“Don’t apologize for being honest.” His fingers curl, and for a breath-stalling moment, I think he might hold my hands, hug me. Except for the odd, rare embrace and the one time I cried in his arms, Knox doesn’t touch me. And he doesn’t now, either. He straightens, his back pressed to the chair. “I know they lean on you more than the rest of us. Especially Mom. To her, you’re all she has left of Connor, and she clings tight to you. She’s”—he pauses, his mouth hardening a little—“fragile right now, and to keep the peace and keep her steady, we’ve all allowed it. And that’s not fair to you. So, no, don’t apologize. This just means we have to step up.”
I stare, barely managing to keep my jaw hinged shut. That might be the most I’ve heard him speak at one time.
“So, umm…” I clear my throat. “Can I ask a favor?”
He arches a dark eyebrow.
“I plan to tell them Sunday.” Sundays were family dinner nights. It’d been a tradition I’d been folded into when I started dating Connor. Since his death, they hadn’t been the boisterous, laughter-filled affairs they’d once been. And Knox has only showed up a handful of times. “Will you come to dinner? I know it’s a lot to ask,” I rush on, because I did recognize the toll these dinners exacted on him. But this past year, especially, Knox has become my rock. Not that I’d ever told him that. He wouldn’t appreciate it. No…correction. He wouldn’twantthe burden of it. “But I could really use your support.”
For several moments, he doesn’t reply, just stares at me with that unwavering, piercing emerald gaze that could burn a hole through you. Finally, he nods.
“I’ll be there.”
A sigh of relief erupts from me. I’d been ready for his refusal. And wouldn’t have blamed him for it.
“Thanks.” I lean forward and rest my hand on his leg. The muscles underneath the denim tighten, and my breath snags. Before I can prevent it, my fingers curl into his huge thigh, squeezing. I swallow back a groan, captivated by the strength and…power that seems to emanate from him, to vibrate under my palm. It’s like grasping a lion by the tail and waiting breathlessly for him to let you pet and stroke him. Or for him to pounce and snap his mighty jaws around your neck. Did it make me a little disturbed that I didn’t know which I craved more?
Yeah. Disturbed.
And more than a little horny.
It’d been two years since I’d been with a man. Screw that. “Been with a man,” is just too damn euphemistic. Two years since I’ve had sex.
Since I’ve fucked.
It’s like my body shut off, went into a cryogenic state after Connor died. For six months, I remained in that frozen condition, no emotions, no needs, nothing. It’d been Knox who forced my return to the land of the living. One afternoon, in his no-nonsense, I-don’t-give-a-fuck way, he’d barged into my room at his parents’ home, literally carried me out of the bed and into the bathroom, where he’d dumped me into the shower and turned on the water. After much yelling and cursing on my part, he calmly explained that I would be his new receptionist at the tattoo shop. If I didn’t show up the next morning, he’d come back for me. I showed up. And when I broke down at the end of that first day, sobbing as the grief and rage poured out of me, he held me, silently letting me cry and scream until I was hoarse and my head hurt. That had been the true beginning of my healing. I have him to thank for that.
I also have him to thank for the reappearance of my sex drive.
Though I’d started to smile and laugh again, that part of me—the need, the arousal—had remained dormant. Then, a year after starting at the shop, we’d all gone out to one of the local bars to celebrate my promotion to manager. A couple of hours in, I’d gone to the bathroom, and on my way back to the bar, I passed a partially closed door. To this day, I don’t know what made me pause and glance inside the room. Maybe a sound that caught my attention underneath the throbbing music and shouts and conversations? Maybe some intuition? Either way, one peek into that dark, cluttered storeroom, and the ice that encased my body for so long melted under a fiery meteorite of lust.
Knox.
His back propped against a tall rack, his huge body taut. His hand burrowed in the dark red strands of the woman kneeling in front of him with his dick buried in her mouth. Even now, the heavy, aching pulse that had throbbed low in my belly, between my legs, as I stood frozen in that doorway, resurges. That memory is so damn entrenched in my brain that it torments me when I sleep, when I’m awake. When I’m eating damn breakfast. The wet suction of him driving into her. The woman’s ravenous moans. His almost guttural, low growls.
But in the vision, it’s me with my fingernails denting his jean-covered thighs. Me, with my lips stretched wide, taking him down my throat. Me, tearing those sounds of pleasure from him, shredding his unshakeable control. Me, staring up at the razor-sharp edges and planes of his face that appeared even more chiseled from stone with lust branded on his face. And those eyes. They’d always been gorgeous to me. While Connor’s eyes had been a lovely, pale green that reminded me of spring, Knox’s are a dark, deep emerald. Fathomless. And that night…
I shiver. That night from my vantage point, I’d glimpsed that gaze just before he tilted his head back. It haunts me, chases me into my dreams and darkest, dirtiest fantasies. His normally impassive, shuttered gaze had blazed like emerald fire. Like the stalking, predatory animal he’d unleashed in the MMA ring had reappeared with this woman.
In that moment, I’d wanted to be that woman. Craved it.
I’d longed to switch places with her, be full of him, have his taste and power inside me…bring him back to fierce, almost feral life.
Exhaling, I remove my hand from his leg. Dangerous. Touching him is too dangerous when I dance this close to the edge of begging him to take me, to fuck me until every part of me—my sex, my thighs, my belly, my chest, the goddamn soles of my feet—echoes with the knowledge that he’s been inside me.
But I have zero doubt Knox doesn’t want me like that. Entwined in his life as his brother’s widow? As his adopted sister? As his shop manager? Yes. But as a woman he’d press to her knees so he could defile her mouth? No.
I know because he told me as much, a few days after I’d seen him and the woman in the club storeroom. God, I hadn’t been able to look him in the eyes, not with the memory of him so entrenched in my mind. I could still hear his grunts, his growled orders… Maybe he’d picked up on my discomfort, or maybe he’d believed I was having one of my “spells” when the grief over Connor just snuck up on me.
Either way, as I cleared off the front desk and shut down the computer, he’d touched me. Which he almost never did. But that night, he broke his norm. Just my hands. He clasped them, his larger ones practically swallowing mine. Such a simple, innocent touch, one meant to comfort, but when I could no longer look at his fingers without envisioning them twisted in my hair… There was nothing innocent about it for me, or about the tight, aching pull of desire between my sex.
I can only imagine what my gaze contained when I tilted my head back. Need? A plea to put those big hands on me? Questions about whether he wanted me, too?
Maybe all of those. Because something entered that hooded, emerald stare. Something dark, cold…forbidding. He’d never looked at me like that before, and icy, skeletal fingers of…not fear, but almost of despair had scraped down my back, infiltrated my veins.
He didn’t want me. And the hardness in his eyes had assured me I’d violated the bounds of our friendship by even hoping he would. He hadn’t needed words to shut me down. He’d done it with a stare and by walking away without a backward glance.
Then, and even now, I don’t resent him for that unspoken but implicit rejection. He’s my dead husband’s brother, for God’s sake. Still… Buried deep beneath reason is that fragile kernel of my sexual confidence, curled into a protective fetal position, shielding itself from any more rejection from the one man it’d shyly awakened for.
