A couple. Lost in each other. Oblivious to their surroundings.
Not two officers running a counter-surveillance operation in the fiction section.
His hand slides lower.
From my waist. Past the curve of my hip. To my thigh.
His fingers grip.
The pressure is controlled—firm, possessive, the specific grip of a man who is touching with intent and wants the intent communicated. His palm on the outer surface of my thighthrough the knitted dress, the material providing exactly zero barrier between the heat of his hand and the nerve endings beneath.
Then his hand moves inward.
And my nervous system recalibrates.
We’re in a bookshop.
On the third floor of a public establishment during business hours with at least a dozen other customers distributed across the space and a watcher at the end of the aisle and Alaric Venezuela’s hand moving between my thighs with the deliberate, unhurried precision of a man who does everything with precision including this.
I have never done anything frisky in public.
This is?—
This is ballsy.
For a detective and a chief. For two officers whose careers depend on the kind of professional reputation that does not include getting handsy in the fiction section of a Victorian bookshop on a Wednesday afternoon.
But he’s not doing it for fun.
He’s doing it for the person watching.
Because a couple who is lost in each other—truly, physically, undeniably lost—is a couple who is not paying attention. Who is not a threat. Who is too absorbed in the private world of their own desire to notice someone observing from a distance.
Or: he’s doing it to make the watcher jealous.
Because if the watcher is connected to the person targeting me—if they’re reporting back to someone who considers my happiness an offense and my new pack a provocation—then seeing me like this, pressed against an Alpha who is touching me with an intimacy that my former pack never displayed, isfuel. Is rage. Is the kind of emotional accelerant that makes careful people careless.
The strategy is brilliant.
The strategy is also making it very difficult to maintain the analytical detachment I’d like to pretend I’m maintaining.
“It’s warm today,” he whispers.
Against my ear. The words landing on the sensitive skin below my earlobe with a warmth that has nothing to do with the October weather and everything to do with the proximity of a mouth that has learned, over the last several days, exactly where I’m sensitive and is deploying that knowledge with surgical precision.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to go out on the yacht?” he continues, his voice low, unhurried, carrying the conversational cadence of a man who is making plans while his hand is doing something that contradicts the casualness of his tone entirely. “Sail a bit. Just us on the water. No one watching.”
His fingers press.
Through the fabric. Against the warmth that has been building since his arm hooked around my waist and hasn’t stopped building since.
“Hmm?”
The sound is an invitation. A question that doesn’t need an answer and demands one anyway.
“Then at the end of the week,” he adds, his thumb tracing a path along my inner thigh that my nerve endings follow like a lit fuse, “we’ll go to that new bar that opened up. Let loose. Have fun.”
His lips brush my ear.
