42. In The Cards #3
Nobody planned this bit for me. I could still run.
Some cornered animal part of me, the part that spent five and a half years learning that love is a thing that leaves, whispers that I could call it off right now, refuse it, let the whole beautiful trap of it snap shut on empty air as some final proof that I was right not to hope.
But that stone is gone from my chest.
It dissolved on the walk up here.
What's left in its place is so light it feels like I could float clean out of this heavy dress.
I turn to August first.
"August," I say, and my voice cracks. I let it.
I take his left hand. His iris-and-pear-blossom scent has gone thick and wet with emotion, and there are tears sliding down the florist's calm face.
"You spent five years apologizing to me with your silence.
And then one day you finally stopped smoothing and started saying, and the man you'd been hiding under all that careful quiet…
the one I always knew was in there…he bloomed right out in front of me.
Watching you become who you already were has been one of the great privileges of my life.
" I slide the ring home. "I choose him. I choose you. "
I move to Beckett, and the mountain of him is trembling.
"Beckett," I tell him, taking his big scarred hand in both of mine, "carried a love so fierce for so long that it curdled into fear.
You let the fear run the show, and it cost us both everything.
" Cedar and smoked vanilla wash over me, gone soft.
"But I watched you fall in love with me all over again this year — on your knees, of all places, a man who swore he'd never bend — and I have never seen anything so much like a sunrise.
Thank you for stopping running. Thank you for staying.
" His hand shakes so hard I can barely get the band on. I get it on.
Finally, Sawyer.
"And Sawyer." I take his hand last and hold his magnolia-and-bourbon gaze.
I don't try to keep my voice steady anymore.
"You walked into Honeybell Harbor a stranger in a nice suit, and you turned out to be the blessing I didn't have the first idea I needed.
You saw me. You championed me. You stood your ground in rooms full of men bigger than you and never once flinched, all for a woman you barely knew, because something in you decided I was worth the fight before I'd given you a single reason.
" I slide the ring onto his finger, and it fits like it was always going.
"I don't know what I did to deserve a man who fights for me like the sun comes up.
But I'm keeping you. All three of you. Forever. "
The three of them are wrecked.
Beckett is crying openly now, unashamed, this enormous ranch-raised mountain of a man with tears cutting clean tracks down his face.
August has both hands pressed flat over his heart.
Sawyer, who has talked his way out of every corner life ever backed him into, has finally run all the way out of words.
I did that. Me.
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 a heart 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.