Penny leaned over the table, smug. “It is if you do it with style,Daniel.”
Arden shook her head, a smirk curling at her lips as she turned to Gideon. “Told you I’d carry us.”
His eyes met hers, something softer tugging at the edges of his own smile. He lifted his glass.
“Maybe you did.”
The buzz of the bar faded.
Just for a second.
It was only them—his eyes, her breath, the quiet gravity of two people orbiting something neither dared name.
The pull between them wasn’t new anymore. It was constant now. Invisible. Inevitable.
Penny’s laughter cracked the moment wide open.
Arden blinked, exhaled, turned back to the table. But inside? She simmered.
Because whatever that had been?—
It didn’t just stir something.
It sparked.
And no matter how carefully she tried to ignore it…
It was catchingfire.
The menu board blurred,chalk strokes swimming in Arden’s periphery.Pumpkin Patch Porter. Maple Moon Stout.Seasonal nonsense. She didn’t register a single one. Not when her senses lit up before her brain could name why.
Then, he was there.
Gideon.
She didn’t need to turn. The shift in the air gave him away. The sudden static, like a warning written in air. She felt him moving closer, heat and presence folding in until it pressed against her spine, weightless and suffocating all at once.
He saw her before she turned. And for one fractured heartbeat, he forgot how to breathe.
She’d taken off the jacket. Just lace now—black and sheer and fucking deadly. It clung to her like a dare, catching the light in all the worst places. Best places. The exact places his hands itched to be.
She was every contradiction that ever undid him. Soft edges and sharpened steel. Her hips moved like temptation with muscle memory, her boots clicking out a rhythm that should’ve come with a warning. That grace born of survival, not performance. The scent of her—jasmine, vanilla, heat—moved through the air, delicate and deadly.
She turned, slow as a trigger pull, and their eyes met.
Electricity.
It was the only word for it. Not lust. Not even longing.
Power.Charged and volatile. A current neither of them could break.
“Running away?” he asked, his voice low—velvet over a blade.
She smiled. Slow. Dangerous. “Just thirsty.”
The lie passed easily off her tongue. But her pulse told a different story. Wild and erratic beneath her skin.
Her voice cut through the buzz of the bar, low and knowing.
