Chapter 3
THREE
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Two weeks in, and Angel's Rest felt like mine.
Not in any way that mattered and definitely not in any way that I'd earned.
But the rhythm of the place had settled into my body the way music does when you've heard it enough times, automatic, unconscious, my hands reaching for the right glass before my brain caught up.
I knew the bourbon Hank liked best was the third bottle from the left.
I knew the trucker who came in on Tuesdays wanted his beer cold enough to hurt and his burger burned black.
I knew which regulars tipped and which ones didn't and which ones thought a wink counted as currency.
The brothers were becoming familiar. Not friends, not yet, but presences I could read. They had their habits, their routines, and I observed it all. I served them. Chatted with them. Laughed at the right moments. They were starting to like me. Trust me.
Which made what I was doing worse.
I was good at the other job too. The one that sat in my stomach every night when I locked up, heavy, rotten, a weight I carried home in the dark.
I wasn't interrogating anyone. I wasn't asking questions that would raise flags.
I was just listening. Keeping my ears open while I wiped down the bar, while I stacked glasses, while I leaned against the counter and let the conversations wash over me.
The brothers talked. They talked at the bar, at the pool table, in the back booth when they forgot I was close enough to hear.
Fragments. Enough to piece together who was at the compound and when, which runs were coming up, what routes they favoured.
I passed it to Colt at our next meeting. A car park off the highway this time, midnight, his bike ticking in the cold. He took the information the way he took everything from me. With a smile that made my skin crawl and a look that said he owned me and we both knew it.
He wanted more. Faster, better, specifics. When I told him I couldn't push harder without raising suspicion, he grabbed my arm. His fingers dug in above my elbow, grinding into the muscle, and he leaned in close enough that I could feel his breath on my face.
"You'll figure it out," he said. "Or I'll find someone else to motivate you. Let’s not forget what’s at stake here.”
He let go. I could feel the bruise forming before I got back to my car. The next morning I wore long sleeves to work and told myself the ache was a reminder. Of what I was. Of what I'd let myself become.
And then there was Hawk.
He was at the bar almost every night now.
Back booth, whiskey, his eyes on the room.
On me. I couldn't tell if it was club business or something else, and the not knowing was driving me out of my mind.
He'd sit there for hours, barely drinking, barely talking, just present.
A wall of quiet, steady focus that I felt on my skin every time I turned my back to pour a drink.
The way he looked at me had changed. Or maybe I was finally letting myself see what had always been there.
It wasn't the way a man looks at his sister's friend.
It was slower than that. Heavier. The kind of look that tracked me across a room and stayed on me a beat too long, the kind that made me fumble a glass because I could feel it between my shoulder blades before I turned around and confirmed it.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of this man, of watching him from the safe distance of a joke nobody questioned.
It had started as a crush. Sixteen years old, heart in my throat every time he walked into a room.
Crushes burn out but this one hadn't. It had grown roots, sunk deep, turned into something steady and permanent that lived in me the way breathing did.
I didn't just want Hawk. I'd been in love with him for so long I couldn't remember what it felt like before.
And now I was standing six feet from him every night with a bar between us and the joke wasn't funny anymore.
The feeling was so loud I was terrified someone would hear it.
A delivery came in on a Thursday. Cases of bottles stacked on the back porch, too many for me to carry alone.
Hawk was there before I asked, the way he was always there before I asked, appearing in doorways and corners with that quiet, unhurried certainty that made me feel simultaneously safe and completely unravelled.
We carried the cases through to the storeroom behind the bar.
Close quarters, narrow corridor, his body taking up most of the space.
I was hyper-aware of every inch of him, the width of his shoulders in the doorway, the way his arms flexed under the weight of the crate, the heat coming off his body in the cramped space.
Our hands brushed on the last case. His knuckles against my fingers, a second of contact, and the jolt went through me so hard I fumbled the box.
He caught it. Caught me. One arm around my waist, steadying me, the case braced against his hip with his other hand.
For a second I was pressed against his chest, the solid wall of him, and his arm was tight around me and his heartbeat hammered through his shirt, fast, faster than it should have been for a man just carrying boxes.
I looked up. He looked down. And whatever he saw on my face made his jaw tighten, his arm flex against my waist, a fraction of a second where his hand pressed harder into the small of my back before he let go.
"Careful," he said. His voice was rough.
"Yeah," I said. “Thanks."
He stepped back. Put the case down and left without another word.
I stood in the storeroom with my back against the shelves and the heat of his arm still burning through my shirt, and I thought, very clearly, I am so not over this crush.
Friday night. Late. The bar had emptied out slowly, the regulars drifting home, the last trucker settling his tab. The brothers that had been in the bar had gone through the back door to the lodge an hour ago.
He was still here though.
His glass was empty and he hadn't refilled it.
He was just sitting there, watching me, and the weight of it pressed against my skin.
I'd been feeling it all night. Every time I'd looked up, he'd been looking back, and the thing between us was so charged the air felt different.
Two weeks of this. Two weeks of his eyes on me across a crowded room, two weeks of near-misses, almost-touches, and two weeks of a heat that kept building with nowhere to go.
The delivery scene in the storeroom had been three days ago and I could still feel his arm around my waist when I closed my eyes.
