KNUD, Her Big Bad Wolf: 50 Loving States, Kansas

by Theodora Taylor

  Trying to think like Rafes, Knud starts to compile a mental list of what Layla will need given her condition.

  “What do you mean, ‘let her go?’” Alexei asks with a sneer. “I am not threatening you to stay away from her. I am threatening you because she has decided to return to Kansas with you.”

  Knud’s heart stops at Alexei’s words. Beside him Tu says, “No way! Are you shitting us?”

  “No, I am not ‘shitting’ you,” Alexei answers Tu with a scornful look. He then sneers at Knud. “She has chosen you. I suggest you do not, as my son Aaron says, fuck it up this time.”

  36

  Wichita, Kansas…again

  I chose him.

  I’m still not sure I made the right choice as I enter his strangely furniture-free apartment.

  Well, not completely furniture free. He doesn’t have a couch or chairs or so much as a family photo on the blank walls. But he does have a bed. A huge bed.

  This is what greets me after our epically awkward, near silent five-hour drive from Wolf Haven back to Wichita. During the drive, I took the time to read a long dossier on both Knud Nightwolf and Dr. Rasmussen Knight that my family’s PR team had sent to my tablet.

  And wow… after reading over that eye-opening report, and seeing his apartment, I really have to wonder if maybe my time in Kansas hadn’t involved an undocumented nervous breakdown. Because I just don’t understand why I would have chosen someone who chooses to live like this.

  But the apartment. I sniff, and it feels like something is finally settling inside my chest. This space smells right, feels right. Even if the bed is practically screaming at me from its corner.

  A few minutes later I climb into the that bed fully clothed, then scoot myself over until I’m as close as I can get to the wall. He climbs in after me, wearing only a pair of boxers. But he doesn’t try or say anything. Instead, he lies quietly on his side of the bed and stares up at the ceiling.

  Yet I could still feel a set of eyes on me. Like something inside him was staring at something inside me. And my something was staring right back, deeply entranced even as I turned over and glued my eyes to the wall before carefully closing them.

  Knud… Dr. Knight…the father of my unborn child…is attractive on another level. The PR report mentioned that he’s one-quarter black, one-quarter Native American, one-quarter Inuit, and one-quarter Latino. In other words, he’s a walking ad for the benefits of diversity, and so very pretty. But he also has an underlying hardness I think might have something to do with his time in the military and…elsewhere. And it’s his hardness that removes him from pretty boy and places him firmly in smoking hot. Both literally and figuratively.

  Despite him lying three feet away from me on the other side of the bed, heat radiates off him. And despite how freaked out I feel, I find myself imagining what it might feel like to have his hot body on top of mine during the winter months when we first met.

  However, that image comes to an abrupt halt when a strange smell hits the air. It’s like…a room after sex but it’s coming from my body…which goes hot, then cold, with embarrassment when I realize it’s the scent of my arousal.

  I’m being crazy. It has to be a side effect of the TBI. I can’t smell my own arousal. Can I? Can he...?

  I can’t stop myself from looking over my shoulder to see if he can smell it, too.

  I find him staring at me in the room’s dim light. “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yes, thank you,” I answer as politely as possible, before quickly turning back over on the soft mattress.

  Then I fall asleep, confused and frustrated for more reasons than one.

  In the light of morning, it all feels like a crazy dream—and I’m still trying to figure out if it’s a good one or a nightmare.

  I sniff the air and look for him. As if I will somehow locate him with my nose. And I do. He’s at the stove, making coffee. Still shirtless though he’s pulled on a pair of joggers over his underwear.

  Since he doesn’t know I’m awake yet, I watch him for a little bit, appreciating the way the muscles move under his sand-colored skin as he busies himself in the kitchen.

  I vaguely remember his brother, Rafesson Nightwolf, being pitched as a possible date for my scheduled appearance at the United States Marine Corps Ball. But then my team decided to go with a Marine who’d recently been fitted with two AI limbs. That was more in line with my brand of princess-next-door with a heart of gold.

