Hunter Russell always carried tension quietly. It lived in his shoulders, in his jaw, in the way his attention tracked his daughter even while he listened to someone else speak.
He had not gotten less attractive with age, which felt rude. Honestly, it felt personally rude. He was older now, obviously. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes and a harder edge to his face. But instead of making him less dangerous, it made him worse. More solid. Like a man who had learned exactly what he wanted to protect and what he refused to risk.
My seventeen-year-old crush, apparently, had not died. The second Hunter looked up and saw me, my crush flared to life with a vengeance. I wasn’t the seventeen-year-old inexperienced girl anymore. I was a woman with needs. I enjoyed sex. I had learned in medical school that sometimes it was necessary to take the edge off.
His gaze moved over me once. Not slowly and not obviously, but not fast enough either. Recognition crossed his face first, then shock, and then something else he buried so quickly I might have missed it if I had not spent half my life studying people. His beer went down wrong. He coughed hard, turning away, and Max slapped him on the back with a laugh. A hot, stupid thrill moved through me.Well, that was new.
I hugged him because it was normal. Because he was a family friend. Because he was my father’s player and my father’s friend, and I was not going to stand there staring at him like he had just stolen my ability to breathe. The hug lasted maybe one second. It was still a mistake. He was warm and solid, and his hand touched my back just long enough for me to remember every forbidden little thought I’d had as a teenager and realize with horror that adult me was much, much worse.
“You look exactly the same,” I said, because saying you look dangerously good seemed like a terrible choice.
“That’s because I moisturize,” he said.
And then I remembered that he always attempted these terrible jokes that made me laugh anyway.
I laughed, and then Isla came running up, wet hair stuck to her cheeks. I had a quick conversation with Isla, taking in how much she looked like her daddy. She was the spitting image of him. I also noticed how his eyes still glowed at everything she said. She made me laugh just like her daddy, and when I looked at Hunter, he was watching me.
Then I greeted my cousin Max who was more like my big brother growing up. He also gave me a reason not to look at Hunter for at least a few seconds. I knew he was close with Hunter. I remembered when Max was signed to the Blaze. But before thirty seconds were up, I side-eyed Hunter, and he was still watching.
Daddy noticed me then, and because he was physically incapable of subtlety when he was proud of one of his children, he announced my elective to half the backyard. Oh boy, he was really getting into the details. I didn’t think anyone here cared except for him and Mom. I smiled because everyone was looking at me, but my eyes found Hunter.
His jaw tightened. Just once. But I saw it, and my stomach flipped because I knew what that look meant. Want and warning were tangled together in his expression, and I recognized that kind of restraint because I had seen it before. My ex had looked at me like that in the beginning. Back when I thought he was intense, focused, and brilliant. Back when I thought dating a resident made sense because he understood the hours, the pressure, the ambition. He knew what it meant to cancel plans because of the hospital. He knew what exhaustion did to a person. He knew why medicine mattered. Two years. I gave himtwo years. Then last year ended with me opening the door to an on-call room and finding him with a nurse.
His white coat had been hanging on the edge of the bed. For some reason, that was the detail that stayed with me. Not the shock on his face, not her scrambling, not my own voice going cold and strange when I said his name. It was the coat. The symbol of everything I had admired about him, tossed aside like it meant nothing.
After that, something in me went quiet. Not broken exactly, just numb. The part of me that wanted, flirted, burned, and hoped went silent. I buried myself in school because school was always demanding and constant. I assured my family I was doing well. Until Hunter looked at me by the pool, and my entire body proved I had been lying.
I tried to enjoy the day. I spent time with Mom and let Daddy brag. I laughed with Max and listened to Rebel, Mom’s best friend, tell a story about college that made Mom cover her face while Wolfe grinned like he had not matured one bit in twenty-five years. I watched Mila and Isla be inseparable while Jaden complained about there being no boys his age and then immediately joined their pool game anyway.
