Wen ambushed me at closing.
"You're coming out tonight."
"No."
"You haven't left this shop in days except to sleep. You smell like espresso and regret. You've looked at the corner table fourteen times today—yes, I'm still counting—and you made a cortado for a man who didn't order one and then told him to leave and then stood behind the counter shaking for ten minutes after he walked out. You are coming out tonight."
"Where."
"Elevation. My friend Jess has a table. There will be music and drinks and people who are not you standing behind a counter having a nervous breakdown in slow motion."
"I don't do clubs."
"I know you don't do clubs. That's why we're going to one."
I opened my mouth to say no again and what came out was nothing, because Wen was right. Four days of Treeline. Four days of cedar on my countertop and a note in my pocket and a PI who wouldn't take my case and a man whose thumb I could still feel through flannel. I was drowning in a room I'd built with my own hands and the only way to stop drowning was to leave the room.
"I don't have anything to wear."
"I brought you something." She pulled a dress from her bag. Black. Short. Not mine. "Before you say no—it's clean, it's your size, and it's the kind of dress that reminds you that you have a body that exists outside of an apron."
I looked at the dress. I looked at Wen. I looked at the corner table.
"Fine."
Elevation was in RiNo, in a converted warehouse with exposed brick and a sound system that I could feel in my teeth before we were through the door. The line wrapped around the block. Wen's friend Jess knew someone who knew someone, and we were inside in three minutes, which told me this wasn't a regular club. The ceiling was thirty feet of open industrial steel. The lights moved in patterns that made the crowd look like one organism. The bass lived in the floor and climbed through my boots and into my ribs and I understood immediately why people came here—it was a place where your body made the decisions and your brain got the night off.
I was not a person whose brain got the night off.
Wen and Jess and two other women whose names I forgot immediately were on the floor within seconds. Dancing. Free. The kind of easy movement that comes from practice and confidence and not spending the last week with a man's scent burned into your skin. I stood at the edge of the floor with a drink I hadn't tasted and watched the crowd move and felt like a pine tree someone had planted in the middle of the ocean.
But here's the thing about being tall in a room full of people: you can't hide. I'm five-ten and the only woman on the floor in boots instead of heels—Wen's borrowed dress, my own shoes, because I'll wear someone else's clothes but I draw the line at someone else's feet. My hair was down because Wen had pulled it out of its clip in the car and refused to give the clip back. The dress did what Wen said it would—reminded me I had a body—and the body in question was drawing attention I didn't want from directions I wasn't watching.
I didn't know about the mezzanine.
I didn't know about the VIP lounge above the floor with its leather banquettes and bottle service and a sightline that covered every square foot of the club below. I didn't know that Elevation was owned by a holding company connected to a man named Cole Ashford through the same web of LLCs that held my lease. I didn't know any of this because I was standing in a nightclub I'd never been to, holding a drink I didn't want, wearing a dress that wasn't mine, trying to remember how to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman who does things other than make coffee and avoid men who smell like cedar.
Wen materialized. "Dance with us!"
"I'm fine here."
"You're standing like a bouncer. Come on."
She pulled me onto the floor. The music was loud enough that thinking became optional. I let my body move because my body had been making decisions without my permission all week anyway—making cortados, leaning toward cedar, letting a man's eyes drop to my throat without pulling away—so I let it move. The bass was in my chest. The lights were in my eyes. For three minutes I wasn't Lark Bridger with an engagement clause and a father who sold her and a man who owned her lease. I was just a body in a room full of bodies, moving.
Then the song changed and the crowd shifted and Wen was gone. Jess was gone. The two women whose names I'd already forgotten were gone. I was alone in the middle of a dance floor surrounded by strangers and the drink in my hand was empty and I was suddenly, sharply aware that I was a woman standing alone in a dark room in a dress that wasn't hers.
"Hey." A hand on my arm. Not gentle. Proprietary. "You look lost."
I turned. Mid-thirties. Expensive shirt unbuttoned one button too far. Cologne that hit me like a wall—chemical, aggressive, the opposite of cedar. His eyes did a full scan of my body before landing on my face and the scan was the kind that doesn't ask permission because it doesn't think it needs to.
"I'm not lost."
"You sure? Your friends took off." He stepped closer. His hand was still on my arm. "I can keep you company."
"Remove your hand."
