Chapter 1
JOSIE
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
Glamorous life you’ve built, Bright.
My office is small, barely bigger than a closet, really, but it’s mine. The small office is a converted storefront at the nice end of Main Street, tucked between a boutique that sells overpriced candles and flowers, and an art gallery that caters to the country club crowd.
It’s the part of town where the moneyed folks do their shopping, which means it’s also where I need to be to ensure those same people will hire me. I’m not above admitting I need to eat, and rich clients have a tendency to pay their bills on time.
My name sits on the door in sensible gold lettering, Josephine Bright, Attorney at Law.
Inside, I’ve made the space my own. Warm butterscotch walls lined with overstuffed bookshelves, the legal tomes’ spines are cracked from use.
A leather sofa sits at the front of the building, soft enough to sink into, scattered with throw pillows I picked up from a craft fair last fall.
My desk is antique mahogany, scarred and beautiful, covered in papers and sticky notes and a plant I keep forgetting to water but which refuses to die.
A worn Persian rug anchors the room, and the lamp on my desk casts everything in a warm amber glow.
It’s a world away from the offices I used to work in back in Atlanta.
All that glass and chrome and aggressive minimalism, where everything was designed to intimidate and nothing was designed for comfort.
I spent far too many years in spaces that felt like surgical theaters—cold, sterile, and devoid of all personality.
Years watching justice get weighed against political palatability, decisions made by people who cared more about optics than outcomes.
I don’t miss it. Not even a little.
I don’t have any partners or associates to deal with. There’s no one to answer to except myself, the clients, and the piles of paperwork that seem to reproduce overnight like particularly litigious rabbits.
It’s exactly what I wanted. Independence. Control. A practice built on my own terms.
It’s also lonely as hell, but that’s the tradeoff, isn’t it? Freedom for company. Principles for small talk. I eat most dinners standing over my kitchen sink. I’ve started talking to myself just to hear a voice, but the upside is the only person whose conscience I answer to is my own.
It might be lonely, but at least I can sleep at night. Mostly.
I sigh and stare down at tonight’s rabbit, a stack of documentation for the District Attorney’s office regarding Summit Development and their recently-denied rezoning proposal.
It’s boring stuff but important. It’s the kind of paperwork that could put cartel-connected real estate developers behind bars if I dot every i and cross every t correctly.
Unfortunately for the criminals, I’m good at dotting and crossing. Damn good.
My phone buzzes with a text from Kya.
Kya
Drink at the club house?
I stare at the message longer than I should. Having a drink with Kya means heading to the Stoneheart MC clubhouse. Being in the clubhouse will exponentially increase the possibly of running into Stone. And running into Stone means...
Nothing, it means nothing. Because there is nothing going on between us.
Josie
Rain check. Dead on my feet.
It’s not a lie but not the whole truth either. Kya doesn’t need to know that I’m avoiding everything MC right now because I’m a grown woman who can’t handle being in the same room as the man who rejected me.
Pathetic, Bright. Truly pathetic.
I shove away from my desk and stretch, my back cracking in protest. I’ve been hunched over this filing for six hours straight, and my body is filing a formal complaint.
Go home. Eat something. Sleep. The cartel will still be there tomorrow.
Sound advice. I should take it.
Instead, I reach for my cold coffee and keep working.
The problem with trying not to think about something is that it requires thinking about the thing you’re not supposed to think about in order to remember not to think about it.
Which is a complicated way of saying I can’t get Boone “Stone” Armstrong out of my head.
Serious and deliberate, he’s the kind of man who weighs every word before he speaks and never says anything he doesn’t mean.
He commands a room without raising his voice, leads with quiet authority instead of bluster.
And he only smiles when he thinks no one’s watching—these rare, unguarded moments that transform his whole face and make my stupid heart forget how to beat.
Unfortunately, I’ve been watching. Fuck, have I been watching.
For months, he’s all I’ve seen. Through legal meetings and strategy sessions, through late nights poring over Summit’s shell companies, through the slow, careful dance we’ve been performing around each other since the day Hawk brought me in to help with their cartel problem.
“I want you, Josie. I’ve wanted you for months.”
