Page 92 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Sawyer.

He's a wreck, and that's the first thing I register, because it's so unlike him it stops the breath in me.

The immaculate Charleston composure is gone. His cream shirt clings to his chest, sleeves shoved to the elbow, dark curls damp and wild, and he's breathing like a man who just ran a very long way in the wrong shoes.

I do the geography, and my chest does something complicated.

His truck was parked on the far side of town, in the quiet lot past the Wishing Pier, a solid fifteen-minute walk from the meeting hall.

He didn't walk it. He surely sprinted it, threw himself behind the wheel, and raced the length of Honeybell Harbor to find one furious woman on a dark road.

He leans across the bench seat and shoves the passenger door open.

"Get in, Blooming Apricot."

I stand in the road and let the disappointment finish moving through me first, because it has earned its moment.

Once again, the men I am working so hard to pretend I still want are not here. They're back in a sealed room, or a truck cab, debating. Weighing. Running the reasonable numbers on the correct way to approach me.

This man —the one I met the day before yesterday— is here.

Present. Soaked through.

Reaching across a bench seat with the door already open.

Then the rest of it lands a half-second behind.

Blooming Apricot.

The name goes through me and stops in a place it has no business stopping.

Alphas don't hand out nicknames idly. We all know that; it's older than manners. An Alpha names an Omega when he's decided to put a label on her, to fold her into the small private vocabulary he keeps for the things that are his. Beckett had a name for me once. I made it a clause in a contract so I'd never have to hear it again.

This one is new.

It has never lived in a vow, or a wound, or a note left folded on an altar.Blooming.Not the sweet, closed bud I was at twenty-four. Something that opened anyway, after, on its own, without waiting for anyone's permission.

I hate that I notice.

"I can walk," I say, which is the single stupidest sentence available to me, and I say it anyway, because five years of never accepting a ride I didn't arrange myself does not switch off because a beautiful man is bleeding through his shirt.

"You can," Sawyer agrees, unbothered. "Eight miles by this road. Three hours, if your feet hold, which in those shoes they won't. I'll drive it in twenty minutes." He doesn't lunge to close the gap. He just holds the door. "Both are options. Only one of them ends with you home before midnight, and I'd like you off this road before the wrong truck finds you on it."

He's right, which is infuriating.

He is annoyingly, consistently right, and he never once uses being right as a lever. He sets it on the seat between us and lets me decide whether to pick it up.

"I don't need rescuing," I tell him.

"I know you don't." He says it plainly, a fact he confirmed a while ago. "You've rescued yourself so many times you've forgotten it's allowed to run the other direction. This isn't a rescue, Boss. It's a ride. You're still the one deciding where we go."

"Why you?" It comes out sharper than I mean, an accusation with nowhere to land. "Why is it you’re on this road to begin with. You've known me two days."

Something crosses his face.

Not offense. Closer to sorrow.

"Because I'm the only one who ran," he says. "You get to decide later what that's worth. Tonight it only means the door's open. My legs still work. I'd rather you spend your anger sitting down."