  The PR team had signed off on Rafesson Nightwolf, but they would never sign off on his brother. And I know exactly why as he shakes a bunch of beans into the top of his coffee maker, then jams his thumb into the machine’s button.

  He’s too rough. Not just unpolished…but more like he took the polish, looked at it, then dropped it in the trash can and set it on fire while saying “I don’t give a fuck about your polish” to the person who tried to bestow it upon him.

  “You’re staring, again,” he says. He doesn’t look up from the coffee machine, but he sounds amused.

  “I apologize,” I say, scrambling out of bed so I can join him at the counter. “That was terribly rude. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  He turns and leans one hip against the counter before saying, “I don’t give a shit about your manners, L-heart,” with a lazy up and down look. “Never have. Never will.”

  His comment makes me crook my head at him, wondering what he does give a shit about when it comes to me. Why we were together in the first place? Because even though he’s insanely hot, and that strange voice inside me continues to insist both he and his unusually spare apartment smell right, I cannot for the life of me figure out what in the world brought and kept the two of us together.

  He’s so very obviously a bad boy. And I am the living archetype of a good girl.

  Not with him, the strange voice inside of me suggests. Not with him.

  “Thank you for inviting me here,” I say, resolutely ignoring the voice. “I know this must be difficult for you…”

  “Not as difficult as it is for you,” he answers, handing me the first cup of coffee his machine spits out.

  I accept it and take a careful sip—a little harsh but not undrinkable—before I bring up the subject I was afraid to mention during our awkward car ride from Oklahoma. “Do you mind telling me what happened during the months we were together? My cousin says we were…acquaintances. But I’ve met your family, and according to my mother, you went to extraordinary lengths to find me.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. We started out as fuck buddies, but then we stopped being stupid about shit and got engaged.”

  I startle, not just because of his language but also because I’m wondering, “Are you always this…blunt?”

  “Yeah,” he answers with a half-shrug.

  “And I liked that?” Back when the family’s PR team was still in charge of finding my dates, “Eloquence” had been at the top of my list of must-haves when it came to men I was willing to spend a few hours with during my scheduled appearances. I wasn’t sure this guy even knew how to spell that word.

  Another half-shrug. “You’re not the type who’d let me know if you liked it or not, are you?”

  No…I’m not. Before Ethan arrived on the scene, I put together plans for how to break up with guys without taking a hit to my reputation. Which meant I somehow managed to tell three long-term boyfriends it was over without ever letting them in on why it was over.

  “I’m not like the other guys you’ve dated,” he guesses. “Not the sort you typically like, right?”

  “Tell me what types of guys you think I like?” I ask, honestly curious about the answer. Because what I like and what’s best for my brand had become interchangeable as far as my PR team was concerned.

  “Clean-cut, fancy as shit with a heart of gold…looking to put a ring on it,” he answers. “But that’s not me.”

  I’m feeling somewhat aghast that he’s landed so close to the mark of the type of man my PR team decided would be the
best fit for their “American Princess.”

  “But you are a Nightwolf,” I point out. “And according to my team, you’re a pediatric surgeon. So somewhere in there you must have a heart of gold.”

  He smirks. “More like a heart of corrugated metal.”

  He gets quiet then. “Your PR Team tell you what I did before I became a doctor?”

  “Well, no. Not exactly. They didn’t have all the details, even with the information given to them by my father’s security team. I know you were in the Marines, right, and spent a few years in black ops?”

  He lifts his cup of coffee and takes a long sip. “Yeah, I was a Marine for about three years, but I was running black ops longer than that. For the U.S. Government and my tribe.”

  “You were black ops before you became a doctor,” I repeat. Then ask, “Are you still running those kinds of missions?” Because I know having a seemingly normal job doesn’t necessarily mean someone has fully retired from black ops. Heck, a few guys who work at the compound still have to “disappear” once in a while when called upon by their former military bosses.

