Page 84 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I'm choosing not to make anything of that, and failing.

I lead us off Main Street toward the old meeting hall behind the library, because I know exactly where it is. I know exactly where it is because I have been to Honeybell Harbor before.

Five years ago.

A lifetime, in the only unit of measurement that's ever meant anything to me.

"How do you know where you're going?" Cade asks.

His tone reaches for casual. It lands nearer to suspicious.

"Is that relevant right now?"

"It's a little relevant."

"It really isn't." I don't slow down.

Beckett's voice comes next, low and flat, aimed at the back of my skull.

"You don't need to keep holding her hand. There's a clause. No touching."

I let myself smile before I turn, because I've been waiting since the lobby for one of them to say it out loud.

"There's a clause that applies to the three of you," I agree. "Signed, notarized, admirably thorough. I read it this afternoon, while you were all losing a staring contest to a banquet table." I look down at Amber. "That clause doesn't have my name anywhere on it. Right, Boss?"

She looks up. Her eyes have gone more green than brown, the shade they take when she's exhausted and holding herself together with both fists, and there's a flush climbing her throat she would end my life for naming.

"Right," she says.

"There we are." I face front, satisfied on two counts. I got her answer, which I wanted for its own sake. I also got to watch three grown Alphas remember, all at the same instant, that the wordoursis not a law of nature. It's a thing you keep earning. Out loud. In public. At cost.

Somebody has to remind them the house is burning.They've stood in the smoke so long they've decided it's just the weather.

Here's the part I can't square, and it needles me the length of the hill.

I saw Amber Whitlock's file before I saw her face.

Paloma sent a headshot, a company one-sheet, a list of impossible things this woman built out of nothing but her own spine. I read all of it in a hotel room in Charleston and felt something turn over in my chest like a lock finding its key. I told myself it was professional admiration. I lie for a living, and even I didn't buy it.

Then I met her.

She was funnier than her file and twice as sharp. We wanted the same things out of a room. Now I've spent one day in hercompany, and I already know I'd tear up my whole calendar to keep the smoke off her.

So no.

Three careful, apologetic, half-a-step-behind men cannot be the same men a woman like this once chose to bond.

Something rotted in them along the way. I have a strong suspicion I know what. I'm not going to fix it for them, either. Jealousy is the only alarm loud enough to wake a comfortable coward.

Let it ring all night.

The meeting hall is one of the new civic builds — plain brick, a row of small rooms in the back, each wired for privacy. We file in. Amber lets go of my hand to step past me, and I feel the loss of it more than I've earned the right to. The last man shuts us in. I hit the panel by the frame, and the soundproofing engages with a soft pressurized hum, the particular hush of a room that has agreed to keep a secret.

They put these everywhere now, even in towns this small.

Pack law tightened, and privacy got monetized right behind it. In a place that runs on gossip the way Honeybell Harbor does, a sealed room is the most valuable square footage for a mile.

Fitting, considering what we walked in here to say.