acknowledged, your move.

Then he waits, absolutely still, under the lamp, in the fog, to see what I do.

The contract in my inbox says he can't approach.

Nothing in any contract says what I'm allowed to do, and for one long second, my body leans a centimeter toward the curb all by itself: toward the shape of him, to the man who drove away, and every rule I wrote this week was written for exactly this moment in the midst of this lamppost.

You’re not going to unwrite the agony they put you through, Amber.

This could be the tactic. To seem unbothered. Hoping I’ll come crawling back like a desperate, needy Omega who yearns for the Alphas that abandoned her.

As if I can’t get anyone else.

The crazy part is, I can.

I’ve been asked plenty. I could be in a relationship at any moment if I let the message out there that I’m ready to mingle.

Maybe it’s time I do that…

Would it help remove the anger within me?

Heal me in some way, like a fairy godmother appearing and ridding me of the burden this pit of rage has continued to drag on?

You made the rules, Amber. Instill them…and prove that these men will have to work a lot harder to get what they perceive they don’t want.

I turn away.

My hands finish the locks, deadbolt, top latch, steady the whole way, and I walk up Bellflower Lane toward home without looking back.

He doesn't follow, call out, or leave.

Cade Mercer stands under the streetlamp beside everything he owns and lets me walk away from him; the sound my heels make on the cobbles is the only voice in the fog, saying the same word all the way home.

Rule one, rule one, rule one.

CHAPTER 10

Homecoming At Tide Table

~CADE~

Every town has one door that never changed, and mine is propped open with the same brick it's been propped open with since I was six.

Mercer's Tide Table at seven in the morning smells like the inside of my entire childhood: coffee, bacon grease, pastry butter, and the low-tide salt that gets into everything on Harbor Street and stays.

I stand on the threshold with my jacket too good for the room and let it hit me like weather.

The chairs are up. The chalkboard says TODAY'S PIE in my mother's handwriting, with the actual pie still classified.

Behind the counter, in her apron, rolling dough with the marble pin that has outlived two ovens, one roof, and my father, is Marina Mercer, who looks up at her firstborn standing in the doorway after five years of phone calls and holiday layovers, and says:

"Wipe your feet."