Chapter 4
Luke
Luke killed the engine and sat for a second, fingers tapping the steering wheel, he’d parked one block over so no one would clock his cruiser when he visited Grace.
Just like always. Just like he knew was smart.
He could’ve pulled into her driveway. Walked up her front steps. Knocked like a man visiting someone he was… involved with.
But Crystal Lake wasn’t that kind of town.
Porch lights flicked on. Curtains shifted. And Luke Bennett walking openly into a Hart’s house? Yeah—that’d hit the gossip mill before sunrise.
He pushed out a breath.
It wasn’t that Grace had done anything wrong. It wasn’t her fault her family had a rap sheet longer than Main Street.
But names stuck in Crystal Lake. They clung like burrs. Luke’s name meant something clean, steady, respectable.
Luke Bennett: solid cop. Good judgment. Future town councilman.
Not Luke Bennett: sneaking into Grace Hart’s bedroom.
He rubbed a hand over his face.
Grace wasn’t the problem. Grace was… easy. Warm. Good and kind. She laughed softly, listened deeply, touched him like she meant it.
She was on half the committees in town—festival planning, library board. Grace Hart gave more to Crystal Lake than most.
But the Hart name came with baggage. Even she understood that.
Luke had filed the name Hart under known quantity years ago and left it there. It had seemed efficient at the time. The family had cost the town enough—grief, money, police hours, patience. It wasn't prejudice. It was pattern recognition.
The reputation had calcified before Grace was old enough to do anything about it.
By the time she was organizing the library drive and keeping half the town's kids out of trouble, Crystal Lake had already decided what a Hart was.
The evidence of who she actually was barely registered against thirty years of what her family had been.
She never asked Luke for more than he was willing to give her. Never pushed. Never complained about him parking out of sight of her neighbors or the late hours or the secrecy.
Luke stepped out of the cruiser and kept close to the shadows, moving automatically down the narrow side street and cutting through the back alley behind her house. His boots made almost no sound on the dirt.
It was… discretion. Professionalism. Common sense.
He tapped once on her back door.
The door opened immediately, as if she’d been waiting for him. Maybe she had been.
He kissed her the second the door shut behind him. Luke backed her into the hallway wall. Her fingers curled in the front of his shirt like she was reeling him in closer. He let himself be caught. They both knew what this was.
Physical. Chemistry. Nothing more.
He kissed her deeply, turning her soft sigh into a low, hungry sound that hit him straight in the gut. They’d gotten good at this—at each other.
They ended up in her bedroom—clothes dropping in careless trails on the floor, her laugh warm against his throat, his breath catching when she dragged her nails up his back.
Her knees hit the edge of the bed, and she sank onto it. Luke followed her down.
He pulled back just enough to reach for the condom. She helped him roll it on, her touch on him felt like a test. Luke exhaled slowly, holding himself in check.
This was the one thing in his life that was just for him. It wasn’t about the town’s expectations, it wasn’t about his future. This—Grace—was the one thing he allowed himself to be selfish about.
At last, he was pressing into her.
The world narrowed to this—to Grace's warmth enveloping him, to the way she gasped his name, to the sensation of finally, finally letting everything else fall away.
His father's voice faded. When are you taking the sergeant's exam, son?
His mother's expectations dissolved. The mayor's office would suit you. You have the Bennett name behind you.
The weight of being perfect, of living up to a legacy he'd never asked for, of carrying the responsibility of generations of public service—all of it went quiet.
Here, the only pressure he felt was the clasp of Grace's body tight and hot and wet around him.
He thrust into her, and her hips answered in a steady, devastating motion. Her thighs locked around him, fingers clutching his shoulders as her body began to move with his. It was bliss. But when her eyes found his, it was the softness there that nearly undid him.
Luke pushed himself up enough to find her mouth, kissing her hard, deepening it until the softness in her eyes turned molten.
Her breath broke on a cry as her body clenched around him, shuddering through a wave of pleasure that ripped straight through both of them. She fell apart in his arms—warm and shaking—and he lost the last of his control. He thrust into her with a rough groan, his own climax tearing through him.
When he was drained, when she was trembling with aftershocks of her pleasure, something sparked in his chest—something warm and dangerous that made him want to pull her closer, fall asleep with her still in his arms.
But that was wrong.
That wasn't what this was.
The Bennett legacy didn't have room for complications. And definitely no room for a Hart.
It was good that they both understand what this was. And what it wasn’t.