"You don't have to stay," I said. As casually as I could muster. "I'm almost done."
He didn't move. Didn't answer. Just watched me from a booth with those steady, dark eyes that saw everything and gave away nothing.
Except tonight they were giving away something.
I could see it from across the room, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand rested on the table with his fingers slightly curled.
He wasn't relaxed. He hadn't been relaxed all night.
I finished wiping down the counter, started on the glasses. The jukebox had run out of quarters and the silence was thick, the kind that makes a room feel smaller.
I heard the booth creak. His boots on the floor, slow, unhurried. I kept my eyes on the glass in my hand, on the cloth, on anything that wasn't him walking toward me. He came to the bar and set his empty glass on the counter. The sound of it, glass on wood, was loud in the quiet room.
He didn't go back to the booth. He stayed, standing on the other side of the bar, his hands resting on the edge.
I was close enough to see the scars on his knuckles, the tendons shifting under his skin.
Close enough that when I looked up, his face was right there, inches away across the narrow bar top.
The air between us went from charged to combustible.
"Hawk." His name came out barely above a whisper.
"I should go," he said.
But he didn't move and neither did I.
We stood there, face to face across the bar, the wood between us the only thing left.
I could see the tension in his jaw, the way a muscle worked there, the way his eyes moved over my face with an intensity that made my skin burn.
His hand was on the bar and so was mine.
Close enough that the heat of his skin reached mine without touching.
I shifted my fingers. Just a fraction. Enough that my pinkie brushed against his.
The sound he made was barely audible. A breath pulled in through his teeth, sharp, controlled, the sound of a man holding himself together by a thread.
His eyes dropped to our hands, to that single point of contact, and when he looked back up at me his expression had changed.
The restraint was still there but something had broken through it, something raw, something that had been building for fifteen years and had finally found a crack wide enough to push through.
He reached across the bar. His hand came up to my face, his fingers sliding along my jaw, his palm warm against my cheek. Slow. Deliberate. Giving me time to pull away.
I didn't pull away, it didn’t even enter my head that I would want to.
I turned my face into his hand and I kissed his palm and I felt his whole body shudder.
He came around the bar. Three steps and around the end and into my space, and then his hands were in my hair and his mouth was on mine and my entire world caught fire.
For one second he was careful. Testing. His lips against mine, firm but controlled, the kiss of a man who was still trying to give himself a way out.
Then I opened my mouth under his and pulled him closer by the front of his shirt and the control evaporated.
He kissed me with a force that drove the air out of my lungs, his tongue sliding against mine, his hands gripping my hair, tilting my head back, angling me where he wanted me.
He walked me backward until my spine hit the edge of the bar and I gasped against his mouth and he pressed closer, his body pinning me against the wood, his hips flush with mine.
The bar dug into my lower back but I didn't care.
He was everywhere, all of him, the hard planes of his chest against my breasts, his thigh between mine, the width and the weight and the heat of him overwhelming every sense I had.
His hands moved from my hair to my face, framing my jaw, holding me there while he kissed me deeper, slower, with a thoroughness that made my knees give.
I fisted his shirt, pulled him tighter against me, and the sound he made against my mouth was low, involuntary, and a sound I wanted to hear again and again for the rest of my life.
He kissed the corner of my mouth. My jaw.
The spot just below my ear where my heartbeat was hammering, and my head fell back and I heard myself whisper his name and his grip on my face tightened in response.
His mouth came back to mine, hungrier now, the last scraps of restraint burning away.
I arched into him, my body pressing against his, wanting more, wanting closer, wanting everything this man had been refusing to give me for fifteen years.
I was shaking under his touch. His hands on my face, my hands twisted in his shirt, his mouth on mine, the heat of him everywhere.
His thumb traced my cheekbone and the tenderness of that one small gesture against the ferocity of the kiss undid me completely.
I made a sound I didn't recognise, raw, honest, and his fingers tightened on my jaw and he kissed me harder.
But then he pulled back.
Not far. An inch, maybe two. His breathing was ragged, his hands still cradling my face.
I could see the war in his eyes, right there on the surface.
Lena. The club. Every wall he'd built. All of it fighting the fact that his mouth had just been on mine and his hands were shaking and he wanted to do it again.
"Bree." My name, rough, wrecked.
I let him go, because I knew.
Not because I wanted to. But because I could see what it was costing him and I was in love with him, and I had loved him for fifteen years.
Loving someone means not making their hardest moments harder.
I uncurled my fingers from his shirt, smoothed the fabric where I'd crushed it, stepped back, and gave him room.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and walked out through the back door without another word.
I stood there. My lips were swollen, my skin flushed, and my whole body vibrating. I could still feel his hands on my face. I could still feel the bar against my spine, the weight of him, the way he'd kissed me with fifteen years behind it.
I locked up. Got in my car. Sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and my hands on the wheel, and I fell apart.
Not because he'd walked away. I'd known he would.
I fell apart because the man I loved had just kissed me with everything he had, and I was the knife in his back, and there was no version of this where I didn't lose everything. If there had ever been a chance of us being together, I was about to ruin that and I had no choice in it.
I sat there until the shaking stopped, until I could breathe without the sob catching, until I could turn the key and drive home.
It took a long time.