Page 18 of Lady and the Butcher

Why was this guy watching me? I kind of liked it.

“You’re nervous,” he said, not a question.

“I’m … warm,” I countered. “It’s Charleston. The air is soup. We live in a swamp held together by good manners and iced tea.”

“You keep making jokes because you’re nervous.”

“I’m not nervous. I’m distracted.”

“Because you’re waiting.”

This time, the words hit home so precisely I had to look away. The lights over the oaks blurred for a second, haloing out. I made myself breathe.

“You don’t know me,” I said again, softer.

“I know the look,” he said. “The kind of waiting that’s a magnet.”

I glanced back at him. “You think I’m a magnet?”

“I think you’re already pulling whatever you want toward you.” His eyes lowered, unapologetic. “I think you asked for it.”

The ground tilted a fraction. The party snapped into an odd relief—laughter, clinking glass, the murmur of a toast—while some private frequency slid just beneath it, thrumming at my ribs.

“Do you dance?” I asked suddenly, desperate to reroute my body into motion before my brain detonated.

His gaze warmed. “If you ask nicely.”

I stepped into the edge of his space and held out my hand. “Please.”

He didn’t look at my hand. He looked at my mouth. Then he took it—my hand, not my mouth—and guided me slowly toward the patch of grass where a few couples swayed under the lights.

We didn’t say anything for the first few measures. His palm settled at my waist. My hand found the breadth of his shoulder under the suit fabric, the hard line of muscle that spoke to a life without desk chairs—dense, warm,there. Heat shot low like my body had been waiting for exactly this shape to press against.

We moved like we’d been dancing together longer than eleven minutes. He kept just enough space that propriety could pretend to be intact. It felt like a dare.

“You lead,” I said, because, of course, he did and because I wanted to hear what he’d do with it.

“I will,” he said, like a promise.

He guided me through a turn that wasn’t fancy, so much as inevitable. My dress whispered against my legs, my heels bit into the grass. I felt absurdly aware of my own thighs. His thumb pressed a little more insistently at my waist. He smelled like clean skin, bourbon, and something darker—cedar, smoke, steel maybe.

“It’s not fair,” I said lightly, because if the truth rose, I’d drown in it. “You get to be all intense and dangerous while I look like the snack table.”

“The snack table?” That almost-smile again. “Lady, you’re the main course.”

“Is that a butcher joke?”

“It can be,” he said, and for the first time the tattoo on his throat felt less like a threat and more like a dictionary no one else could read.

7

We turned. We breathed.

Somewhere, Mom whooped as the DJ, against his better judgment, slid into something with a beat. A cluster of Stephen’s colleagues cheered. Alicia’s laugh carried—bright, unbothered—then softened as she tugged Stephen into a slow spin. He grimaced, pretended to hate it, then gave in, looking ten years happier.

“You’re good with your family,” Atticus said, voice low, meant for no one but me.

“I’m stubborn with my family,” I corrected.