Page 52 of Strawberry Moon

But Linden was there, enough of a big brother and an alpha to give the couple a brief reprieve. He led the whole family in toasting them, all while I stood there in the door, staring, at this impossible thing.

Cliff, an alpha on the edge, framed in the warm embrace of his mate. A beta wolf.

“Congratulations, brothers,” Linden said, his calm voice expanding to fill the room. It was a weird thing. Linden had always been quiet. Well, quieter than Aspen and Juniper and their father. But he’d taken over as pack alpha, and since then, he’d never struggled to make his voice heard.

“I want to thank you both.” Linden smiled down at the couple as Rowan swayed in to rest his head on Cliff’s chest, and they both stared up at him. “For your patience with each other, for your faith in this pack, and for your willingness to take a chance on love when the odds seemed stacked against you.”

Right then, Linden caught my eye. I swallowed hard, heat flooding my face under the steady perusal of my alpha.

“And I think we all owe Archer Sterling a thank you as well. Without him and his commitment to finding a solution for alphas everywhere, I don’t think I’d have a chance to see my baby brother mated and married to the love of his life.”

Another cheer broke out, but Archer wasn’t there to hear it. I hoped he could feel all the gratitude in this room, that it washed over him from everybody from now on.

Linden, still holding my gaze, nodded. Archer deserved nothing less, and we both damn well knew it.

36

Archer

I’d known something was odd when Cliff had called and asked me to come out to Grovetown for lunch, but I’d needed to come down anyway, to talk to Linden and more importantly, drop off more of the pheromone preparation that he’d been testing for the last few weeks.

He wore it like a light cologne, making him smell like just a hint of cinnamon, and it went with Rowan’s sweet baking scent like nothing else I’d been able to imagine. Most importantly, it didn’t make him sneeze or scrunch up his nose in disgust.

Okay, no, most importantly, it seemed to beworking.

I slid into the booth opposite them, where the two of them were leaning into each other as they always did. But this afternoon there was a softness to the set of Cliff’s shoulders that was new. A relaxed air about him. An easy smile that looked like it belonged on his face, not like he’d forced it there to try to fool everyone.

Just sitting across from an alpha that relaxed settled my nerves too. Knowing that this enormous predator who was part of my pack was calm and happy meant there were no threats about, nothing I needed to worry over.

I could relax and eat lunch.

That, of course, was when Cliff turned his smile on me. “Hey. So this is probably a strange request. And the timing might be bad. I’ll understand if you can’t make it—”

“Cliff, sweetie,” Rowan interrupted, pausing in the middle to kiss his boyfriend on the cheek. “You have to at least ask him before you answer for him.”

Cliff flushed and leaned into his boyfriend’s touch, biting his lip before looking back up to meet my eye. “It’s just that Ro and I decided it’s high time we got hitched. So when I asked him to marry me, we decided to just... go ahead and do it.”

I ignored the tiny stab of jealousy in my gut and did nothing to stem the grin spreading across my face. I wanted that for me, sure, but if anyone in the world deserved happiness, it was these two. And maybe it was arrogant of me to think I’d had any part in helping them along, but—

“Good job on getting these two out of that rut of theirs,” Wanda Chadwick announced, arriving at the table. “They invite you to the shindig this weekend?”

Cliff shot her a narrow-eyed frown. “Not yet, Wanda. We were trying to.”

She tossed up her hands and inclined her head. “Fair enough. I’ll leave you be a minute, then.” Before leaving, she glanced over at me. “Usual soup and sandwich?”

I grinned and nodded back. “Please.” Then I turned to Cliff and Rowan. “Seriously? This weekend? That’s amazing! I guess I shouldn’t be shocked though. It’s Grovetown. I’ve never seen a place able to pull together and get things done the same way as you.”

“Us,” Rowan corrected. “The whole Grove pack, and that includes you now.”

He reminded me almost every time we saw each other, and it... it was helping. I got it. Rowan had lived his whole adult life in love with Cliff, and not sure if he’d ever get the happy ending he longed for. He was also a nurturer and wanted to make sure everyone had the support they needed. The combination meant he recognized when people felt like outsiders, and moved to fix it.

Frankly, he was maybe the best person I’d ever met.

Cliff leaned forward, across the table, and met my eye once again. “The reason we asked you to lunch is that I wanted to ask you, um”—he paused and glanced around the diner shiftily, then back to me—“this wouldn’t be happening without you, Archer. So we wanted to ask you to be my best man.”

Their hands were clasped on the table, and Rowan squeezed Cliff’s tight as they both looked at me, waiting.

Me. Archer Sterling, grandson of the architect of a near-genocide,theirnear-genocide. They wanted me to be their best man, because I had made a difference in the opposite direction.

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