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Gas pockets.

I rolled onto my side, frowning into the dark. What exactly did that mean? He hadn’t seemed worried about me breathing it in. He’d been worried about himself. About getting me away from it. About getting me home like the world was ending in fifteen minutes.

Sterling Hayes didn’t strike me as a man who panicked easily or reached for excuses when things got uncomfortable. If anything, intensity seemed to be his default setting. Watching him in that parking lot, his body wound tight like he was holding something back with sheer force of will, should have felt dramatic.

But somehow it hadn’t. It had felt very real, like he was riding on the very edge of control.

It was still probably just a cop-out, my lovely brain offered. A very creative, region-specific excuse not to bang you for real because he finally realized you were trouble.

As ridiculous as that seemed, given all of our…activities recently, the alternative was even more ridiculous, right? That something in the air could turn him into a hyper-alert, barely restrained version of himself who needed to drag me to his truck like danger had teeth and a schedule.

I rolled onto my back and pressed my palms into the mattress, staring at the ceiling again, and then my traitorous mind took a sharp left turn.

The fact that I’d let a man fuck me on a saddle should have sent me running. Instead, my body had done the unthinkable. I barely recognized the woman who’d been breathless and unafraid today, who’d let pleasure take up space where fear usually lived.

That version of me did not belong to the house I’d come from. The one with locked doors and careful steps and the constant waiting for something bad to happen. In that place, my body had learned to go still, to disappear…to survive.

This version of me was somehow having orgasms on horses.

The thought pulled a weak, disbelieving smile out of me, and then the smile slipped…because the longer I lay there, the more that confusion curdled into irritation. Not fear or doubt.

Annoyance.

Because this was the same man who had split my jeans open with a knife earlier like it was nothing. A moment that should have terrified me and instead had lodged itself in my brain as one of the hottest things that had ever happened to me.

He did not get to do that—rewire my nervous system, unlock something feral and free in me—and then disappear down the hall like he’d suddenly taken a vow of restraint.

I’d been braced for the best fuck of my life when we left the bar. I’d expected hands and a mouth and that charged inevitability we’d been circling since I’d taken Big Hank down. Instead, he hadn’t touched me once after we got home. Not even by accident. He’d told me to lock the door and vanished like proximity alone might set something off.

Like I might.

Which was ridiculous and unfair…and starting to feel a lot like a cop-out.

If there was gas in the air, fine. I could work with that. I could stand six feet away. I could wave a towel. Hell, I could hold a gas mask up to his face like some unqualified hazmat intern and call it a plan.

He did not get to light the match and then walk away from the fire.

Decision made, I shoved the covers back and sat up, my feet hitting the floor with purpose. My heart kicked a little harder, not with fear, but with resolve…and I recognized the feeling for what it was. This was the new me. This version confronted things early, at the first sign of a red flag.

Men are way more fucking complicated than women, I decided as I yanked the door open and stormed straight into the hallway, my bare feet silent against the wood as I crossed the short distance to the next room. His door was ajar, and light was spilling out into the hall like an invitation that had arrived too late.

It was empty.

The bed was untouched. The room smelled faintly of soap and leather and him, but Sterling Hayes was nowhere in sight.

My irritation sharpened.

“Of course,” I muttered, frowning as I pushed the door open the rest of the way just to be sure, like he might be hiding behind a dresser for dramatic effect.

He wasn’t.

I backed out, shutting the door with more force than necessary, then turned and headed down the hall. My pulse kept time with my steps as I passed closed doors and shadowed corners, my annoyance and curiosity propelling me forward now more than resolve.

The stairs creaked softly under my feet as I descended, one hand trailing the banister.

The house kept stretching.

I passed the kitchen, then the living room, then a hallway that felt like it had been added by someone who didn’t believe in moderation. Each step took me farther from the guest room and deeper into the quiet, until I was pretty sure I’d reached the farthest corner of the house…a place you only ended up if you were determined or deeply lost.