“Wren.”
“Wren.” He tests the syllable. The rough timbre of his voice sends heat pooling low in my stomach, immediate and inconvenient. “Pretty name for a pretty bird who flew into the wrong nest.”
I should roll my eyes at that. Instead, I press closer, letting him guide me through the slow burn of the song. His thigh slides between mine as we turn, and the friction—the rough denim against my bare inner thigh where the dress has ridden up—draws a sharp, quiet exhale from somewhere in my chest.
I don’t step back to a polite distance. I step forward.
I let my hips roll against him, deliberate, testing. The contact draws a controlled inhalation from him—the first crack in his composure I’ve seen. Beneath the rough denim I feel the heavy, unmistakable press of his erection against my hip, and my breath stills—not from surprise, but from a surge ofpure, uncomplicated want. The realization sends heat washing through me that has nothing to do with the whiskey.
His grip shifts—a low, possessive slide to my hip, fingers curling into the thin fabric and pulling me harder against him. An answer. Not an apology.
Three months of twelve-hour days and sleeping alone. Three months of my body existing purely as a mechanism for keeping my brain operational. I’m so tired of being careful, productive, and responsible.
I want Kade’s hands on me. I want the low threat in his voice turned to a different purpose. I want to feel wrecked in the best possible way, and I want it badly enough that the wanting itself is a physical pressure against my ribs.
“Careful,” he murmurs against my ear, his voice rougher than it was five minutes ago. “You keep moving like that, someone’s going to get the wrong idea.”
“Maybe I want them to get ideas.” The words are out before I can intercept them—reckless and entirely honest.
His grip tightens on my back, pulling me flush against him. “Dangerous thing to say to a stranger who just ran off your last problem.”
“Are you dangerous?”
He’s quiet long enough that I pull back to look at him. Something dark lives in his expression. Not threat exactly. History.
“Yes.”
No reassurance follows. No promise that I’m the exception. He leaves the silence standing between us, heavy and stark, and waits to see what I do with it.
Everything in me should run. Instead, I stay locked against his chest, pulse skittering, tracking the steady beat of his heart under my palm, the heat of his hand at the small of my back, the specific controlled tension in his body that suggests depths Ihaven’t begun to map. He is genuinely dangerous. He is also the most present I’ve felt in three months.
I make my decision.
The song bleeds into another without pause, and neither of us separates. We sink deeper into each other, bodies finding a rhythm that has nothing to do with the band. His hand slides up my spine, palm hot against the bare skin the dress leaves open. His fingers curl into my hair at the nape of my neck—deliberate, possessive—and I exhale slowly against his chest.
“You’re trouble,” he says. It lands like a compliment.
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“I know enough.” His thumb traces the edge of my jaw—just the line of it—and I forget how breathing works. “Know you came here alone looking for something. Know you’re smart enough to recognize danger but too stubborn to back down from it. Know you fit against me like you were made for it.”
That last part comes out rough, like it surprised him. The air between us thickens.
“Next time you want to disappear,” he says, lips close enough to my ear that I feel them move, “pick a safer place than a den like this. Or at least bring backup.”
“Maybe I was hoping to find backup here.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. His eyes drop once to the neckline of the dress—slow, unashamed—then return to mine. “Careful what you wish for, little bird.”
The song ends. The lead singer announces a break, and the spell shatters—noise and crowd and the sweaty reality of a Wednesday night in a mountain roadhouse crashing back in. I’m wrapped around a complete stranger. I should be embarrassed.
I’m not.
It’s not about safety. It’s about the weight of his hand at my back and the specific, unhurried pressure of his body against mine for the last twenty minutes. It’s about the fact that I drovetwo hours into the mountains tonight because I wanted someone to take me apart, and this man—this dangerous, controlled, devastating stranger—looks at me like he knows exactly how to do it.
I want him in my bed. I want his hands on me. I want to find out what happens when all that leashed control finally breaks.
“Walk me home?”