His words from the night he rejected me surface unbidden, and I shove them back down with the ruthlessness of long practice. He said he wanted me, then stepped back like I’d burned him.
We can’t.
I can still feel it—the heat of his body close to mine on the back porch, the weight of his hand on my hip, the way his eyes darkened when he leaned in. The air between us was electric, months of tension finally breaking, and for one perfect moment, I thought—
Stop. Just stop!
I thought wrong. That’s all. I read the signals wrong, got swept up in the moment, made an ass of myself. It happens. People recover from worse embarrassments every day.
Right?
I rub my sternum, frowning.
Why does it still feel like there’s a knife between my ribs?
Because you actually let yourself hope, you idiot. You let him past your walls, and look what happened.
The worst part is that I can’t even be angry at him. He pulled back. That’s his right. People are allowed to change their minds, to pump the brakes, to decide that whatever’s building between them isn’t what they want or need right now. .
I just wish he’d decided it before he touched me.
I close my laptop harder than necessary.
“This is ridiculous. I’m a successful attorney who’s taken down corrupt politicians and cartel-connected businessmen. I’ve survived things that would have broken most people. And here I am, mooning over a motorcycle club president like a teenager with a diary full of hearts.”
I stand up, needing to move.
“Time to get it together, Bright.” I rub my arms, flicking off the pretend shadow of Stone that feels as if it’s lingered on my skin. “Begone, Stone. I don’t want you here any more.”
Alas, it doesn’t work, but at least I feel slightly less caged in.
I gather the files I’ve been working on, stacking them neatly in my briefcase. The DA documentation can wait until tomorrow. Everything can wait until tomorrow. Right now, I need to go home, pour myself a very large glass of wine, and stop thinking about Boone Armstrong’s hands.
And his eyes. And his voice. And the way he says my name.
“Shut up,” I mutter to myself, grabbing my coat.
The office is quiet around me with only the low hum of the ancient HVAC system and the distant sound of a car passing on Main Street. I like it here. It’s peaceful and uncomplicated. There’s no one to perform for, no one to answer to outside of my clients.
It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time I was a fierce prosecutor on the fast track to District Attorney.
Atlanta feels like a lifetime ago, but some nights—like tonight—the memories press close. The corner office with the skyline view. The designer suits and seven-figure cases. The endless game of political chess where justice was just another piece to be sacrificed when it suited the people in power.
I was good at that game. Too good. I learned to swallow my objections when the DA killed cases that might embarrass his donors.
Learned to smile for the cameras while burying evidence that pointed to the wrong people.
Learned that “justice” is often just a word politicians use when it’s convenient, and discard when it isn’t.
And then there was Maria Jean Santos.
Her face surfaces unbidden, and my stomach pitches sideways.
She was so young and trusting the last time I saw her alive.
She was my witness, my key to bringing down a trafficking ring with connections that reached all the way to the state senate.
I promised her protection. I believed my own promises.
“I promise you’ll be safe. We’ll protect you.”
The words echo in my head, sharp as the day I said them. My throat tightens, a lump forming.
Lies. Well-intentioned lies, but lies all the same. I promised protection I couldn’t deliver, and Maria paid the price. She and her mother and her seven-year-old brother, all of them gone in a flash of fire and twisted metal the night before she was supposed to testify.
Even now, years later, thinking about that little boy makes my eyes sting. Seven years old. He had a dinosaur backpack. He wanted to be a firefighter.
I blink hard and stare at the ceiling until the feeling passes.
Despite the political pressure to drop the case, I got the conviction anyway. After her death, I worked around the clock until we found other evidence, built another case, and put the bastard who killed them away for forty years.
Rage and guilt and devastation—I poured all of it into that prosecution. I didn’t sleep. I barely ate. I burned through every favor I’d ever earned because nothing else mattered except making sure her death was avenged.
Afterward, her family called me a hero.
I strongly suspect heroes don’t lie awake at night hearing screams in the silence.
My chest aches. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum, as if I can push the feeling back down where it belongs.
I force myself to shake off Maria’s ghost, and grab my keys. Stoneheart was supposed to be my fresh start. Small-town law, filled with property disputes and parking tickets. Nothing that could get anyone killed.