Chapter 3

The air in the wine cellar was thick, heavy with the scent of fermented grapes and old oak, a perfume so rich it felt like it had weight against my skin. We had been down here for nearly an hour, the rest of the gala crowd having drifted upward toward the main hall, leaving us in a quiet, amber-lit isolation that felt deliberate, though neither of us had claimed it was so. I stood near a row of towering barriques, the wood gleaming under the flickering candlelight, while he watched me. He didn’t speak. He just watched, his dark eyes tracing the line of my throat, the way my chest rose and fell with shallow, nervous breaths. The tension between us had been building since the first glass of the vintage was poured, a silent, electric current that hummed in the space between us. I could feel it in the way his gaze lingered on my mouth, in the slight shift of his hips as he leaned against the barrel nearest to me. I was conflicted, torn between the primal urge to close the distance and the rational part of my brain that screamed *daddy*, *taboo*, *wrong*. It was the