Not because I wanted him to stop. That was the problem.
I wanted him to keep looking. Wanted him to watch me. Wanted his eyes on my body, my face, my every movement.
My traitorous body had apparently decided that ten years of anger and heartbreak meant nothing compared to the way Hudson Cole made me feel.
Martinez arrived around one, a compact, muscular man with a no-nonsense demeanor and a duffel bag full of equipment. Jesse nearly started to drool as she saw him. He and Hudson spent an hour walking through the bar, discussing sight lines and entry points and a dozen other tactical terms I didn't understand.
I tried to focus on my work, but I kept finding excuses to walk past them. I kept accidentally brushing against Hudson when I reached for something near where he was standing. Kept meeting his eyes and feeling that jolt of electricity every single time.
By the time we opened at five, I was a wreck.
Not because of the danger. Not because of Lang and Briggs and the constant threat hanging over my head.
Because of Hudson.
Because being near him and not touching him was its own kind of torture. Because my body remembered what his hands felt like, what his mouth tasted like, what it felt like to be consumed by him, and it wanted that again. Desperately.
I poured drinks and made small talk and pretended everything was normal, but inside, I was falling apart.
And the worst part? He knew.
I could see it in the smug set of his jaw. In the way his eyes lingered on me a beat too long. In the small, knowing smile that curved his lips whenever he caught me watching him.
He was waiting. Patient and confident and absolutely certain that I was going to crack.
And the terrifying thing was, I wasn't sure he was wrong.
By the time the bar started filling up with the Friday night crowd, I'd given myself approximately a thousand mental lectures about boundaries and self-preservation and the importance of not sleeping with men who'd broken your heart.
None of them were working.
Because every time I looked at Hudson, I felt my resolve crumble a little more.
When this happens, and it will happen, Betty, it's going to be because you ask for it.
His words echoed in my head, a promise and a threat all at once.
I wasn't going to ask. I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.
But God, I wanted to.
And that scared me more than anything Lang and Briggs could do.
Chapter 4: Hudson
Watching Betty work was torture. Pure, exquisite, self-inflicted torture.
She was in her element. Radiant. Alive. And every man in the place was watching her.
I couldn't blame them. Betty had always been magnetic, She was the kind of woman who drew attention without trying, who lit up a room just by existing. She was wearing a fitted black t-shirt with The Flame's logo across the chest, and the way it hugged her curves was making me lose my goddamn mind.
I'd been sitting at the end of the bar for hours, nursing the same beer I'd ordered when we'd opened. Martinez had come and gone, leaving behind a detailed security plan and a promiseto have cameras and motion sensors installed by tomorrow. The front door now had a better lock, and I'd positioned one of my guys, Santos, in a car outside to watch the alley.
The Flame was as secure as I could make it on short notice.
But that didn't mean I could relax.
Every time someone got too close to Betty, my whole body tensed, ready to move. I was operating on almost no sleep, running on caffeine and adrenaline and the bone-deep need to keep her safe.
