Page 62 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Stella

The weld hissed, popped, and flared to life, white-hot and watching, like it knew I was holding my breath again.

I didn’t let it go. Not until the seam took shape beneath my electrode, each molten inch pulled tight with precision.

I maintained a steady pace, wrists aching, shoulders burning, sweat slipping down my spine and catching under the band of my bra.

Only when the glow dimmed from white to amber, when the metal stilled beneath my hands, did I exhale.

I flipped my mask up and stepped back, dragging my arm across my forehead as I stared down the thing I’d made, or the thing that was becoming something beneath my hands.

It had started as a rose. Curved steel, delicately bent.

Meant to catch light. Meant to be pretty.

But the metal hadn’t wanted pretty. It wanted to fight.

It hunched into itself with jagged weight and sharpened edges, every seam radiating tension like it resented every compromise I’d forced on it.

This wasn’t a flower anymore. It was a warning. And I couldn’t stop looking at it.

My body still buzzed with the wrong kind of energy.

I hadn’t come out here to make anything.

I came to burn through the pressure clawing just beneath my skin, the helplessness, the waiting, the slow grind of Quinn and the others retreating into strategy, stacking files and theories while time kept slipping by with no word.

I didn’t wait well. So I welded. And when the metal resisted, it felt honest.

I reached for the wire brush and froze. The air behind me shifted. That prickle at the base of my neck was instinct, not imagination. I didn’t turn. Didn’t need to.

“You gonna say something?” I asked, grabbing the brush, “Or just stand there staring at my ass while I sweat?”

There was a long enough pause to make me smile before he even spoke.

“Can’t I do both?” Jax’s voice dropped behind me, smooth, low, dry enough to make my knees ache.

I kept brushing the weld line, but my smirk deepened. “That line’s only gonna work once.”

“Then it was well spent.”

He stepped closer. I felt the heat of him before I saw him, that quiet, steady gravity he carried, like nothing around him moved without permission.

I finally turned, tossing the brush onto the worktable.

Sweat slicked the base of my throat, soot streaked my arm, and my tank top clung in all the wrong places. I probably looked like hell.

Jax looked like stillness made flesh. Shirt sleeves rolled, eyes on everything.

“I figured you’d be with the others,” I said, nodding toward the house. “Or buried in data. Doing something useful.”

He looked at the sculpture. “I was. Then I realized something.” His gaze met mine. “Tension doesn’t build in silence. It needs friction. Pressure. Contact.”

“Was that your way of saying you missed me?” I cocked an eyebrow.

He didn’t blink. “That was my way of saying I came to see what you’re making.”

I stepped aside, gesturing toward the twisted metal. “Started as a rose. Now it’s... I don’t know. A warning.”

He didn’t smile, but his eyes flickered. “It’s certainly not soft.”

“No. It didn’t want to be.”

He came closer, bending to look at the curve of one of the outer petals. His fingers didn’t touch—of course they didn’t—but his focus was razor sharp. The kind that made you feel stripped. Not sexually. Structurally. Like he could see what you were built from.

“You see this line?” I said, pointing to one of the deeper welds. “It’s fighting itself. Pulled in opposite directions. The tension is what holds it together.”

He straightened, nodding. “That’s what rope is.”

I tilted my head. “Rope?”

He looked at me like the answer was obvious. “Most people think it’s about restraint. Or pain. Or sex. But it’s not. It’s about tension. It only works when the force pulling one way is matched by something pulling back.”

I stood there, breathing heavier than I should’ve been. The steel buzzed behind me. My skin was hot, but not from the metalworking. My muscles had gone tight.

“So what you’re saying,” I said, voice lower now, “is the only reason it doesn’t snap... is because the pain’s in balance.”

He didn’t move. “Exactly.”

I looked down at my fingers. They were trembling. Not from effort. From want. That restless edge had stalked me for days, crawling in under the seams, making it impossible to be still. I’d tried to weld it out. Burn it down. Sweat it into silence. It hadn’t helped.

“I want it again,” I said before I could stop myself.

He didn’t ask what.

I stepped into his space and lifted my chin, holding his gaze. “Not what we’ve already done. I don’t want comfort. I want pressure. Strain. I want to feel what happens when you don’t hold back.”

His gaze dropped to my mouth. His jaw shifted once.

“No limits?” he asked.

“One,” I said. “I want to see it. While I’m in it. I want to watch myself become something else.”

