The restaurant was soft and golden and quiet, exactly the kind of place where someone could pretend nothing hurt. Candles flickered low inside tall glass chimneys and the shadows swayed gently across the linen tablecloths while a warm thread of piano music drifted through the air with the slow steadiness of a heartbeat. The space should have felt romantic and it should have felt safe, yet Willow felt suspended in a way she could not escape, caught between the echo of Miles's desperate grip with his breath and anger and hands still vivid in her memory and the warm solidity of Zane's palm that still tingled faintly against her own.
She felt suspended between the woman she wanted Zane to believe she was and the woman who had pressed herself against her own wall an hour earlier trying to avoid a kiss she did not want. She felt suspended between revenge and the man she was dangerously and foolishly beginning to fall for despite every warning she had given herself.
