Knox
“I have to go to the restroom,” Naomi announced and bolted into the ladies’ room.
“Goddammit,” I muttered, clenching my hands into fists.
Adrenaline and rage raced through my veins, heating my blood to boiling.
I debated going into the No Man’s Land after her, but Max, Silver, and Fi beat me to it.
“You can’t all leave the floor at the same fucking time,” I called through the door.
“Fuck off, Knoxy. We got this,” Fi yelled back.
“And we got this, Knox,” Wraith said, throwing a bar towel over his shoulder and stepping behind the bar. “You’re all gettin’ beers or shots cause I don’t know how the fuck to pour anything else.”
A raucous cheer rose up from the customers.
The kitchen door swung open, and Milford the cook walked out with two baskets of brisket nachos in one hand and an ice pack wrapped in a towel in the other. He tossed me the ice, then let out an ear-splitting whistle.
Sloane jumped up and grabbed the baskets. “Yo! Who got the brisket nachos?”
Hands went up all over the bar.
“If I find out any of you are lying, I’ll personally ruin your life for an entire year.”
Sloane was no mild-mannered librarian. She had a legendary temper that, when roused, was a Category Five Shitstorm.
All but two hands wisely went down. “That’s better,” she said.
“We got this, boss. See to your lady,” Milford insisted. “Did Lucian—”
“Mr. Rollins is taking out the trash,” he said with a grin before ducking back into the kitchen.
I wanted to, but I was afraid her posse wouldn’t let me near her. I could punch an asshole out without a second thought, but I was smart enough to be a little terrified of the Honky Tonk women.
“Naomi,” I said, pounding a fist on the bathroom door. “If you don’t get your ass out here, I’m either comin’ in there or I’m gonna go knock more sense into that son of a bitch.”
The door opened, and Naomi, with smudged eye makeup, glared at me. “You will do no such thing.”
Relief coursed through me, and I leaned into her.
“I’m gonna touch you now because I need to. And I’m warning you in advance, because if I touch you and you flinch, I’m gonna go out in the parking lot and start kicking ass until he’s too broken to ever touch another woman again.”
Her eyes widened, but she nodded.
I tried to be gentle as I took her by the hand. “We good?” I asked.
She nodded again.
It was good enough for me. I pulled her past the restrooms and Fi’s office into the next hallway that led to my office.
“I can’t believe this happened,” she groaned. “I’m so embarrassed.”
She hadn’t been embarrassed. She’d been fucking terrified. The look in her eyes when I stepped into the hall was one I’d never forget as long as I lived.
“The nerve of him showing up here, saying he wants me back because he misses how I cleaned up after him.”
I squeezed her hand. “Pay attention, Daisy.”
“To what? The way you turned his face into ground beef? Do you think you broke his nose?”
I knew I had. That was the point.
“Pay attention to this,” I said, pointing at the keypad next to the door. “0522.”
She stared at the keypad then back at me. “Why are you giving me the code?”
“If that guy or anyone else you don’t want to see shows up, you come back here, and you plug in 0522.”
“I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown, and you want me to memorize numbers.”
“Enter the code, Naomi.”
She did as she was told while muttering about what pains in the ass all men were. She wasn’t wrong.
“Good girl. See the green light?” She nodded.
“Open the door.”
“Knox, I should get back out there. People are going to be talking. I’ve got six tables,” she said, her hand hovering over the handle.
“You should open the damn door and take a breath.”
Those gorgeous fucking hazel eyes of hers widened, and I felt the world slow to a stop. When she did that, when she looked at me with hope, trust, and just a little bit of lust, it did things to me. Things I didn’t want to dissect because it felt good, and I didn’t want to waste time wondering how it was going to go bad.
“Okay,” she said finally, pushing the door open.
I hustled her across the threshold and closed the door behind us. “Wow. The Fortress of Solitude,” she said with reverence.
“It’s my office,” I said dryly.
“It’s your safe space. Your lair. No one but Waylon is allowed in here.
And you just gave me the code.”
“Don’t make me regret it,” I said, moving in to back her against the door, fighting against the need to grab her and hold her tight.
“I’ll try not to,” she promised on a breathy sigh.
“What happened out there was a shit show,” I began, putting my hands on either side of her head.
