I’ve been fighting this for days—the awareness of her, where she is, how she moves. I don’t do this. Haven’t since the Army burned that part of me out. And yet here I am, a grown man with a scar on his face and blood on his history, tracking a physical therapist across a bar like some kind of raw recruit who doesn't know better.
She sits near the jukebox, crosses her legs, reaches for her drink—and I look away so fast it almost hurts.
Christ.
I signal Tommy for another whiskey.
The trouble starts at the pool table.
There's a group from out of town—three men, no patches, the kind of energy that comes in looking for a score. They've been in here an hour. I've been watching them the same way I watcheverything, peripherally, cataloguing. One of them, the loudest, has been running his mouth about the bikes outside. About the club. About how MCs in small mountain towns are just playing dress-up.
Blaze hears it on his fourth beer, which is two beers past his patience threshold.
He slides off the stool.
I say his name once, "Blaze."
Too late.
It goes fast the way bar fights always do—one second Blaze is across the room, the next there’s a pool cue hitting the floor and a table going sideways, and three men and one extremely willing Road Captain turning the back half of the bar into a problem. Stone is off his chair before the table fully lands, moving like a freight train in no particular hurry. Gear, bad hand and all, pushes away from the wall.
I'm already moving, but not toward the fight.
I'm moving toward her.
She’s on her feet when I reach her, Rosa already pulling back into the crowd as a stool skids and glass breaks somewhere to the left. The room tips into chaos. Harper is too small in it, too exposed, and something in my chest goes tight and territorial.
I reach her in four steps. My arm goes around her waist from behind—firm, no hesitation, and I pull her back from the fight. She startles, then grips my forearm and realizes it’s me. She stops resisting.
I move her to the far wall, keeping my body between her and the room, and guide her into a narrow corridor beside the bar, dim and just out of the noise.
I turn her to face me. Check for injuries—nothing. Her eyes are wide, but steady. Even now, she’s present, looking straight at me.
"You okay?" My hands are still on her shoulders.
"Yes." She breathes out once. "What the hell—"
"Blaze and his mouth." I glance back toward the bar. I can hear the fight winding down, Stone tends to have that effect on things. "It's handled."
She nods. Her hands are still wrapped around my forearm from when I grabbed her and she hasn't let go. I don't think she's noticed. I notice. I notice everything about the four inches of space between us right now, the rise and fall of her chest, the warmth coming off her, the green sweater this close doing considerably more damage than it was doing from across the bar.
Her grip tightens slightly on my arm.
Don't.
"Your heart is going fast," she says quietly. She's a PT. She's probably feeling my pulse through my forearm without even thinking about it.
"Adrenaline."
"Right." She looks up at me. "Is that all it is?"
The corridor is narrow and she’s right there, her scent—warm, clean, something I can’t name, hitting me at close range and doing exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid.
I feel it before I can shut it down. The pull low in my gut, the heat moving through me, my body deciding things my brain hasn't authorized. I shift my weight and angle slightly away because thelast thing I need is for her to feel exactly what watching her is doing to me.
"You should've stayed down," I say. My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "When it started. You stand up in a bar fight you become a target."
She tilts her head. Not offended. Reading me.