  Knud shakes his head. “No, I don’t do that shit anymore.”

  “What made you stop?” I ask, sensing a story.

  He shakes his head with a wry grimace. “Had an operation go sideways. I was sent to kill a target but I was supposed to make it look like a suicide. The guy had a vintage car in his garage so I settled on carbon monoxide. It would have worked, too, because he’d just divorced, and among my tribe, that’s the number one reason for most male suicides. But his ex-wife got in a fight with their kid who she was supposed to have for the week. She dropped him off at the front door without warning.”

  “He saw you kill his father?” I ask, my heart going out to the child, even as I easily processed the mission gone wrong aspect of the story after a lifetime of being kept company by security guards.

  “Nah, the target was already dead by then. But turns out the kid was a fainter. Collapsed as soon as he walked into the garage. But I didn’t have eyes on the garage. I saw him get dropped off, but all I could do was stay in my stake out spot and wait to see if any of the lights came on in the house. They never did…”

  He trails off.

  And though my heart is pinched with fear I ask, “Did he die?”

  “No. In the end, I compromised the mission and opened the garage. Got the boy out of there and took him to a hospital. My brother, who was the director of black ops for my tribe at the time, was pissed. But I guess the experience broke something in me. I was good at my job. But I almost killed a kid—and even though I saved him in the end, I knew he’d still be traumatized for life because of what he saw—what I took from him. Nah, my, um…soul wouldn’t let me do it anymore. Kept telling me I had to make a change. Start doing something to wipe the stain of what I’d done off—but some stains don’t wipe out so easy, I guess.”

  “Your soul told you this?” I repeat, wondering if it’s similar to the new voice I have inside me. The one that refused to let me simply return to my easy life in Texas.

  He shoots me a sharp look before answering, “Yeah, like I said, I’m not like your other boyfriends.”

  He’s answered my questions but I feel like he’s still keeping something from me.

  “Were you using your job to help manage your mood disorder?”

  “Wow…so that was in the report, too?” he asks before taking another sip of coffee.

  “My dad’s people are pretty thorough once they have a name—or in your case, names,” I answer, voice gentle. “I imagine some algorithm picked you out for black ops because people who’ve lived with a mood disorder often have far more self-management skills than those who don’t—especially in the case of young adults.”

  He snorted. “I almost forgot that about you.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “How you drill down and understand the hell out of shit until it almost looks like a positive the way you tell it.”

  “Is that why you fell in love with me? Because I turned everything into a positive?”

  He stares at me. And an embarrassing thought occurs to me. “We were in love, right? I wasn’t… using you to get back at my parents.”

  He stares at me for a long uncomfortable moment, before saying, “I’m not sure. Now that I know who you really are, and why you really moved to Kansas, I guess that’s a question I could ask myself. But on the other hand, it doesn’t matter, because I’m in love with you. So I don’t care if you chose me just because you’re trying to get back at your daddy, I’m just glad you did.”

  His words stop my heart. And, I feel compelled to tell him, “I decided to come home with you because my father finally admitted he made a mistake with Ethan. He said…”

  I shake my head in wonder, having never heard Dad outright approve of a man I was dating, much less encourage me to return to him. But my next words are completely true. “He said that the man I chose was a much better match for me, and that he trusts you, because you’re the first guy I’ve dated who cares more about me than himself. My mom also thought it was important for me to stay with you. She said you helped her see how much she still loved my father, and why I’d fallen for you in Kansas. I trust them, and there’s this voice inside of me. It’s new and possibly related to my brain injury—but nonetheless, I trust it, and it’s saying you, you and nothing but you…”

  I trail off, expecting a worried look, like the one I got from my doctors when I told them about my suddenly hypersensitive nose.

  But Knud goes very, very still, as if he’s trying to control something inside of himself, before he says with a tight voice. “I love you so damn much, Layla. And I wish to hell you remembered me. I wish you still loved me back.”

