He takes my hand. His grip is firm and warm and he holds it exactly one second longer than a handshake requires. His fingers are calloused. Not keyboard calluses. Working calluses. The kind that come from rope or tools or gripping things that fight back.
"You're real," he says, and there's something in his voice that sounds almost bewildered. Like he's the one who should be surprised.
"Last time I checked." I pull my hand back before I do something embarrassing, like not let go. "Although if you turnout to be a sixty year old retiree using someone else's photos, I want you to know I will make a scene."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not a smile. Not yet. But the ghost of one, haunting the edges of a face that looks like it doesn't give them up easily. "No stolen photos. What you see is what you get."
"What I see," I say, letting my gaze travel over those shoulders and back up to that scarred eyebrow, "is not what I expected from an accountant."
That does something to him. A flicker in those blue green eyes that's gone before I can name it. He takes a slow sip of his drink, and I watch his throat work, and I think about all the messages we exchanged at two in the morning when neither of us could sleep. How he told me he understood what it felt like to come home and not recognize the person you'd become. How I told him things I haven't said out loud to anyone, not my therapist, not my best friend, not the God I stopped praying to somewhere between my first tour and my second.
"Numbers are deceptive," he says finally. "They look boring until you understand what they're hiding."
"That your sales pitch?"
"Do I need one?"
The confidence in that question is quiet and absolute and it makes my thighs press together under the bar. This is what I came here for. Not the whips and chains and whatever else is behind that rumored hidden door. This. A man who speaks like he means every single word and wastes none of them.
I signal the bartender. "Whiskey. Neat. Whatever he's having."
He watches me order with an expression I can't quite decode. Somewhere between amused and assessing, like I'm a puzzle he didn't expect to find interesting. Then he angles his body toward mine, and the movement is slow and deliberate, and I feel thefull weight of his attention settle on me like a hand pressing gently against my sternum.
"So," he says, and the way he angles toward me narrows the entire bar down to the two of us. "Tell me what you're looking for tonight."
Direct. No games. My skin prickles with something electric.
"Honestly? I want to explore. Submission. The whole thing." I take a sip of whiskey and let it burn through the nerves. "I don't have a list of hard limits because I've never done this before. Not really. I don't know what my limits are yet."
His expression shifts. The easy almost warmth tightens into focus, and he sets his glass down with a deliberateness that draws my attention to those calloused hands all over again.
"That's not freedom, Zara. That's a blind spot." His voice drops, and there's an edge to it now that wasn't there before. Not anger. Authority. "Everyone has limits. Even if they haven't found them yet. Especially then."
Most men would hear "no limits" and see an open invitation. This one hears it and sees a gap in my defenses. And instead of exploiting it, he flags it. Like a medic marking a wound before treatment.
And just like that, sitting on a barstool in a mountain town sex club next to a man who smells like pine and speaks like someone who understands the weight of responsibility, I feel something I haven't felt in six years.
Safe.
Which is terrifying. Because the last time I felt safe, people died.
CHAPTER TWO
RONAN
I'm not supposed to be here tonight.
I'm supposed to be at the compound going over the environmental survey data for the Whistler contract that Callum needs by Friday. I'm supposed to be eating leftover chili at my desk while cross referencing soil samples with watershed maps and pretending that's a fulfilling way to spend a Thursday evening. Instead I'm sitting at the bar in the Ember Lounge nursing a Macallan and wondering when exactly my life became the kind of quiet that feels less like peace and more like a holding pattern.
Two weeks. That's how long it's been since Callum met Nadia, and watching my oldest brother crack open like a fault line after eight years of granite has done something to the rest of us. Declan won't shut up about it. Flynn keeps making spreadsheets about "optimized romantic outcomes" which is his way of processing emotion without admitting he has any. And me? I drove to Club Crimson for the first time in three months and ordered whiskey at the public bar like a man who's not sure what he came here for but knows he won't find it in watershed data.
That's a lie. I know exactly what I came here for. I just don't want to name it.
The Ember Lounge is busy for a Thursday. Noah Kane's team runs a tight operation, and the public side of this place looks like any upscale mountain bar. Good music, better liquor, attractive people in low lighting. Nobody on this side of the fireplace would guess what's happening on the other side unless they already knew. I've been on that other side exactly twice. Once when Roman gave me a tour six months ago because he thought I should "stop lurking and commit." And once three months ago when I came to watch a demonstration and spent the entire evening thinking about Jess.
Jessica Langford. My only submissive. The only woman I've ever guided into subspace. The only woman I ever hurt.
Not physically. I would cut my own hands off before I physically harmed a woman in a way she didn't ask for and enthusiastically consent to. But Jess and I had a communication breakdown that still wakes me up at three in the morning, and the details don't matter as much as the result. She didn't trust me enough to tell me something was wrong. I didn't read her well enough to see it. And by the time the damage surfaced, she couldn't look at me without flinching.
