The beat drops, and I let go.
Shoulders roll, hips sway, hair loose and flying. The crowd parts to give us space, and suddenly everyone’s clapping along, hooting, cheering. Someone whistles.
Across the room, Wesley’s watching me—elbow on the bar, holding a drink, that lazy, dangerous smile curving his mouth. His buddies elbow him, grinning, but he doesn’t look away.
The girls spin around me, laughing, feeding off my energy. I drop low with the beat, rise slow, rhythm sliding through my veins. The whole bar feels it—the pulse, the spark, the charge.
Then the song crests. And I see him—reallysee him.
His gaze cuts through the dark, fixed on me like a touch. Want coils low in my stomach, dark and hungry. Wesley’s set jaw and hooded lids tell me everything I shouldn’t want to know.
He’s wrecked.
That raw, unguarded look isn’t for a fake fiancée. It’s for me.
This is real for him too.
The realization hits like vertigo.
For a moment, the music, the laughter, the crowd fades, and it’s just him, eyes turned black, thumb dragging the rim of his glass.
The beat breaks, applause explodes, and I spin out of the circle, adrenaline buzzing under my skin.
Kim slings an arm around my shoulders, flushed and grinning. “Holy hell, girl, you candance.”
I giggle, trying to steady myself, trying not to look at him again. “What can I say? I help where I can.”
“Help,” she snorts. “You just made half the bar fall in love with you.”
She tugs me off the dance floor, and before I can blink, I’m face-to-face with Wesley. The only one I want.
He drops his beer on the bar, catches me around the waist, and pulls me against him, hard enough that my breath breaks on contact. A sound slips out, half gasp, half moan.
“That navel ring,” he mutters against my hair, voice rough, wrecked, “has been frying my goddamn brain since the first time you took off your hoodie in front of my team. The whole bar’s been watching you. But you’re my girl, aren’t you?”
His words hit like a spark to dry tinder. My body melts before my brain catches up, pressing closer, taking him in—soap, pine, salt, and sin. Every cell in me is singingyes.
But my heart trips over itself, panic breaking through the haze.What is happening here?Does he mean it? Is this still for show, or is this himwantingme?
I push gently against his chest, slipping free. Reluctantly, he loosens his grip, dragging heat across my hips. My heart skips.
“W-what are you doing?” My voice is slurred with need.
His eyes are wild, desperate. “Goddamn, Joy. I can’t?—”
The words slice me open. The air between us crackles. I laugh, but it scrapes on the way out. “Little late for that, don’t you think?”
I nod toward the far end of the bar—Hannah and Levi framed in tinsel and Christmas lights. She’s laughing too loud, touching his arm. He’s exactly the kind of safe she left Wesley for.
He stiffens beside me, and my chest splinters. So I do what I do best. I perform.
My palm slowly slides up his chest until my fingers find the warm column of his throat. I rise on my toes, my lips grazing the shell of his ear. “Smile for the audience,” I whisper.
He exhales a laugh that sounds like it hurts. “You trying to start another scene, Foxy?”
“Maybe. Worked wonders earlier.”
He looks down at me then, and the noise around us fades. The air between us crackles.