His eyes darkened, not with lust, but with decision.

“Then come with me.” He turned without flourish or pause, and I followed, heart pounding like a war drum, body aching, heat rising like breath through flame.

The sculpture could wait. I had my own tension to shape into meaning.

The air shifted the moment we stepped inside his cabin.

It always did, but tonight, it was different.

It felt thick. Saturated. My skin registered it first, like even the light had been recalibrated to some humming frequency only desire could hear.

Nothing had touched me yet. Not his hands.

Not even his voice. But my body already knew.

This wasn’t play. It was diving into surrender headfirst.

The rig waited in the center of the room as it always did, solemn beneath the amber lamplight.

Ropes lay coiled on the dresser, each loop as precise as a prayer.

The space was too quiet, too clean, and too reverent to be a coincidence.

He’d been ready. Maybe not just tonight.

Maybe longer. Maybe he’d always known I’d shatter, and ask to be pieced back together this way.

I lingered just inside the door, breath rising too fast, not from fear, but recognition.

My heartbeat stuttered beneath my ribs. This was where women turned back.

Where they said not tonight, not like this, not me.

Still, I stayed, anchored by the ache, by the bone-deep truth that leaving was never an option.

Jax stepped forward, still silent, still not looking.

He peeled off his shirt with the same ease with which he moved through rooms; unapologetic, deliberate, elemental.

The flex of his shoulders, the ripple of taut muscle, the square line of his jaw; none of it was casual.

It was an invocation, and it hit me low and sharp, lighting every nerve.

A pulse fired in my belly, thighs tightening as my breath caught and held. The silence stretched, thick and deliberate, until he turned—calm, controlled, devastating—and said, “Clothes off. Slowly.”

The command didn’t shock me. It settled deep, blooming heat where I already ached, like my body had waited for those exact words.

I didn’t sass or even speak. My hands moved before my brain caught up, gripping the hem of my sweat-soaked tank and dragging it over my head, damp cotton scraping over sensitive ribs.

My sports bra followed quickly, a quiet surrender of everything that made me feel composed.

Then the boots and socks. Then the jeans, peeled off inch by inch, catching on damp skin, taking the last of my armor with them.

I stood in nothing but thin black panties and a flush I couldn’t hide, nipples tight, thighs slick, already wrecked with want.

He watched me like a sculpture he hadn’t finished, eyes dragging across me without urgency or mercy.

I swallowed. “Are you just going to stand there, or….”

“Turn around,” he said, cutting me off.

I obeyed.

My skin prickled as I faced the warm-lit room, feeling exposed. I gathered my hair into a knot at the base of my neck, holding it there without being asked. My heart thundered in the silence that followed, anticipation coiling into something sharp and alive.

I felt him behind me, his breath first, then his presence, heat lapping at the space between us like a promise. Still no touch. Just that unbearable patience he wielded like a blade.

When his hand finally landed at the center of my back, I had to fight not to whimper. He didn’t trace or tease, just pressed his palm flat between my shoulder blades like he was testing the integrity of something he meant to climb. My lungs stuttered. My spine arched. I felt staked.

“You’re warm,” he murmured. “Sweaty. Raw. Just the way I want you.”

“Romantic,” I rasped, voice cracking. It was all I had left.

“I’m not here to romance you, Stella.” My name hit like a brand. “I’m here to shape you.”

He stepped in front of me again, hand trailing around my ribcage as he passed. My breath hitched. His chest rose with mine, bare and steady, while his fingers flexed like they already anticipated the rope.

“I’ve had you in rope before,” he said. “Seen you surrender. Seen you break.”

I swallowed hard. Couldn’t look away.

“But tonight, I want you to change. I want you to become something new. And I want you to feel every second of it.”

My thighs pressed together. My lips parted. “You’re making it really hard to play it cool.”

His gaze dipped to my mouth. “Then stop trying. Cool doesn’t suit you. Raw does.”

A pulse beat within my chest. A tingling coil lit at the base of my spine.

He stepped closer, the heat of his chest hovering just inches from mine. I didn’t move. He was already everywhere, in my breath, my blood, the throb low in my belly demanding touch.

“I’ll make it beautiful,” he said, voice low. “But you’ll come out of it wrecked.”

My throat worked around another swallow. “And if I fall apart?”

His eyes didn’t waver. “Then I’ll hold the pieces. And decide which ones you no longer need.”