22. Old Flames #3
"When I left…when we all settled the way we finally settled, we made him a promise.
That he'd only ever reach back out if it was a true emergency.
Something big enough, important enough, to be worth breaking five years of hard-won quiet clean in half.
" His jaw works, once. "So when my phone lit up last night with his name on the screen, I already had my answer before I picked up.
Whatever this is, this business with your career, these people trying to burn down everything you've built with your own two hands, it matters to him.
Enough to call. Enough to ask a thing of me after all this time.
" He shrugs, and the mask slides most of the way back into place.
"That's why I'm helping. We're not a pack anymore, him and me.
But his happiness still weighs exactly what it always did on my scale.
Same as he weighed ours, the day he stepped aside and handed us his blessing and let us go be happy with his sister. "
It lands square in my chest, the way the true things always do when Marshall's the one saying them.
He never did waste words.
Every single one he spends, he means right down to the ground.
The kitchen goes quiet. The kind of quiet that carries weight, that leans on your chest and asks something of you.
"Thanks, Marsh," I say. Low. It isn't near enough. He knows it isn't. He takes it anyway, the way he's always taken the things I couldn't find the size of.
He shrugs one shoulder, already turning the handle.
"Three minutes," he says, all business again, offering mercy in the shape of a subject change.
"I'll go start the car. Once your paperwork's signed and the government's off your back, I'll swing back around and help you get that sorry truck of yours running again, so you can get on with all that wedding nonsense you love so much.
" A ghost of a smile. "Can't have the great Sawyer Devereaux kept from his flowers and his seating charts. "
He's gone before I can assemble anything worth saying back to him.
The door clicks shut.
Then it's just the two of us, the low hum of her old refrigerator, and the smell of coffee slowly going cold on the table.
"You really loved each other," Amber says, soft. Not a question. A thing she's turning over gently in her hands.
I think about it.
About Marshall, about the four of them, about the whole shape of a life I set down five years back and mostly stopped picking up to look at.
When I go looking now, I find it doesn't cut the way it used to.
"We'd have walked down that aisle," I tell her. "All of us. Bonded the Omega of our dreams and built the whole beautiful thing, if the cards had fallen our way." I meet her eyes. "They didn't. Turned out the Omega of the pack's dreams shared half my blood, and, well. That was that."
She watches me, quiet, letting me get where I'm going on my own.
"But maybe it was never in my cards to begin with," I say slowly, working it out even as it leaves my mouth.
"Maybe I spent all those years feeling nothing because the thing I'm actually built for was never being the groom.
" I huff, rueful. "Or…maybe my whole calling is to be a part of somebody else's love story instead.
To help the cards fall right for other people, since they wouldn't fall for me. "
The way they might just be falling, this very minute, in this little kitchen.
I keep that particular thought behind my teeth.
Amber's mouth tips up.
"Well. If we're reading the cards this morning." She takes a slow sip. "I clearly drew the Tower straight out of some tarot deck, because my love life is a smoking heap of rubble with three exes standing around in it looking sorry."
"Second chances are worth it, sometimes," I say, and let the smirk build up nice and slow. "And if they're not — if those three manage to fumble you a second time — I'll just whisk you off myself. We'll go pack hunting, you and me. Start clean."
She laughs, bright and surprised out of her.
"Last resort, huh."
"Total last resort," I assure her. But my hand's already moving, tucking a loose wave of that down hair back behind her ear, my thumb grazing one of the marks on her throat as it goes. "You ought to wear it like this more often. The hair."
She goes a little pink.
It's a beautiful thing to watch happen on her, that color rising up under the apricot in her scent, tipping the whole of it sweeter.
"Do you..." She swallows. "Do you like it?"
"Mhmm." I cup her cheek in my palm and bring her down to me.
The first brush of her lips is soft, a question set against my mouth. I answer it slowly — one unhurried, deliberate, thorough kiss, the kind meant to be felt down in the soles of the feet.
She makes a small sound and gives in to it, setting her mug down blind on the table, deepening the kiss, shifting on my lap in a way that drags a groan clean up out of my chest before I've got any hope of stopping it.
"One minute!" Marshall's voice carries clear through the front door.
Amber breaks the kiss with a gasp, going scarlet to the roots of all that gorgeous down hair.
"I thought," she whispers, "he went to go start the car."
"He's a petty son of a bitch, is what he is." I chuckle, low, and get one last grip of her — a firm handful that makes her squeak — before I steal one final kiss off her mouth and set my forehead to hers.
"Come on, Blooming Apricot," I murmur. "Let's go sign those documents. Let's show the federal government it's going to take a whole lot more than one nasty little complaint to run the two of us out of our careers."
She pulls back just far enough to look me dead in the eye, and that spark I'm already half in love with catches and goes to open flame behind her eyes.
"It's on," she says.