Chapter 11
Knox
I called him too soon. I told myself that I would make him wait a few days, but I called him the very next day. And then the day after that. And the day after that. Then I didn’t need to call him anymore because he just showed up at the same time every night, parking his practical car in front of my cottage, the same anxious, yet content, look on his handsome face.
I was getting in too deep. I’d never had a lover like him. I wasn’t lying when I told him that I was a bad girl, the kind of girl he didn’t need in his life. He needed some good girl, a woman who was pure and kind, someone who would be a good mom to Stevie and Mattie, someone who would give him more babies—maybe a son—and support him at home while he went out to build his business.
He didn’t need the same sort of trouble he’d had with Colby.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her. How much did we have in common? She was a slut, just like me. She slept with men, not because it gave her pleasure, but because she wanted to stop hurting. That’s how it began with me, and then it became a habit. And now…I found myself wondering how she could do that to Dunlap. Every time I was with him, it was as if there’d never been anyone else. It was as if we were the only two people in the world who had found this magical thing, who knew what it was like to be one with each other like that. All the other guys were nothing compared to him.
It frightened me, how much I wanted to be with Dunlap. He frightened me. When he looked at me this certain way, when he stared into my eyes as we moved together, I felt as if nothing bad could ever happen to me again ever again. In the moment it was good, but afterward…it couldn’t last. These things never lasted. He would break my heart, and I would end up alone again. I would end up hurt again. I really didn’t want to be hurt.
“Do you still love her?”
We were in bed on a late Saturday afternoon. The girls were with his sister—a sister who’d flown out to pick them up and take them Orlando for a week. Very convenient, if you asked me.
“Who?”
“Colby. Do you still love her?”
I tried to make the question sound casual, but it wasn’t casual. It was about as far from casual as it could be.
He ran his fingers over the curve of my body, slipping them over my hip and along my ribs, tickling me a little. I elbowed him, moving his hand from my flesh.
“She was my wife. I’ll always love her.”
“But are you still in love with her?”
He sighed softly against my temple. “Are you jealous of a ghost?”
I pulled away, climbing off the bed. He sat up, watching as I snatched a t-shirt over the floor and pulled it over my head.
“Knox,” he said, tugging on his boxer briefs and following me into the living room. “I was just joking.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
I curled up on the couch, tucking my shirt around my knees. He came over and sat next to me, careful not to touch me. After only a few weeks and he already knew well enough not to touch me when I was upset. That was something that even Alexander had yet to learn.
“Do you still love her?”
He studied a blank spot on the wall across from us for a long time, rubbing his hands on his thighs like it would help him formulate an answer.
“The moment I saw her in that stupid economics class, I knew I wanted to know her better. And it was…our relationship was like a tornado, taking over both our lives. We couldn’t get enough of each other; we couldn’t stay away from each other.” He rubbed his hands on his thighs a little harder, matting the thin hair that lived there. “I thought I loved her. I thought that sort of passion was everything that love was supposed to be. And it was. For a while, it was so good. Even with her mother pressuring us to get an annulment and her stepfather offering me money to disappear…it just gave us more reason to bond together. But then her stepfather died while she was pregnant and things just fell apart.”
“But you stuck by her.”
“She was my wife. In the world I grew up in, marriage was for life. You didn’t walk away just because it got hard.”
“You told me she started therapy…that she got better. That she sobered up.”
“She did. She was trying hard to set things right. And I admired her for that, especially after everything she told me in that therapy session. The things that man did…” He sighed. “But things had changed. We weren’t the same people we were before. If she’d lived, we might have found our way back to each other. But she didn’t.”
I let that sink in. I wasn’t sure it answered my question, but it came close.
“She was my wife, Knox. We have two children together.”
“I know.”
“But life goes on.”
I dragged my fingers through my hair, tugging at my shirt to pull it tighter over my knees. He leaned toward me, resting his chin on my knee.
“Let me cook for you.”
“What?”
He laughed at my expression. “I can cook.”
“Can you? What kind of food?”
“Whatever you have ingredients for.”
“Yeah, well, I have mostly frozen pizzas and deli sandwiches.”
He laughed again. “Okay.”
He went into the kitchen and I could hear him riffling through my cupboards and the fridge. A minute later, he came back, his head tilted to one side.
“You weren’t kidding.”
It was my turn to laugh. “No, babe, I wasn’t kidding.”
“Babe?” He lifted me up and sat on the couch under me, tucking me into his arms. “You’ve never called me that before.”
“There’s never been reason to.”
“And now there is?”
I twisted a little, sliding my fingers through his dark hair. “I guess.”
He nuzzled against my throat, nibbling at me a little. “Say it again.”
“But then it won’t be spontaneous.”
“I don’t care. I just want to hear you say it again.”
