It had been too long since I’d been touched. Too long since I’d let someone—anyone—close enough to quiet the hum under my skin. Combat zones didn’t exactly lend themselves to romance, unless one counted adrenaline-fueled mistakes inside fortified bunkers.
Charleston, apparently, was crawling with the kind of men who hit every one of my inconvenient triggers. Military. Broad shoulders. Quiet, lethal confidence. The kind of men I told myself I wasn’t attracted to anymore, because I’d learned the hard way what loving a soldier did to a woman.
Still, my pulse responded without my permission whenever one of them passed.
God, I needed to get out of this city before my hormones and my career collided in a disaster.
My gaze snagged on a group of men near the corner—tall, suited, assessing. Maybe brothers, though the sheer number ofthem made that unlikely. But there was something shared in their posture, in the way they occupied space like they’d been trained for it.
A man bumped my shoulder as he passed and murmured an apology. His accent was thick Lowcountry, his cologne expensive, his posture unmistakably military.
My stomach fluttered—irritation or attraction, it was hard to tell. Both pulled at me with equal strength.
I dragged in a breath, reminding myself why I was here.
Not for them.
Not for anyone.
For the story.
For the truth buried somewhere in this city’s polished surface.
Truth had always been my compass.
Maybe it was growing up in a small Canadian town where everyone knew your business. Rumors spread like wildfire in winter, when people were bored and snowed in, and I learned early that lies could rot a place from the inside out. My mother used to say honesty was the one thing you gave yourself, not anyone else. Live clean, she told me. Even when the world doesn’t.
I carried that with me.
Still did.
Still fought for it in a profession offering less and less of it. Sometimes, it felt like I was clinging to a dying religion—insisting on integrity in a world that rewarded spin and spectacle. But I couldn’t stop. Not when the truth still mattered to someone. Even if that someone was only me.
I moved toward the edge of the ballroom, pretending to study the silent-auction tables while stealing another look at the cluster of men in the corner. They laughed at something—low, masculine, controlled. One of them gestured with a glass, revealing a scar that ran along the side of his hand.
A story.
Every soldier had one. Most didn’t tell it.
A voice in my head whispered that I could be on a flight tomorrow, back to the desert, back to the dust and risk and honesty of people living on the edge of survival. I missed it—missed the clarity of danger, missed the instant purpose that came with stepping out of a Humvee and knowing my presence mattered.
Here?
I was another woman in a dress, sweating under a chandelier.
Someone brushed past me again, this time a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a friendly smile.
“Excuse me, ma’am—are you enjoying yourself?”
His politeness was unmistakably Southern, but his eyes flicked over me with curiosity—the kind that made my ribs tighten.
Am I enjoying myself?
In this humidity?
In this humidity while wearing shapewear?
“I’m still taking it all in,” I said lightly.
