Chapter 1 #2
Three months of twelve-hour days and sleeping alone. Three months of my body existing purely as a mechanism for keeping my brain operational. I’m so tired of being careful, productive, and responsible.
I want Kade’s hands on me. I want the low threat in his voice turned to a different purpose. I want to feel wrecked in the best possible way, and I want it badly enough that the wanting itself is a physical pressure against my ribs.
“Careful,” he murmurs against my ear, his voice rougher than it was five minutes ago. “You keep moving like that, someone’s going to get the wrong idea.”
“Maybe I want them to get ideas.” The words are out before I can intercept them—reckless and entirely honest.
His grip tightens on my back, pulling me flush against him. “Dangerous thing to say to a stranger who just ran off your last problem.”
“Are you dangerous?”
He’s quiet long enough that I pull back to look at him. Something dark lives in his expression. Not threat exactly. History.
“Yes.”
No reassurance follows. No promise that I’m the exception. He leaves the silence standing between us, heavy and stark, and waits to see what I do with it.
Everything in me should run. Instead, I stay locked against his chest, pulse skittering, tracking the steady beat of his heart under my palm, the heat of his hand at the small of my back, the specific controlled tension in his body that suggests depths I haven’t begun to map.
He is genuinely dangerous. He is also the most present I’ve felt in three months.
I make my decision.
The song bleeds into another without pause, and neither of us separates.
We sink deeper into each other, bodies finding a rhythm that has nothing to do with the band.
His hand slides up my spine, palm hot against the bare skin the dress leaves open.
His fingers curl into my hair at the nape of my neck—deliberate, possessive—and I exhale slowly against his chest.
“You’re trouble,” he says. It lands like a compliment.
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“I know enough.” His thumb traces the edge of my jaw—just the line of it—and I forget how breathing works. “Know you came here alone looking for something. Know you’re smart enough to recognize danger but too stubborn to back down from it. Know you fit against me like you were made for it.”
That last part comes out rough, like it surprised him. The air between us thickens.
“Next time you want to disappear,” he says, lips close enough to my ear that I feel them move, “pick a safer place than a den like this. Or at least bring backup.”
“Maybe I was hoping to find backup here.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes drop once to the neckline of the dress—slow, unashamed—then return to mine. “Careful what you wish for, little bird.”
The song ends. The lead singer announces a break, and the spell shatters—noise and crowd and the sweaty reality of a Wednesday night in a mountain roadhouse crashing back in. I’m wrapped around a complete stranger. I should be embarrassed.
I’m not.
It’s not about safety. It’s about the weight of his hand at my back and the specific, unhurried pressure of his body against mine for the last twenty minutes.
It’s about the fact that I drove two hours into the mountains tonight because I wanted someone to take me apart, and this man—this dangerous, controlled, devastating stranger—looks at me like he knows exactly how to do it.
I want him in my bed. I want his hands on me. I want to find out what happens when all that leashed control finally breaks.
“Walk me home?”
The corner of his mouth shifts. Not quite a smile. “And when we get there?”
“I’m going to take off this dress.” I hold his gaze. “And then I’m going to let you do whatever you want with me.”
A beat of silence. His eyes drop—just once, just briefly, a slow drag down the length of the dress and back up—then return to mine with something new in them.
Darker. Decided.
“Whatever I want.” He says it slowly, like he’s testing the weight of it. “That’s a dangerous offer from a woman who doesn’t know me.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
Something moves through his expression—not surprise exactly. Recalibration. “I’m not going to be polite about it.”
“Good.” I don’t look away. “I’m not interested in polite or soft.”
He goes still. The particular stillness of a man revising his assumptions.
“How dark are you willing to go, little bird?”
His voice has dropped to something that belongs in a different room entirely—low and deliberate, stripped of any pretense of restraint. The sound of it moves through me like a second pulse.
“Darker than you think.” I hold his gaze. “Don’t let the dress fool you.”
Something shifts in his jaw. “I like it rough.” Flat. Unapologetic. A warning dressed as a fact. “Not the kind of rough most women mean when they say they want rough. The kind that leaves marks.”
“Good thing I bruise pretty.” Heat detonates low in my belly. I don’t look away. “Your marks will look good on me.”
A sharp exhale through his nose—not quite a laugh, but close. His hand presses flat against the small of my back, fingers splayed wide, heat bleeding through the thin fabric like a brand.
"I intend to take you apart." His thumb traces a slow arc against my spine. "Slowly. Until you don't remember your own name, let alone why you thought you had any control over how this ends."
"Control." A breath of a laugh escapes me. "You think I came here tonight to be in control?"
His thumb stills against my spine.
"I spend every waking hour making decisions, managing problems, holding everything together." I hold his gaze and don't look away. "Tonight I want exactly one thing — and it's to hand all of that over to someone who knows what to do with it."
The air between us shifts. Something in his expression moves through recalibration and lands somewhere far more dangerous.
"So take it," I say quietly. "I'm not going to fight you for it."
He pulls back just enough to look at me. Really look. Like he's reassessing everything he thought he knew about the woman in the short black dress who wandered into the wrong bar.
"Easy to say it on a dance floor." His voice is low. Careful.
"I'm not saying it on a dance floor." I hold his gaze.
"I'm saying it to you. Directly. Because I've spent three months being in charge of everything and I am so tired of being in charge of everything, and you—" I press my palm flat against his chest— "look like exactly the kind of man who doesn't need to be told twice what to do with a woman who hands him the wheel. "
Something shifts in his jaw.
