His fingers find the strands of hair that have worked themselves loose from my ponytail during the ride—the icy blue wisps that are framing my face with the kind of artful dishevelment that would take a stylist twenty minutes to produce and took a galloping palomino approximately three. He gathers them. Gently. Moves them behind my ear with the slow, deliberate care of a man who is not fixing hair but creating proximity.
He leans in.
His lips press to my temple.
The kiss is light. Soft. The kind of contact that doesn’t demand a response but offers one—warmth, pressure, the particular intimacy of a mouth finding the thin skin at the side of the head where the pulse is close to the surface and the touch registers at a depth that handshakes and hugs can’t reach.
“You’d be a beautiful bride,” he says softly.
Against my temple.
The words vibrating through the bone and into the spaces behind my eyes where I keep the things I’m not strong enough to look at directly.
I blush.
“Really?” The word escapes with a vulnerability that I didn’t authorize. Small. Hopeful. The voice of a girl who used to dog-ear pages in romance novels and imagine the dress and the flowers and the someone who would be standing at the other end of the aisle looking at her like she was the only thing in the room. “I doubt I could pull off a wedding dress, though. Probably too muscular.”
“Now who told you that, Martinez?”
His voice drops.
A register shift. Not to the Alpha command frequency—to something lower. Warmer. More dangerous. The specific, intimate modulation that Oakley uses when the playfulness recedes and the hunger surfaces, the two states exchanging positions with the smooth, practiced transition of a man who knows exactly how to move between them.
His breath is on my neck.
Hot. The exhalation landing on the sensitive skin below my ear with a warmth that my nerve endings process as event-level stimulus—the kind that makes the hairs on my forearms rise and my spine produce a shiver that travels from my cervical vertebrae to the base of my tailbone with the slow, undeniable certainty of a body recognizing what it wants.
I shiver.
His tongue.
Just slightly. A single, slow, devastating pass along the side of my neck—tracing the curve from the space below my ear to the junction where neck meets shoulder, the wet heat of the contact leaving a trail that the cool diner air immediately finds and converts into a sensation that is half temperature andhalf electricity and entirely responsible for the fact that I have forgotten we are in a public establishment.
I blush harder.
“I…just assumed,” I mutter, my voice operating on residual power while my body diverts all available resources to processing the fact that Oakley Torres just licked my neck in a diner booth at eleven in the morning. “Since everyone says I’m muscular and boyish.”
“Hmmm.”
The sound vibrates against my skin.
He kisses my neck.
Firmly. Not the featherlight brush of the temple kiss or the teasing ghost of his lips in the barn. This is a kiss with intent—his mouth sealing against the curve of my throat with a pressure that is claiming territory it has decided belongs to it. His lips are warm and sure and his scent is everywhere—the candied blood orange darkening to something richer, the caramelized sugar deepening to a note that I can only describe aswant, the olfactory signature of a man whose arousal is no longer an undercurrent but a tide.
He sucks.
On the spot.
The suction is controlled—not aggressive enough to hurt, not gentle enough to be ambiguous. The precise, calibrated pressure of a man who knows what he’s doing and is doing it with the deliberate, unhurried confidence of someone who has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it. The sensation travels through my neck and down my throat and into my chest and lower, lower, into the warmth that has been building since the barn and the lip tug and the gallop and the ninety minutes of sitting beside a man who smells like home.
I gasp.
Softly. The sound escaping through parted lips with the involuntary urgency of a body that has been running on suppressed desire for years and has just encountered stimulation that the suppression can’t contain.
He bites.
A tidbit. The barest pressure of his teeth against the skin he’s been working—not breaking, not marking, just the edge of sharpness that converts pleasure into something brighter, something that makes my breath catch and my thigh muscles tighten and my hand find his knee beneath the table with a grip that communicates everything my voice can’t manage.