She winced. “I know. I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was coming. I haven’t talked to him since the rehearsal dinner. I tried to get him away from the crowd and handle it privately, but—”
“Baby, a man ever gets you in that position again, I want you to knee him in the balls as hard as you can, and when he doubles over, you knee him in the fucking face. Then you run like hell. I don’t give a shit about
causing scenes. I give a shit that I walked into my bar and found a man with his hands on my girl.”
Her lower lip trembled, and I wanted to hunt down Warner Whatever the Fuck His Name Was and put his head through a plate glass window.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Baby, I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t want you to be scared. I want you to be as pissed off as I am that some asshole thought he could put his hands on you. I want you to know your worth so no one in their right mind ever thinks they can treat you like that. You get me?”
She nodded tentatively.
“Good. Think it’s time you tell me the whole story, Daze.” “We don’t really need to talk—”
“You’re not getting out of this room until you tell me everything. And I mean every fucking thing.”
“But we’re not really togeth—”
I pinched her lips closed. “Uh-uh, Naomi. It doesn’t matter what the fucking label says, I care about you, and if you don’t start talkin’, I can’t do what I need to do to make sure it never happens again.”
She was still for a long beat.
“If I tell you, will you let me go back to work?” she asked through my fingers.
“Yes. I’ll let you go back to work.”
“If I tell you, will you promise not to hunt Warner down?” I was not going to like this one bit and I knew it.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Fine.”
I took my hand away, and she ducked under my arm to stand in the middle of the room between my desk and the couch.
“It’s my fault,” she began. “Bullshit.”
She whirled around and fixed me with a look. “I’m not telling you anything if you’re going to interject like one of those old man Muppets in the balcony. We’ll both just die of starvation in here, and eventually someone will smell our decaying bodies and break down the door.”
I leaned against the front of my desk and stretched my legs out. “Fine.
Continue with your asinine assessment.” “Excellent alliteration,” she said.
“Talk, Daze.”
She blew out a breath. “Fine. Okay. We were together for a while.” “History. You’ve got it. You moved on, and he hasn’t.”
She nodded.
“We’d been together long enough that I had my eye on the next step.” She glanced at me. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I really like checking things off my list.”
“No shit.”
“Anyway, on paper we were compatible. It made sense. We made sense. And it wasn’t like he was making plans for next year’s vacations. But he wasn’t moving as quickly as I thought he should.”
“You told him to shit or get off the pot,” I guessed.
“Much more eloquently, of course. I told him I saw a future for us. I was working for his family’s company, we’d been dating for three years. It just made sense. I told him if he didn’t want to be with me, he needed to cut me loose. When he slid a jeweler’s box over the table at his favorite Italian place a few weeks later, part of me was so relieved.”
“The other part?”
“I think I knew it was a mistake right there.”
I shook my head and crossed my arms. “Baby, you knew it was a mistake long before then.”
“Well, you know what they say about hindsight.” “It makes you feel like an idiot?”
Her lips quirked. “Something like that. You don’t really want to hear all this.”
“Finish it,” I growled. “I spilled my guts to you the night Nash was shot.
This’ll even us out.”
She sighed, and I knew I’d won.
“So we started planning the wedding. And by we, I mean his mother and me because he was busy with work and didn’t want to deal with the details. Things were happening with the company. He was under a lot of stress. He started drinking more. Snapping at me for little things. I tried to be better, do more, expect less.”
My hands itched to close around that fuckface’s throat.
“About a month before the wedding, we were out to dinner with another couple, and he had too much to drink. I was driving us home, and he
accused me of flirting with the other guy. I laughed. It was so absurd. He didn’t think it was funny. He…”
She paused and winced. “Say it,” I said gruffly.
“H-he grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. I was so surprised I swerved and almost hit a parked car.”
It took everything I had not to jump up from the desk and run into the parking lot to kick this fucking guy’s ass.
“He said he didn’t mean it,” she continued as if her words hadn’t just set off a ticking time bomb inside me. “He apologized profusely. He sent me flowers every day for a week. ‘It was the stress,’ he’d said. He was trying for a promotion to set us up for our future.”
I was choking on suppressed rage and wasn’t sure how long I could pretend to be calm.
“We were so close to the wedding day, and he really did seem like he was sorry. I was stupid enough, eager enough to move on to the next step that I’d believed him. Things were fine. Better than fine. Until the night of the rehearsal.”
