Hazel Martinez. Former city police chief. Academy valedictorian. Decorated officer. Currently stuttering in a bookshop aisle because a man read three lines of fiction at her in a low voice.
“I’mnot—it was a random page—I wasn’t actually?—”
I abandon the sentence.
Look around instead. The rapid, anxiety-driven scan of a woman who needs to confirm that no other customers witnessed this moment, because if anyone in this bookshop heard Alaric Venezuela reading a sex scene aloud behind me like a one-man audiobook service, I am relocating to another country.
The aisle is empty.
I’m going to say something—a retort, a deflection, something that restores the competitive equilibrium—when Alaric leans in.
Close.
The amusement in his eyes shifting. Not disappearing—shifting. The warmth remaining but the quality of it changing, the entertained detective receding behind something more focused. More deliberate. The glint in his dark eyes carrying a message that his mouth hasn’t delivered yet.
“Can you play along?” he whispers.
I pout.
Looking up at him. Reading the expression behind the expression. The surface is playful—the smirk, the whisper, the proximity that could read as flirtation. But the glint is operational. The specific, alert sharpness that I’ve learned to recognize as Alaric’s detection mode—the investigator’s awareness that something in the environment has triggered his attention and he is responding without announcing the trigger.
He noticed it too.
The watcher. The shadow at the end of the aisle. Whatever I sensed, he confirmed. And he’s not telling me to run or to hide or to call for backup. He’s telling me to play along.
Which means he has a plan.
I nod.
Slowly. The motion small enough that anyone watching from a distance would read it as an intimate gesture between two people in a private conversation, not as a tactical acknowledgment between two officers coordinating a response.
“It’s…decent,” I mutter, the word performing its dual function—answering his earlier question about the book for the benefit of anyone listening while communicatingI’m infor the benefit of the man in front of me.
I return my gaze to the page.
Pretend to read.
His arm hooks around my waist.
The contact is fluid—one continuous motion from standing behind me to standing against me, his chest meeting my back with the warm, solid pressure of a body that is significantly larger than mine and is using that differential with deliberate, theatrical intent. His long coat—the tailored, dark wool piece that he wears like a second skin—falls around both of us, the fabric providing a visual barrier from the waist down that I immediately understand the purpose of.
Coverage.
Whatever he’s about to do, the coat ensures it’s felt but not seen.
He presses closer.
The burnt vanilla of his scent saturating my immediate atmosphere—warm, dark, the espresso notes deepened by proximity, the cardamom carrying the particular richness that I’ve started to associate with his arousal. Because I can smell it now. Beneath the analytical calm, beneath the investigator’s control: the specific, biochemical shift that occurs when Alaric Venezuela is turned on and is choosing to act on it.
“Do you like it?” he murmurs.
His mouth near my ear. Close enough that the question lands on my skin as a vibration before it registers as sound.
I blush further.
Wondering, distantly, whether we look suspicious—a tall man in a long coat pressed against a shorter woman in a bookshop aisle, the posture intimate enough to raise eyebrows. But the coat creates the impression of an embrace. A couple standing close, reading together, sharing a moment. Normal. The kind of public affection that couples display in bookshops because bookshops are romantic and romance makes people brave.
That’s what the watcher will see.