"Once I take control," he says, "I don't give it back easily."
"I don’t suppose you do." The word comes out steadier than I feel. "Good thing, I'm not asking for easy."
The silence that follows isn't empty. It hums.
Something flares in his eyes — dark and decided and absolutely certain.
"And when you're begging—" he leans in, just enough, his mouth at my ear— "and you will beg…are you still going to let me be in control?”
A sound almost escapes me. I stop it with effort. The shiver is beyond stopping—and he feels it. His arm tightens around me.
“If the man’s strong enough to earn it?” I tip my chin up and let the pause sit. “I’m game for whatever you want.”
The stillness that moves through him is absolute. One second. Two. Then his grip tightens at my back—deliberate, possessive—and his eyes drop to my mouth before returning to mine with an expression that makes my knees genuinely unreliable.
Before I can speak, his hand fists in my hair at the nape of my neck—no warning, no preamble—and his mouth comes down on mine hard. Not a question. Not an introduction.
A statement.
His lips are rough and certain, and he kisses me the way he does everything else: with complete, unhurried control that somehow still feels like being devoured.
He angles my head back, taking what he wants.
His other hand slides from my lower back to my hip, fingers digging in through the thin fabric, gripping hard enough that I’ll feel it tomorrow.
The thought alone sends a fresh wave of heat crashing through me. I feel exactly how much he wants this—the heavy press of him against my hip, nothing subtle about it, nothing apologetic.
When I gasp, he uses it—deepens the kiss, teeth grazing my bottom lip with a sharp sting that pulls a sound from me I’ve never made standing upright on a public street before.
He breaks it as deliberately as he started it. Pulls back just enough to look at me. Takes in the wreckage.
I am breathing hard. My fingers are knotted in his Henley. I have no memory of putting them there. The night air hits the flushed skin above my neckline and does absolutely nothing to cool it.
“Still want me to walk you home?” His voice is rough now, scraped raw at the edges, and the satisfaction layered underneath it is absolutely insufferable.
“Very much.” The words come out wrecked. I don’t care. “Faster. Walk faster.”
The smirk that breaks across his face is slow and dark and devastating—the expression of a man who has just gotten exactly the answer he intended to get and is already thinking about what comes next.
He laces his fingers through mine, turns, and walks.
We move toward the exit. I track every detail—the rough texture of his palm, the automatic way bodies shift out of his path before he reaches them, the warm solid presence just behind my shoulder like a shield I didn’t ask for and already don’t want to give back.
We hit the front doors, and the night air meets us hard, sharp and cold, mountain-clean after the swampy heat of the bar.
A shudder moves through me. He’s already shedding his jacket, draping it over my shoulders before the second one can form. It falls to mid-thigh, swallowing the dress entirely, and something about being wrapped in his clothes while my blood still runs hot from his kiss makes my stomach flip.
“Which way?” he asks.
I point, and watch his posture change—subtle, immediate. A sharpening. His eyes do a single, efficient sweep of the parking lot.
“What is it?”
“Maybe nothing.” He repositions me against his side, angling himself between me and the road. “Let’s say your friend inside wasn’t the only one who noticed you tonight.”
“Someone’s following us?”
“Probably nothing.” He sets a pace that makes me stretch my stride. “Black sedan, far corner of the lot. Been there since before you arrived. Engine’s still running.”
I keep my eyes forward. “How do you know when I arrived?”
"Told you I've been watching." Zero apology. "Part of the job."
"What job?"
No answer. Just streetlights and his grip and the quiet sound of our footsteps.
I should be scared. I am scared. But underneath the fear is something else entirely—the memory of his mouth on mine, his hands, the absolute certainty in the way he moves through the world like it was built to accommodate him.
My pulse hasn't settled since he kissed me and I'm not sure it's going to.
He glances down. "Changed your mind?"
"Definitely not."
He stops walking. Turns. Leans down until his mouth is at my ear, and I feel the heat radiating off him, the tension coiled in his frame like something that's been held too long.
"Then pick up the pace." His voice is stripped bare—no control left in it, no careful edges, just raw and low and direct. "Because I've had my hands on you for the last hour and I'm about thirty seconds from saying to hell with your place and finding the nearest wall."
A full-body shudder moves through me that has nothing to do with the cold.
And then the image arrives, unbidden and completely unwelcome in its clarity — his hands pinning my wrists above my head, the rough press of brick at my back, the dress shoved up, nothing between us, anyone walking past able to see exactly what he's doing to me — and I should be horrified.
I have never in my life done anything like that. I am the woman who closes the blinds. Who keeps the noise down. Who is always, always too careful, too controlled, too aware of what the neighbors might think.
The thought should stop me cold.
Instead, heat detonates through me so fast my knees go unreliable.
God help me, I want it. I want the wall. I want the risk of it, the rawness of it, the specific obliteration of every careful thing I've ever been.
"My place," I manage. My voice comes out wrecked. "Fast."
Something moves through his expression—too brief to name, but it's there.
Hunger. The particular, focused kind that has nothing patient left in it.
Like a man who has decided exactly what he wants and is done pretending otherwise.
It hits me low and hard, and I have to look away before I do something embarrassing on a public street.
His jacket settles around my shoulders like armor as we walk deeper into the dark. Behind us, an engine turns over. The whisper of tires on asphalt. Kade's hand in mine is the only warm thing in a world gone suddenly cold.
He squeezes my fingers.
I squeeze back.
Sometimes the devil you choose is better than the one that chooses you.