Page 69 of Knot Their Safe Haven

Feel: velvet, of course, absurdly fitting, and soft as myth.

For all my years of training, all my discipline, nothing prepared me for the synaptic overload.

The kiss was a flicker caught in a hurricane, and the hurricane was inside me. I wanted more, and that wanting was a physical force—limbic, primal, so close to violence it made my hands shake. Yet her hand remained, steadying me, soft thumb tracing the line of my jaw as if to say: Remember this is real. Remember this is me.

She pulled away only a centimeter, but her breath stuttered in my own mouth. Her eyes, close enough for me to see the individual filaments of her lashes, brimmed with emotion—anticipation, terror, an almost adolescent hope.If she’d been born less ferocious, I could have ruined her with a word.

But then she smiled—a smile so private it was a secret told only to me.

“That’s all I needed,” she whispered, voice trembling with some inner thrill. “At least…for now.”

Taunting.

It occurred to me, somewhere in the background, that I was probably supposed to say something clever to break the tensionor reassert control. Instead, I just stared, stupefied, lips tingling with aftershock and mind gone gloriously blank.

In that moment, I wasn’t an Alpha or a Devereaux or even a man with a plan.

I was just the sum of what she made me feel.

When she pulls back, my face is burning like a teenager's. Thirty-five years old, master of billion-dollar deals, and one barely-there kiss from Velvet Morclair reduces me to blushing incoherence.

"I've never been invited on a date." Her voice catches slightly. "The fact you set this up, that you waited all day for me to wake, to give me a moment of normalcy in this chaos..." Her eyes go glassy with unshed tears. "It means more than I can express to an Alpha who's given me the best ultimatum I could ask for."

She cups my face with hands that smell of expensive lotion and her,only her.

"Merci, mon beau sauveur."

Thank you, my beautiful savior.

The endearment in French, the acknowledgment of what I've done, what I'm trying to do—it nearly breaks my control entirely.

I press my lips to her forehead, breathing her in, memorizing this moment when everything finally starts.

"From this moment forward," I whisper against her skin, "let us show you what true courting is. A pack that never wishes for you to hide. That celebrates every silver hair, every battle scar, every year that made you who you are."

I pull back, offering my arm.

"Shall we? The chef has prepared seven courses, each paired with wines from years that mattered. The year you opened the Haven. The year you saved your hundredth omega. The year you told Knox you loved him, even if he was too much of a coward to reciprocate properly."

Her eyes widen.

"How do you?—"

"I've been watching, remember? Seventeen years of careful observation. I know your history, your victories, your defeats. And now," I guide her to her chair, pulling it out with practiced ease, "I want to know your future."

She settles into the seat like a queen taking her throne, my jacket dwarfing her frame but somehow making her look more powerful, not less.

"The first course is oysters from Prince Edward Island." I take my own seat, noting how her eyes track my movements. "Harvested this morning, flown here directly. The wine is a Sancerre from 2019—the year the movement began that would eventually lead to your freedom."

The waiter appears—one of the cottage's discrete staff—placing plates with architectural precision. The oysters rest on crushed ice, garnished with champagne foam and caviar, beautiful enough to photograph but destined for destruction.

"This is too much," she protests, but her smile says otherwise.

"This is exactly enough. You've been surviving on hospital food and wine stolen between crises. Your body needs protein, minerals, celebration." I raise my glass. "To first dates that should have happened seventeen years ago."

She raises her own, crystal singing as our glasses meet.

"To patient Alphas who know how to make an entrance."