It was a good day filled with family and friends. A normal day. And still, my awareness of Hunter ran under every moment like a second pulse. Hunter near the cooler. Hunter laughing at something Daddy said. Hunter crouching at the edge of the pool to fix Isla’s goggles. Hunter lifting his beer to his mouth. Hunter looking away every time I caught him looking.
By late afternoon, I had changed into my yellow bikini because it was hot and because I wanted to swim and because some reckless, newly awakened part of me wanted to know if he would look again. He did. For a second. The water cooled my skin, but it did nothing to calm me down. If anything, it madeeverything worse. I was too aware of my body, too aware of every drop of water sliding over me, too aware of Hunter.
It was ridiculous. I was twenty-four years old, a fourth-year medical student, a grown woman who had survived humiliating heartbreak, impossible exams, brutal rotations, sleepless nights, and hospital shifts that made my feet ache so badly I wanted to cry. Surely, I could survive attraction. Apparently not.
Because when Hunter got into the pool at Isla’s request, all bare chest, tattoos, wet hair and reluctant smile, my mouth watered so badly I had to swim to the other side. I lasted another twenty minutes before I got out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and told Mom I was going to rinse off in the pool house. She was busy mediating a dispute between Mila and Jaden, so she barely heard me.
The pool house was quiet, cool, and private. I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it for a second, my eyes shut as I tried to gather myself. The problem was that I couldn’t.
I was overheated and restless and embarrassed by how alive I felt. Months of numbness had snapped apart in one afternoon, and all because watching Hunter Russell got me hot and bothered. I turned on the shower. Steam rose quickly, curling around the glass and tile. I untied my bikini top, stepped out of the bottoms, and moved under the water before I could think too hard. For a minute, I just stood there, letting the spray soak my hair and run down my face, trying to breathe, trying to cool down, trying to convince my body that nothing had happened. But my mind betrayed me. Hunter’s hand on my back when I hugged him. Hunter coughing when he saw me in the white dress.
I came up with a fantasy of us alone in the pool. He walked up to me and told me how beautiful I was. How he knew I was grown up. That I was a woman with needs.
Catherine, what are you doing?
My pulse kicked hard. I should’ve turned the water colder, gotten dressed, and gone back outside. I should have remembered that this was my father’s team, my father’s friend, Isla’s father, and a man tied so closely to my family that wanting him felt like stepping toward a cliff.
But I was alone and needy after months of sexual drought. I was allowed to want something privately, even if I could never touch it in real life. After months of feeling nothing, wanting him felt almost like relief, and I let myself have that relief for one reckless, stolen moment.
I braced one hand against the tile and tipped my head back, letting the water run over me while my imagination filled in the things I would never allow myself to ask for. His voice and hands. The weight of his attention. The way he might say my name if there were no people outside, no rules, no history, and no reasons this could become a disaster.
The fantasy built too quickly, too sharply, and too completely for me to stop it. My fingers traveled between my thighs as I got myself off. I was moving fast, tweaking my nipple with my other hand.
Oh, I was going to come. Thinking of his wet body in the shower was my undoing…Then the bathroom door opened. At first, my brain did not understand the sound. It was too small and ordinary, a soft push of air, a faint shift of the door, a presence where there had been privacy.My eyes opened. Hunter stood in the doorway. The whole world stopped. My mind cut out so completely that for one suspended second, I did not understand that he was real. He was not the fantasy. He was not the thought I had been chasing under the hot water. He was there, damp from the pool, towel in one hand, shoulders tense, eyes fixed on me with a shock so violent it looked almost like pain.
I didn’t move or scream or attempt to cover myself. I also didn’t turn away. I stood beneath the water with one hand braced on the tile, my fingers between my thighs, my chest rising and falling too hard, my breath coming in uneven pulls that seemed louder than the shower, louder than the party outside, louder than the blood rushing in my ears.
Hunter didn’t move either. He stood frozen in the doorway, one hand still on the door, his entire body locked in place as if his muscles had stopped obeying him. His lips parted, but no sound came out. His gaze held mine, and the shock between us became something heavier, something neither of us was ready to name.