I sighed, running my fingers through his hair again, watching as it settled in odd places, falling over here and curling there.
“Babe,” I said, drawing the word out longer than its single syllable.
He groaned. “I like that.”
“Yeah? Why?”
“Because it’s almost like you’re admitting we’re in a relationship. That you care whether I come around.”
I stiffened a little, pulling back slightly. “You think I don’t care?”
“I wondered.”
“I wouldn’t have invited you here if I didn’t want you around.”
“Is that the same thing as caring?”
“For me? It’s better than caring.”
He slid his hand under my shirt. “Okay. I’ll take that.”
I leaned in and kissed him. But then he pulled back.
“We need food. You have no food in your house.”
“What do we need food for?”
“Because we need sustenance to survive the rest of the night.”
I laughed again. “Am I wearing you out? Do you need a rest?”
“I need food.” He nuzzled close to me again, nibbling at my throat. “I’m starving.”
“Yeah, me too.” I reached down and slipped my hand inside his boxer briefs. “But not for food.”
He groaned, but he didn’t object. I kissed my way down the length of his body, lingering at the all the places I liked the most. He groaned before I ever reached that spot he liked the most. And then…hmmmm…
We ordered pizza later, curled up on the bed together. We talked about politics and music and movies, realizing we both liked a lot of the same things. He was a Star Trek guy while I was more of a Star Wars woman, but otherwise we liked a lot of the same things. He’d even gone to see Panic! At the Disco in concert the same year I did—just in different places. He saw the concert in Dallas while I drove down to Houston.
I
liked talking to him. I liked the sound of his voice. I liked watching his mouth move and the way his jaw moved slightly sideways when he said certain words. I like the way he gestured with his hands when he talked and that he often leaned over and touched me when he was trying to make a point. And I liked that he looked me in the eye when he talked. You’d be surprised how many people don’t really do that anymore.
“We should go to my place in the morning,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have a kitchen full of groceries.”
I groaned. “Are we back to that?”
“Don’t you ever cook?”
“I’m a single woman living in a cottage owned by my employer. No, I don’t cook.”
“Do you not know how?”
I slapped his arm. “I know how to do a lot of things. You’d be surprised.”
“I probably would be.”
“I cooked for my sister a lot,” I said, throwing myself down on the mattress. “My mom didn’t cook, so I’d make whatever there was in the kitchen. We didn’t have a lot—before she married Ed—so I had to be creative. I can make a mean macaroni and cheese casserole.”
“What’s in it?”
“Macaroni. Extra cheese. A little mustard and sometimes, if we had it, bits of ham.”
“Sounds good.”
“And I made this really good noodle soup with Ramen and eggs.”
“I can make that.”
“Not the way I did it.”
“You and your sister…you were close?”
I groaned. I knew where this was going, and I still wasn’t ready to talk about it. I rolled toward him, running my hand up his bare leg.
“Were you close to your siblings?”
“Exceedingly close. There were no other houses close to ours, so we had to play with each other or no one at all.”
“Yeah, well, I raised my sister so it was kind of a love hate thing we had going on.”
“Why hate?”
“She didn’t always like the way I handled things. She thought she should be able to do whatever she wanted. I thought she should do her homework every night.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t think so.”
“It’s tough being a parent.”
“Especially when the real parent is never around.”
He brushed the hair out of my face as he lay down beside me. “What happened after your mother married Ed? Did you get to be a kid?”
I shook my head. “Sherilynn didn’t like Ed. And Momma was so busy trying to keep Ed happy, she forgot she had children.”
“Sucks.”
“Divorce isn’t fun.”
“My parents have been married for forty-five years, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Lucky you.”
He slid his hand over my belly, letting his fingers tease the top edge of my pubic hair. “I don’t say that to rub it in. I’m just saying that it can happen.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever considered getting married?”
I closed my eyes, seeing Drake down on one knee, making promises that he wouldn’t keep. At least, not to me. Or, more accurately, to that girl who no longer existed.
“I was engaged once.”
I felt him sit up a little and could feel the weight of his eyes on me. He was shocked and that pissed me off a little.
I rolled onto my side, aiming on climbing out of the bed again. But he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back.
“To who?”
“Isn’t it whom?”
“Does it matter?”
I groaned. “It’s complicated.”
“Tell me about it. My marriage to Colby was the definition of complicated, but I told you all about it.”
He was right. It only seemed fair.
I lay with my back to him, curved to fit the angles of his body. I felt almost safe there, protected somehow. I pulled his arm around me, glad I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to see the judgement that was probably in his eyes.
“We met in middle school. I was thirteen; he was fifteen. He was from a middle-class family across town. His dad was a vet and his mom stayed at home with his little brother and sister. It was an unusual thing in the town where I grew up because everyone was poor and everyone had to work. But his dad made enough to keep him in two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes.”
