I take another sip and watch the room in the mirror. The bartender is serving a group at the far end. The live music has shifted to something slower. The lights are low, and the bar has settled into that mid-evening ease where people stop performing and start just being.
I’m thinking about the Forrester name and what it means, and how to get closer to it when everything changes.
My wolf lifts her head. Not in warning. Inwant.
Chapter 4
Willow
I feel him before I see him.
It’s not a sound or a scent. It’s a shift in my awareness, a sudden pull in my chest that has no explanation. My wolf is alert,interested, in a way she hasn’t been since we arrived. I’m scanning the room in the mirror, and then I’m not, because my attention has locked onto a man at the far end of the bar as if someone grabbed my chin and turned it.
Dark brown hair, pushed back from his face. A flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. Tanned skin, a day’s worth of stubble. He’s sitting with a beer, relaxed, talking to the bartender like they’ve done this a thousand times. There’s a scar through his right eyebrow that gives his face an asymmetry I shouldn’t find attractive, but do. He’s built the way men are built when the muscle comes from work: dense, functional, carved by repetition rather than vanity.
He’s looking at me.
Not the way the other men looked. Not the dress, not the legs, not the newcomer-in-a-small-town appraisal. He’s looking at my face. Specifically, at my eyes. And his expression isn’t flirtatious or predatory. It’s still. Arrested. Like he was in the middle of something and forgot what it was.
My wolf throws herself forward so hard my fingers tighten on my glass.
I look away. Take a sip of whiskey. My hand is steady. The rest of me isn’t. There’s a heat building under my skin that has nothing to do with the alcohol, and my nipples have tightened against the fabric of the dress in a response so sudden and so visible that I’m grateful for the dim lighting.
What the hell?
I don’t look at him again. I watch the mirror. He watches me. Not staring, just returning to me, again and again, the way your eyes return to a fire in a dark room.
Then he moves.
He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t swagger. He picks up his beer and walks the length of the bar with the easy confidence of a man who’s never had to prove he belongs somewhere. He takes the stool next to mine. Not one seat over. Not with a gap. Right beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his arm near mine.
“You’re the woman from the general store this morning,” he says. His voice is low, unhurried. A Texan cadence that sits in the vowels without drowning in them.
“You were watching me shop?”
“I was buying fence wire. You were hard to miss.” He takes a drink of his beer. “I’m Conner.”
“Willow.”
“Just Willow?”
“Just Conner?”
He grins. “Touche. Wanna leave it at that?”
“Yep.” I nod, trying not to stare at his mouth, which is just the perfect combination of firm yet soft.
His knee shifts and brushes my thigh below the bar. The contact lasts a second. A casual adjustment, nothing deliberate. My body responds like he’s run his hand up the inside of my leg. Heat blooms from the point of contact and spreads. I press my thighs together, aware that my breathing has changed and willing it to settle.
“So what brings you to a place nobody comes to?” he asks.
“Bad navigation.”
“Uh-huh.” He doesn’t believe me. Doesn’t push. “You get lost often?” His fingers rest on the bar near his beer, and I’m looking at his hands. Broad, calloused, a leather cord bracelet at his wrist. Capable hands. The kind that know what they’re doing.
I know what I’d like them to be doing right now.
Quit it, Willow!