Chapter Three

Avery’s POV

Sleep never fully arrived.

I lay in the guest bed listening to the rain soften into a steady, endless curtain against the windows, replaying every quiet correction Kane had delivered throughout the day. The way he had told me to hold the mug properly. The calm order to step back from the glass. The precise instruction to either enter the study or leave. Each memory carried the same low, unwilling heat that had started when his fingers first brushed my neck the night before. By the time the clock on the nightstand passed one, the restlessness under my skin had become impossible to ignore.

I got...