Look up.
Alaric is there. Close. His dark eyes warm in the bar’s low lighting, the charcoal shirt open enough at the collar that I can see the hollow of his throat and the faintest shadow of the collarbone that I have recently become intimately familiar with.
“What?” I taunt. The word coming out with the playful, tipsy boldness of a woman who has consumed enough tequila to convert inhibition into audacity. “Can’t take a shot?”
He smirks.
Reaches past me.
His arm extending to the bar behind us where the remaining line of shots sits, his hand closing on the sixth glass with the precise, unhesitating motion of a man who accepts challenges the way he accepts case files—with the quiet assumption that he will execute. He brings the glass to his lips. Tips it back. Swallows.
Sets the glass down.
And before I can comment—before the taunt can develop into the competitive escalation that my tipsy brain is constructing—his hand moves to the front of my throat.
Not gripping.
Not squeezing.
Resting. His large hand settling against the column of my neck with the warm, encompassing contact of a palm that has found its position and intends to hold it. His fingers curve along the side. His thumb sits at the hollow of my throat, pressing with exactly enough pressure to feel the pulse that is hammering beneath the skin.
He tilts my face up.
And kisses me.
Deeply.
The taste of tequila on his tongue. The burnt vanilla flooding my senses at the closest possible range. The hand on my throat holding me in place while his mouth takes its time—slow, thorough, devastatingly controlled even with alcohol in his system.
He breaks.
“Designated driver, remember?” he says.
His voice low.
I giggle.
Giggle.
Hazel Martinez just giggled at a man in a bar. File that under “things that have never happened before and are happening now because tequila and Alaric’s hand on my throat and Oakley’s arm around my waist are collectively dismantling whatever remains of my professional composure.”
“No,” I declare, the word arriving with the cheerful, unassailable logic of a woman who is five shots deep and considers sober reasoning overrated. “I don’t remember. So. Yolo.”
I slip between them.
The motion is fluid—or as fluid as a tipsy woman in heels can manage, which is considerably more fluid than it should be thanks to years of physical training that has taught my body to maintain coordination well past the point where my mouth can manage sentences.
“I’m gonna go pee,” I announce.
Alaric arches an eyebrow. “Do you even know where the bathroom is?”
“Down the hall on the left.”
I say this with the confident, navigational certainty of a woman who cased the venue’s layout upon entry because she is a police chief and police chiefs catalogue exits and bathrooms and structural vulnerabilities as a matter of professional reflex, even when they are five shots of tequila into an evening and wearing a cocktail dress.
Getting there is a breeze.
The hallway beyond the main bar area is quieter—the music dulled by walls and distance, the lighting warmer, the air cooler against my flushed skin. I navigate with the practiced, muscle-memory efficiency of a woman whose motor skills remain operational even when her decision-making has been liberated from its usual constraints.