I chewed on my lip, remembering those shoes. They were the envy of the entire school.
“We dated all through middle school and high school, even after he left to go to college. He’d come home on the weekends and we’d hang out, dream about the future, you know. He asked me to drop out of high school and move to Jonesboro to be with him. But I wanted more out of my life. I wanted to travel, to see the world. So I finished school and enlisted six months before I finished high school. When he found out, he was livid. But then he gave me a ring, told me that he’d be waiting for me. That we’d get married the week after he graduated college. I can’t even begin to tell you how thrilled I was. We had this life planned out. He’d go to school to be a vet like his dad and I’d stay home, like his mom. It was going to be the perfect life.”
I shuddered a little, the memory of it burning in the center of my chest. It was that dream that got me through basic training when it proved to be almost too much. It was that dream that stuck with me late at night in Afghanistan when soldiers around me were getting blown to pieces by IEDs. It was that dream that made me whistle under my breath as I left the base and prepared for my first visit home in two years.
“What happened?” Dunlap asked softly, his fingers drawing patterns on my belly.
“I came home, and he was married to someone else.”
“Wow!” Dunlap leaned over my shoulder a little, trying to see my face. “Are you serious?”
“I saved myself for our wedding night. We argued over it a lot. When I was younger, I didn’t want to have sex because I’d seen this girl in my class have to drop out because she got pregnant. I didn’t want to be some loser statistic. And then it was because I was going to basic training and I needed to not ruin that chance. And then it was because we were getting married and it would make the honeymoon better. But this other girl…she must not have worried about those things because she was pregnant when they got married.”
“What an asshole!”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. “You think so?”
“Any man who’d do that has to be an asshole. Who sleeps with another woman when his fiancée is overseas fighting for her country? That’s worse than the ‘Dear John’ letters women sent to men overseas during World War II.”
I nodded. I’d always kind of thought that, but my mother assured me that I was wrong. Momma said that Drake was lonely and he was feeling abandoned by me. That he did it because of my decisions, not because of any weakness on his part. I thought my momma was full of crap.
Dunlap’s opinion made me feel better about the whole thing.
He kissed my shoulder. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t marry that guy.”
“Why?”
“Because then you wouldn’t be here with me.”
I rolled onto my back and looked up at him. “But some of the things I did afterward…I’m telling you, I’m not the girl for you.”
“Who says?”
“You deserve better, Dunlap. You deserve a woman who’s going to be a good mom and a good wife. Someone who looks just as good in spit up as an evening gown.”
“What makes you think you aren’t that woman?”
I snorted. “I look best in fatigues.”
“I can imagine.”
I raised my hand to smack him, but he caught it and pressed it back against the mattress. “I’m not looking to get married again, Knox. Not right now. I just want to spend time with a woman who makes me feel good about myself, who makes me feel like a man. A woman who makes me feel like I know what the hell I’m doing from day to day.”
“Do I make y
ou feel that way?”
He studied my face for a long moment. “Yeah, Knox. You make me feel like that and so much more. I’ve never known anyone like you.”
I blushed, turning my face away for a minute so that he wouldn’t see the tears burning in my eyes. But he touched my face and forced me to look at him.
“I want to be with you. I want to get to know you. And if it leads to marriage, then I think you and I can make it work if we want it bad enough. And if it doesn’t…well, we’ll have a good run of it anyway.”
I nodded, reaching up to kiss him. He kissed me back, his mouth soft against mine. And then he was rolling on top of me, sliding inside of me as if our bodies were two puzzle pieces that were meant to fit perfectly together. I ran my hand over his ass, tugged him against all the parts that desperately wanted his touch. And I closed my eyes, telling the panic that wanted to overwhelm me that it was okay. That it was okay to want something again.
Just because I was letting him in didn’t mean that I was walking a road that would lead to the same hurt and pain I felt before. Just because my heart swelled every time I saw him, just because I wanted to cry every time he left me, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t live without him.
Just because I was falling in love…
Chapter 12
At the Compound
Kipling stood at the windows in his room, watching as Dunlap Spencer drove up to Knox’s cottage again. He’d been watching them meet nearly every night for the last ten days. She glowed. He wondered if she saw it when she looked in the mirror. Every time she came to the main house for a meeting or to get her assignments, her face just absolutely glowed. She was happy in a way that only a woman in love could be. Kipling knew that David had a rule against his operatives becoming romantically involved with the clients, but he wondered if David thought the rule was logical. Any time you put two young, healthy adults in a dangerous situation—as most of these cases were—you had to expect a little sexual tension to develop. Even Kipling understood that.
TAMING KNOX (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 3) Page 9