Chapter 4 Charlotte’s POV

Charlotte POV

The shot glass is cool against my palm, the liquid inside catching the cabana's low light. Third round? Fifth? I've lost the thread completely, which should bother me more than it does. The cabana has turned into our own private party, music rolling through in muffled waves, and Alexander's cologne keeps drifting close enough to scramble my thoughts in ways that have nothing to do with tequila.

Logan plants himself in the middle of the group, wearing the exact expression of a man about to suggest something deeply unwise.

"Alright, alright." He claps his hands together. "Drinking's getting boring. We need stakes."

Here we go.

"What kind of stakes?" Hannah asks, already leaning in with interest.

"A little game I like to call Vegas Roulette." Logan produces a pen and a stack of cocktail napkins like he's been planning this all along. "Everybody writes a dare. We pick blind. You do what you draw, or you finish your drink and forfeit a piece of clothing."

"That escalated fast," Jess says, delighted.

"That's the Vegas spirit catching up to you," Logan says.

"What's the catch?" I ask, because there's always a catch with Logan.

"No catch. Just consequences." His grin widens. "Unless you're scared."

I am, in fact, a little scared. Mostly of myself.

Alexander's voice slides in from across the cabana before I can answer. "She'll pass," he says, not unkindly, but with that particular note of certainty that makes my spine straighten. "Charlotte doesn't really do unscripted."

Something hot flares behind my ribs. Annoyance, mostly. A little bit of something else.

"Excuse me?"

He shrugs, and the motion does unfair things to his shoulders. "I'm just saying. Some people come to Vegas and Vegas changes nothing. They're still running their five-year calendar in their head the whole time." His mouth tips up. "Nothing wrong with that. Christopher's lucky to have someone so... contained."

"You don't know the first thing about me," I say, and I can hear the edge creeping into my own voice.

"I know you color-code his itinerary by hour," he says. "In four different highlighters."

Logan waves a napkin between us like he's separating boxers before a match. "Children. Focus. The game requires participants, not commentary."

I hold Alexander's gaze. There's a dare sitting right there in his eyes, plain as anything  go on, prove me wrong.

This is a terrible idea. The kind of terrible idea that gets recapped later as remember when Charlotte lost her mind in Vegas and it somehow got back to Christopher.

I snatch a folded napkin out of Logan's hand before I can talk myself out of it.

"Charlotte!" Amara's gasp has more excitement in it than alarm.

"When in Vegas," I say, and unfold it.

Do a body shot off the person to your right.

Alexander is, infuriatingly, sitting to my right.

His eyebrows go up  actual surprise, followed by a slow, lazy smile spreading across his face. "Well played, Charlotte Carter. I was fully prepared to lose this bet." He reaches for the salt and a lime wedge without being asked.

"That's the spirit!" Logan crows.

Hannah groans, then grabs her own napkin. "God help us. Fine."

Jess and Amara follow, and Logan looks like he's just successfully talked an entire monastery into karaoke night.

Great. Now I've peer-pressured my best friends into questionable life choices. My mother would be thrilled.

"To bad decisions," Alexander says, holding his glass up toward me before tipping it back.

"To unemployment," I mutter, but I'm smiling when I say it.

What happens next moves faster than I can properly track. The salt is cold against my collarbone, his mouth is warm where it follows, and by the time he's straightened back up, the whole cabana has gone a little hazy and golden at the edges  Vegas-drunk, body-warm, every nerve ending suddenly very interested in paying attention.

"You alright over there?" Alexander asks. He's closer now. I don't remember him moving, but his leg is pressed against mine, and that's all I can think about.

"I'm great," I admit, and the honesty startles even me. "Everything just feels very... close."

He laughs, soft, and I notice the lines that form at the corners of his eyes. "That's one way to describe several shots of tequila."

His knuckles brush mine where our hands rest on the cushion between us, and I feel it everywhere, a low current running straight up my arm.

"You're staring," he says.

"I'm allowed to stare. You're an attractive man. It's just an observable fact."

Where is this coming from. Someone reboot professional Charlotte immediately.

But Alexander doesn't laugh it off. His eyes go darker, more deliberate, tracking slowly over my face. "Since the pool," he says. "Maybe before that."

"Before that?" My pulse trips.

"You've never once looked at me at the office," I say. "Not really."

"I looked," he says, his hand sliding up my arm and leaving goosebumps in its wake. "I just made sure you never caught me at it."

"Why?"

"Boundaries. Christopher's protective of his people." His fingers trace a slow, lazy line down my forearm that feels like it's burning straight through to somewhere much deeper. "We're not in his office right now, though, are we."

I shake my head, slow, my whole body suddenly tuned to a different frequency. "No. We're really not."

I'm not sure which one of us moves first. His mouth finds mine, and it's nothing like the careful, polite version of kissing I've rationed myself for the last two years. It's hungry, unhurried in some places and not at all in others, the faint bite of lime still on his tongue. My hands end up in his hair before I've decided to put them there. His hands find my waist, my back, the curve where the bikini bottoms sit low on my hips, and somewhere in the last thirty seconds I have apparently relocated into his lap.

I pull back, breathless, dimly aware of the rest of the cabana still existing somewhere behind us. "We can't. Not here."

His eyes have gone nearly black. He glances toward the doorway, finds one of his security guys, and gives a short, decisive nod.

"What was that," I ask, watching the line of his throat as he swallows.

"Making sure nobody walks in," he says, low and rough, standing and pulling me up with him.

We move through the cabana toward the back, toward the room I changed in earlier. My brain catches up exactly half a second before he pulls me through the door and turns the lock behind us.

He has me against the wall before I can say anything else, his mouth at my throat.

"Say stop and I will," he murmurs against my skin.

"Don't," I breathe.

His hands find the ties at the back of my neck  Hannah's careful safety-pin repair undone in a single motion  and the bikini top slips away between us.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter