It’s a world away from the offices I used to work in back in Atlanta. All that glass and chrome and aggressive minimalism, where everything was designed to intimidate and nothing was designed for comfort. I spent far too many years in spaces that felt like surgical theaters—cold, sterile, and devoid of all personality. Years watching justice get weighed against political palatability, decisions made by people who cared more about optics than outcomes.
I don’t miss it. Not even a little.
I don’t have any partners or associates to deal with. There’s no one to answer to except myself, the clients, and the piles of paperwork that seem to reproduce overnight like particularly litigious rabbits.
It’s exactly what I wanted. Independence. Control. A practice built on my own terms.
It’s also lonely as hell, but that’s the tradeoff, isn’t it? Freedom for company. Principles for small talk. I eat most dinners standing over my kitchen sink. I’ve started talking to myself just to hear a voice, but the upside is the only person whose conscience I answer to is my own.
It might be lonely, but at least I can sleep at night. Mostly.
I sigh and stare down at tonight’s rabbit, a stack of documentation for the District Attorney’s office regarding Summit Development and their recently-denied rezoning proposal. It’s boring stuff but important. It’s the kind of paperwork that could put cartel-connected real estate developers behind bars if I dot every i and cross every t correctly.
Unfortunately for the criminals, I’m good at dotting and crossing. Damn good.
My phone buzzes with a text from Kya.
Kya
Drink at the club house?
I stare at the message longer than I should. Having a drink with Kya means heading to the Stoneheart MC clubhouse. Being in the clubhouse will exponentially increase the possibly of running into Stone. And running into Stone means...
Nothing, it means nothing. Because there is nothing going on between us.
Josie
Rain check. Dead on my feet.
It’s not a lie but not the whole truth either. Kya doesn’t need to know that I’m avoiding everything MC right now because I’m a grown woman who can’t handle being in the same room as the man who rejected me.
Pathetic, Bright. Truly pathetic.
I shove away from my desk and stretch, my back cracking in protest. I’ve been hunched over this filing for six hours straight, and my body is filing a formal complaint.
Go home. Eat something. Sleep. The cartel will still be there tomorrow.
Sound advice. I should take it.
Instead, I reach for my cold coffee and keep working.
The problem with trying not to think about something is that it requires thinking about the thing you’re not supposed to think about in order to remember not to think about it.
Which is a complicated way of saying I can’t get Boone “Stone” Armstrong out of my head.
Serious and deliberate, he’s the kind of man who weighs every word before he speaks and never says anything he doesn’t mean. He commands a room without raising his voice, leads with quiet authority instead of bluster. And he only smiles when he thinks no one’s watching—these rare, unguarded moments that transform his whole face and make my stupid heart forget how to beat.
Unfortunately, I’ve been watching. Fuck, have I been watching.
For months, he’s all I’ve seen. Through legal meetings and strategy sessions, through late nights poring over Summit’s shell companies, through the slow, careful dance we’ve been performing around each other since the day Hawk brought me in to help with their cartel problem.
“I want you, Josie. I’ve wanted you for months.”
His words from the night he rejected me surface unbidden, and I shove them back down with the ruthlessness of long practice. He said he wanted me, then stepped back like I’d burned him.
We can’t.
I can still feel it—the heat of his body close to mine on the back porch, the weight of his hand on my hip, the way his eyes darkened when he leaned in. The air between us was electric, months of tension finally breaking, and for one perfect moment, I thought?—
