The question delivered from close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath and identify the individual notes of his scent—the blood orange, the caramelized sugar, and beneath both, the darker note that I can now identify aswant. The biochemical signature of an Alpha who is aroused and is not concealing it.
I bite my bottom lip.
The gesture is involuntary—the same nervous, un-Hazel-like habit that surfaces in Roman’s presence, except here it carries a different charge. Not anxiety. Not the defensive reflex of a woman protecting herself from vulnerability. Something more honest. More dangerous.
“Slow,” I mutter.
The word escaping like a confession I didn’t plan to make.
I don’t do slow.
I don’t do the gradual, cautious, let’s-take-our-time approach that reasonable adults adopt when entering new relationship dynamics. I don’t do the slow burn that those romance novels describe with such beautiful, excruciating detail—the weeks of lingering glances and accidental touches and sexual tension that builds like a symphony approaching its crescendo.
I do fast. I do direct. I do the Hazel Martinez approach to everything, which is: identify the objective, assess the obstacles, eliminate the obstacles, acquire the objective.
And right now the objective is standing six inches from my face smelling like caramelized blood orange and looking at me like I’m something he wants to taste.
Oakley smiles.
Not the grin. Not the smirk. Asmile. The slow, darkening expression of a man who has just received information he finds both pleasing and actionable. His hazel eyes darken at the edges—the pupils expanding, the warm brown and green tonesdeepening to something that reads less like playfulness and more like intent.
Fuck.
Seeing an Alpha have hunger in his eyes like this is?—
Doing something to me.
Not the clinical, detached observation of a woman cataloguing a biological response. The full, embodied, between-the-thighs reality of a woman whose body has decided that the man standing in front of her is someone it wants and is communicating that decision through every channel available. The warmth in my cheeks has migrated. Spread. Settled into places that I haven’t felt heat in, in longer than I’m willing to calculate.
“Neither do I, Chief,” he says.
The title—Chief—delivered with a teasing, deliberate emphasis that transforms it from a professional designation into something else entirely. Something that sits in the mouth like a dare.
And then.
His teeth find my bottom lip.
Not a kiss. Not the firm, committed pressure of Roman’s mouth against mine. This is something more precise. More devastating in its restraint. His teeth close on the lip I’d been biting—catching it with a gentle, controlled pressure that sends a jolt through my nervous system like a current through a conductor—and he tugs.
Slowly.
The pull is measured. Deliberate. The specific, agonizing pace of a man who said he doesn’t do slow and is now demonstrating that when he does, it’s a weapon. My lip stretches under the soft grip of his teeth, the sensation traveling from the point of contact to every nerve ending in my face and jaw andthroat and further, further, down into the warmth that is no longer subtle and is no longer contained.
He releases.
And leans in.
His lips brush mine.
Not a kiss. Abrush. The barest, featherlight contact of his mouth against the lip he just pulled—a ghost of pressure, a whisper of warmth, the cruelest possible preview of what a full kiss would feel like from a man whose restraint is clearly a choice rather than a limitation.
“I’d gladly fuck you here and now, Chief,” he murmurs against my mouth.
The words vibrating against my lips.
Each one landing in my bloodstream like a drop of something potent.
“But I think we should do something rather exhilarating first.”
