THE ALPHA BIKER 'S HEARTBEAT

Chapter 1 — Pulse

The first time I ever touched Kade Voss, his heart stopped and then it didn't, and I've been trying to explain that sentence to myself ever since.

It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays were my long clinical days, the ones where I came straight from an eight-hour rotation smelling like hand sanitizer and bad coffee, and Tito Bo's garage was the last place on earth I wanted to spend my evening. But the fluorescent light over exam bay two had been flickering all week, and if I didn't fix it myself nobody would, and that's how I ended up standing in a converted auto shop at nine o'clock at night with a screwdriver in one hand when the roll-up door groaned open behind me.

I didn't turn around right away. You learn not to, in a place like Tito Bo's — half the men who came through that door were either bleeding, drunk, or both, and turning around too fast just gave them something to perform for.

What I noticed first was the silence.

Not quiet. Silence. The kind that has weight to it, that presses the air flat. Behind me, the two guys who'd been arguing about a poker debt for the last twenty minutes just — stopped. Mid-sentence. I heard a chair leg scrape back, fast, like whoever was sitting in it had gotten up without meaning to.

I turned around then.

He filled the doorway the way a held breath fills a room — like something had to give before anyone could exhale. Tall, dark hair pushed back like he hadn't touched it in hours, a leather jacket with a tear along the shoulder seam that told me exactly where tonight's problem was going to be. But it wasn't the height or the jacket that made every hair on my arms stand up. It was his eyes. They found me across the garage and didn't move again.

"Somebody's bleeding," I said, because that felt like the safer thing to notice out loud.

"That'd be me." His voice was low, unhurried, like pain was a language he'd forgotten how to speak. He crossed the garage in a handful of strides, and the two card-players practically flattened themselves against the wall to give him room, which — okay. Filed that away.

"Sit." I nodded at the exam table, already reaching for gloves. "Jacket off."

He peeled it off one shoulder at a time, wincing exactly once, and underneath his T-shirt was already dark and wet along the ribs. Not a scrape. A gash, deep enough that I could see the pale edge of subcutaneous fat before the blood welled up again.

"How'd you do this?"

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to whoever's suturing it."

That got the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. A man conserving his resources.

I got him laid back, swabbed the area, laid out the kit Tito Bo kept better stocked than most actual urgent cares because he didn't trust hospitals to keep their mouths shut about who they were treating. Six inches of laceration, clean edges, needed maybe fourteen stitches. Routine. I've done worse on less sleep.

"This is going to hurt," I said, reaching for the lidocaine. "I'm numbing it first, so give me a second—"

"No."

I looked up. "No?"

"No numbing." He said it the way other people order coffee. Like it wasn't a big deal, like I hadn't just watched a six-inch wound weep blood two inches below his heart.

"That's not how this works. I'm not stitching you dry, that's not a personality quirk, that's malpractice."

"It won't do anything."

"It's lidocaine, not a suggestion, it'll absolutely do—"

I reached for his side to angle the wound better into the light, and his hand came up and closed around my wrist.

It wasn't rough. That's the thing I keep coming back to — it wasn't rough at all, just fast, and warm, and utterly still, like he'd caught a bird out of the air and didn't quite know what to do with it now that he had it. I opened my mouth to tell him to let go, and then I felt it.

His pulse.

Under my own fingers, where his hand had wrapped around my wrist, I could feel his heartbeat hammering against my skin — not steady, not calm, jackrabbit-fast, like he'd just sprinted here instead of walked in like death itself had better places to be. And he went rigid. Not from pain. I know what pain looks like on a body, I've spent three years learning its dialects, and this wasn't that.

This was a man who'd just been startled awake.

His eyes dropped to where our skin touched and then came back up to my face, and for one full second neither of us said a single word. The garage was so quiet I could hear the flickering fluorescent I hadn't fixed yet.

"You felt that," I said. Not a question.

"Do it again."

"Do what again?"

"Whatever you just did."

I pulled my hand back out of reflex, and something crossed his face I can only describe as loss. Actual, physical loss, like I'd taken something off him instead of just my own wrist back.

"I didn't do anything," I said, slower now, watching him the way I watch a chart that doesn't add up. "I put my hand on your side. That's it."

"Yeah." His jaw worked. "That's it."

I picked the needle back up because staring at a bleeding stranger having some kind of unexplainable moment felt like a worse use of my evening than finishing the job, and this time when I touched him to start the first stitch, he didn't flinch away from the needle at all. He watched me instead. The whole time. Fourteen stitches, and not once did his breathing change, not once did he so much as tighten his jaw — until I was done, until my hands lifted off his skin to snap the gloves off, and only then did something in his shoulders drop, like the air had gone back out of the room.

"You should've felt that," I said, tying off the last knot. "The needle. Most people flinch."

"Most people feel things," he said, and it was so flat, so matter-of-fact, that I almost laughed before I realized he wasn't joking.

I taped the dressing down and stepped back to write it up, and that's when I noticed — really noticed — that every single person in that garage was still watching him like he might detonate. Not out of fear of a stranger. Out of fear of him, specifically, the way you'd watch a live wire on wet pavement.

"Who are you?" I asked, because clearly I was the only one in the room who didn't already know.

He held out his hand instead of answering, and stupidly, clinically, I shook it, and felt that same jump under his skin again, faint this time, an aftershock.

"Kade," he said.

"Mila."

His knees actually buckled.

Not dramatically — nothing so obvious the two card players even looked up from where they'd started very deliberately not watching us — but I felt it, the way his hand tightened around mine for just a fraction of a second like the floor had tilted under him, and when he caught himself against the exam table, his eyes never left my face.

"Say that again," he said, low.

"Mila," I said again, slower, watching him like a patient crashing in front of me that I couldn't name a diagnosis for. "Are you — do you need to sit back down—"

"No." He straightened. Recovered fast, too fast, like a man used to hiding things from a room. But his hand was still wrapped around mine, and he didn't let go, and behind him I heard someone mutter something under their breath that sounded a lot like oh, hell.

I had no idea, yet, exactly how much trouble that one word — my own name — was about to cause both of us.