I try to look away. I really do. But something about her holds my attention. Something fragile, but not weak. There’s a kind of resilience in the way she tugs the apron tight around her curvy waist, sets her jaw, and squares her shoulders. I’ve seen that look before: in the faces of bomb techs in my old unit, right before they had to cut the red wire or die. It’s the white-knuckle look of someone who’s fighting like hell to keep fear from taking the wheel.
Then she turns, scanning the room, and our eyes meet.
Everything inside me stills.
Her gaze hits me like a blade through the ribs — sharp, curious, terrified, alive. The noise fades, the air shifts, and all I can think is how goddamn beautiful she is.
Too beautiful.
Heat coils in my chest, spreading low and dangerous. I grip my beer tighter. I don’t want this. I don’t want her. I can’t.
I can’t get close to her.
Can’t get close to anyone.
I learned that lesson years ago, and still carry the scars to prove it. Bits of shrapnel, too, left in places the surgeons can’t getto. But when she walks toward me, hips swaying just enough to betray nerves, I can’t look away.
I’m trapped.
And the woman walking toward me is more dangerous than any IED I ever faced.
She stops in front of my table. I force my voice steady.
“You're new.”
“Uh… hi,” she says softly, pen trembling in her hand.
Her voice slides right under my skin. It is sweet, scared, disarming, absolute poison to every bit of good sense in my head.
She shifts on her feet, looks from her notepad to me, then back again.
“Um… would you like something?”
There's something in her voice, something shy but warm, that makes me think thoughts I have no business thinking. Dangerous thoughts involving that voice saying my name in very different circumstances — breathless in the dark, tangled in bedsheets.
Goddamn, I need a beer. Or something stronger.
She cocks her head, her voice still a demure, quaking thing. “So, do you want that to be a beer or something stronger?”
Oh, fuck, did I say that out loud?
“Yes, I can hear you. You’re speaking out loud.”
“Shit,” I say. “Fuck.”
She blinks and takes a step back. “Am I doing something wrong?”
Again with that voice. That innocent, scared, wanting-desperately-to-please tone that I’d love to hear from her as she looks up at me from her knees.
I pause, looking at her expectantly, waiting for the inevitable.She heard that too, right?
“Are you going to order something or, uh, just stare at me silently?”
“Oh, thank fuck. A whiskey, please. Neat.”
She scribbles it down, and I watch her fingers — slim, pale, trembling just enough that the pen wavers. There's a faded bruise on her wrist, half-hidden by her sleeve. My jaw tightens. I know marks like that. I've seen them on women who've had the misfortune of loving the wrong man.
"Anything else?" she says, and there's something in her voice now — a thread of warmth beneath the nerves. Like she's grateful I'm not leering at her the way half the bar was when she walked in.