  “I wish I remembered you, as well,” I say, my own voice growing tight despite all my media training.

  But I don’t remember him. And for moments on end, we stare at each other. Cursing our star-crossed fate.

  Then I say, “Grace told me we may have gotten into a fight—a bad one.”

  He expels a long breath, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck like this is the last thing he wants to talk about. Nevertheless, he says, “Yeah, I got home, and you jumped out of a closet at me, and I swung on you.”

  “Oh, no!” I say, covering my mouth with my hand. “Did I hurt you? I’m so sorry if I did!”

  He shakes his head at me, expression hugely bemused. “No, I mean, yeah you blinded me a little, but that’s not why we got into the fight. You wanted to talk about my mood disorder, and that was against the rules—”

  “To what rules are you referring?” I cut him off to ask.

  He tells me about a list of rules, which both do and don’t sound like me. While I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of taking on a sex buddy just a few days ago, if I had, I would have definitely made a list of rules governing our relationship.

  “I understand, you were upset because I broke the ‘no personal details’ rule,” I say when he finishes explaining.

  He nods. “And you were pissed because you knew that was bullshit. We’d been breaking rules left and right, I just didn’t want you to get too close.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was afraid I’d hurt you.”

  My smile turns quizzical. “You were afraid you’d hurt me, after I hurt you?”

  “Believe me, my reasoning made sense…until it didn’t. Okay, you’re doing it again.”

  “What am I doing?” I ask, a little startled by the accusation.

  “Looking at me like you completely understand every word coming out of my mouth.”

  “Have you not felt understood before?” I ask softly.

  He looks at me for a long time, before shaking his head. “I’ve been a loner most of my life.”

  “Because you were afraid of yourself. Afraid of your temper.”

  He nodded.

  And I have to ask, “Are we always this honest with each other?”

  �
��No,” he answers, voice thoughtful. “But we were real. You once said I made you feel like a real person, because before me—”

  “My whole life had been Photoshopped,” I finish.

  He straightens. “You remember saying that?”

  “No,” I answer with an apologetic smile. “It’s something I’ve thought, but have never said out loud…before you.”

  He sets down his coffee cup. “Well, I guess that’s what you wanted the night of that fight. For us to start being honest with each other. But I was being stupid about it, so you threw up deuces. Real polite deuces, but you were out.”

  “And what made you finally decide to stop ‘being stupid?’” I ask, completely enraptured by this story, which is apparently based on my life.

  “You asked me to marry you, so I had to make a decision.”

  I blink. And then blink some more. Because surely, I heard that wrong. “I asked you to marry me?”

  “Yeah, you got down on both knees, right in front of Founder’s Cabin, which is—”

  “I know where it is,” I say, cutting him off with an upheld hand.

  Then I look at him in a new light and say, “I can only assume the sex was really good.”

  To my surprise, the somber guy standing across from me bursts into laughter. “Yeah, it was.”

  “Was it like what happens in the movies?” I ask setting my coffee cup down. “Did we rip each other’s clothes off and do it everywhere, including restaurant bathrooms and on top of conference tables?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” he answers with a lifted brow. “But it was rough and…I don’t know. Dirty. Wrong. No-holds-barred sex.”

  My eyes widen and my body swells with reawakened arousal as I say, “I, Layla Rustanov, the former first daughter of the United States, had dirty, wrong, no hold bars sex?!?”

  He nods with a cocky smirk. “Yeah, you definitely did. Up against the wall. On this counter. Once in the bathtub. But mostly on that bed right there.”

  He tilts his head and I follow his gaze over to his huge bed. Then, though I’ve spent the last eighteen years of my life thinking before I talk, the truth slips out in an angry blurt, “I am so pissed I don’t remember any of this!” I slam the side of my fist on the counter before asking, “Why are you smiling? This is terrible!”