He pulls back.
The distance returns with a cruelty that my body registers as a physical loss—the candied blood orange scent thinning, the warmth retreating, the charge in the air dissipating like heat from a surface that has been removed from its source.
“To warm us up,” he adds.
His eyes holding mine.
Bright. Dark. Both at once.
“Before the main course.”
He takes my hand.
And takes the lead.
Walking forward with the easy, confident stride of a man who has just detonated a controlled explosive in my nervous system and is now strolling away from the blast site like nothing happened. His fingers are laced through mine—warm, certain, guiding without pulling—and his scent trails behind himin a wake that my Omega physiology follows like a compass following north.
I walk.
Because my legs are moving.
But the rest of me is still standing in the spot where his teeth caught my lip, processing the aftermath with the shell-shocked, recalibrating awareness of a woman whose entire assessment of this man has just been restructured.
My face is red.
Not warm.Red. The full, capillary-flooding, cheek-to-forehead flush that my body produces when the arousal has bypassed every containment protocol and is expressing itself through the only channel it has left: visible, undeniable, surface-level evidence that Hazel Martinez is turned on.
My bottom lip tingles.
The ghost of his teeth still there. The phantom pressure of the tug—slow, measured, devastating—lingering on the nerve endings like an afterimage that refuses to fade. I can still feel the exact spot where his teeth closed. Can still feel the pull. Can still feel the brush of his lips that followed, the whisper-soft contact that was somehow more obscene than anything explicit could have been because it was apromise.
Fuck.
I stare at the back of his head as he leads me through the barn and toward the daylight beyond it.
At the auburn curls that catch the light. At the broad shoulders that his tactical jacket doesn’t hide. At the easy, athletic gait of a man who holds a third-degree black belt and administers medication with field-medic precision and feeds information to federal investigations and just told me he’d fuck me in a barn with the same casual confidence he uses to check someone’s blood pressure.
I thought Oakley was a rookie.
Thought the winks were charming. Thought the grins were sweet. Thought the auburn curls and the easy warmth and the way he asks permission before touching made him the safe one. The gentle one. The soft entry point into a pack dynamic that includes a territorial Norse commander and a detective who dismantles crime networks before breakfast.
I was wrong.
Oakley Torres is not the safe one.
Oakley Torres is the one who slides across cruiser hoods and tugs your bottom lip with his teeth and tells you he’d fuck you here and now with the same breath he uses to promise something better.
He’s the one who looks like sunshine and operates like a slow-burning fuse—bright on the surface, patient underneath, and when it reaches the end, catastrophic.
I may think Oakley is a young rookie of an officer.
But now I’m starting to realize that he might be the most dangerous one in the “love” department.
CHAPTER 21
Cowgirl
~OAKLEY~