He smiled. The kind of smile that isn't a smile. "Relax, sweetheart. I'm just being friendly."
"You're being friendly the way a bear trap is being friendly. Remove your hand or I'll remove it for you."
He laughed. Didn't let go. Squeezed. His fingers dug into my bicep and I was calculating—elbow to the ribs, knee to the groin, heel to the instep, the self-defense playbook I'd learned in a free class at the rec center in Conifer when I was nineteen—when the air behind him changed.
Not a sound. A displacement. Like the crowd had made a hole for something that was coming through it fast.
The fist came from behind the man's left ear and connected with his jaw with a sound like a book being slammed shut. His hand flew off my arm. His body followed his jaw—sideways, stumbling, catching himself on a stranger who shoved him away. He went down on one knee with his hand on his face and a look of bewildered fury that lasted exactly as long as it took him to look up and see who had hit him.
The fury vanished. Whatever he saw in Cole Ashford's face made it vanish.
I didn't get a chance to react. Cole's arm hooked under my knees and his other arm caught my back and the floor disappeared. I was off the ground. Over his shoulder. My face against the charcoal cashmere of his sweater and the cedar flooding my lungs and his heartbeat hammering against my ribs through the fabric—fast, hard, furious—a heartbeat that didn't match the composure of a man carrying a woman through a nightclub like she weighed nothing.
"Put me down."
He didn't answer.
"Cole. Put me down."
He was walking. The crowd was parting. I could see faces turning, phones lifting, mouths opening. The entire club was watching Cole Ashford carry a woman in a borrowed black dress through the floor and up the mezzanine stairs and nobody—nobody—stepped in his way.
He set me down in the VIP lounge. Leather banquette. A table with a drink he hadn't touched. The sightline I hadn't known about—the whole club laid out below like a chessboard and I understood now that he'd been watching. The whole time. From the moment I'd walked through the door.
"What the hell are you doing at my club?" His voice was low. Shaking. Not with anger—with something underneath anger that I recognized because my body was doing the same thing. Adrenaline and fury and the specific kind of terror that comes from watching someone you care about standing in a place where you can't reach them fast enough.
"Your club." I was breathing hard. The dress was wrong. Everything was wrong. I was standing in a VIP lounge in a borrowed dress with cedar in my lungs and the ghost of his heartbeat still pressed against my ribs. "Of course it's your club. Is there anything in this city you don't own?"
"You're not answering my question."
"Wen brought me out. Because I've been standing behind a counter for days smelling you on my own wood and counting how many times I look at your empty table and I needed to be somewhere you weren't." I shoved his chest. He didn't move. Six-four, two hundred and twenty pounds, and he absorbed the shove the way the mountain absorbed weather. "Except you're everywhere. You own my lease. You own my nightclub. You put your thumb on my shoulder and I can still feel it days later. I told you to stay away from Treeline but what I meant was stay away from me, and you can't stay away from me and I can't—"
I stopped. Because the sentence I was building had a destination I wasn't ready to reach with my hand on his chest and his heartbeat under my palm and the whole club watching from below.
"You can't what," he said. Quiet. The shaking was gone from his voice. What was left was something raw and open and devastating.
"I can't stop smelling cedar."
The words hung between us. The bass from the floor vibrated through the leather banquette. His hand came up—slowly, like he was giving me time to pull away—and his thumb found my shoulder. The same shoulder. Through the thin fabric of a borrowed dress, with no flannel, no ski jacket, no layers between his skin and mine.
I didn't pull away.
"You hit that man," I said. My voice was barely a voice.
"Yes."
"You carried me through a nightclub."
"Yes."
"Everyone saw."
"Everyone sees everything I do. That's how this works." His thumb moved. One slow circle. The same circle from the chairlift, from the dinner table, from the place on my body that belonged to him whether I admitted it or not. "The question is whether you care."
I looked at him. VIP lounge. Mezzanine. The whole club below and the city beyond and a man whose thumb was making a circle on my bare shoulder that was burning through every wall I'd spent two weeks building.
"I care," I said. "I just haven't decided what to do about it."
His thumb stopped. His eyes held mine. And for the first time since Vail, Cole Ashford smiled. Not the ghost. Not the killed-before-it-arrived version. A real smile, brief and devastating, that reached his eyes and cracked something open in my chest that I was never going to be able to close again.
"Take your time," he said.