My fingers dug into my biceps.
She was pacing now in front of me. “He showed up to the rehearsal smelling like a distillery and he had several more drinks during dinner. I overheard his mother making snide comments about how she wished she could have invited more people but that she couldn’t because my parents couldn’t afford it.”
Fuckface’s mom sounded like she needed her own kind of ass-kicking. “I was so mad I confronted him when we left the restaurant.” She
shuddered, and I was afraid I was going to grind my fillings into dust. “Thank God we were alone in the parking lot. My parents had already gone home. Stef and the rest of the wedding party were still inside.
“He was so angry. Just like a switch had flipped. I never saw it coming.”
She closed her eyes, and I knew she was reliving the moment all over again.
“He slapped me right across the face. Hard. Not hard enough to knock me down, but just enough to humiliate me. I just stood there in shock, holding my cheek. I couldn’t believe he’d do something like that.”
I doubted that Naomi was aware she’d lifted a hand to her cheek as if she could still feel the hit.
I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I turned for the door and was ready to rip the knob off when I felt her hands on my back.
“Knox, where are you going?”
I flipped the lock and wrenched the door open. “To dig a shallow grave so I have a place to put him after I get tired of throwing punches.”
Her fingernails dug into my skin under my shirt, giving me something else to feel besides fury.
“Don’t leave me alone,” she said, then pressed herself against my back.
Fuck.
“He started pacing and yelling. It was my fault, he told me. He wasn’t ready to get married. He had goals he wanted to accomplish before focusing on his personal life. It was my fault for pushing him. All he was trying to do was give me everything I wanted, and there I was complaining to him the night before the wedding he didn’t want to have.”
“That’s fucking bullshit, Naomi, and you know it.”
“Yeah,” she squeaked, resting her forehead between my shoulder blades. I felt something damp leak through the shirt.
Damn it.
I turned and took her in my arms, holding her face against my chest.
Her breath hitched. “Baby, you’re killin’ me.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered. “It was a slap. He didn’t put me in the hospital. Didn’t threaten my life.”
“Doesn’t make it anywhere near right. A man doesn’t put hands on a woman like that. Ever.”
“But I wasn’t exactly innocent. I tried to force a man to marry me. I almost said ‘I do’ even after he hit me. How pathetic is that? I was in that church basement in my dress, worrying about what other people would think if I didn’t go through with it. Worried about letting them down.”
I thumbed away the tears that tracked down her cheeks. Each one felt like a knife to my heart.
“I still don’t know if I would have made the right choice if Tina hadn’t called me and said she was in trouble. That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to go through with it.”
After everything Tina had done, at least she’d provided the excuse Naomi needed when she needed it.
“Daisy, you gave him a choice. It doesn’t matter how shitty the options are. It’s still his choice to make. He could spend the rest of his life with you
or without you. He didn’t give you a choice when he hurt you.”
“But I should have listened to what he was trying to tell me. He didn’t want to commit, and I forced him to.”
“He had a choice,” I repeated. “Look. A man doesn’t go all in with a woman, it’s for a reason. Maybe he’s looking for something better. Maybe he’s just comfortable with his place in your world and doesn’t want to make a place for you in his. Either way, he makes no forward progress unless he’s forced into it.
“After that, even if he pops the question, even if he shows up at the altar, he’ll hold on to the fact that it wasn’t his idea. He washes his hands of responsibility for the entire relationship. But the bottom fucking line is, he had a choice every step of the way. You didn’t force him into anything.”
She looked down. “He never thought I was good enough for him.” “Baby, truth is, on his best day, he was never gonna be good enough for
you, and he fucking knew it.”
So he’d manipulated her and he’d tried to prove he was better by showing he was stronger, more powerful. By using force. And it only would have gotten worse.
“Damn it, Knox. You cannot be sweet to me right now!”
“Do not cry. Do not shed one more tear over some asshole who never deserved you in the first place. Or I’m going to go break both his arms and legs.”
She cast her eyes down then looked back up at me. “Thank you.” “For what?”
“For being here. For…taking care of me and cleaning up my mess. It really means a lot.”
I thumbed away another stray tear. “What did I say about crying?” “That one was for you, not him.”
Instead of hunting Warner down and kicking him in the gut until my boot wore through, I did something more important. I lowered my mouth to take hers.
She instantly went soft and pliable against me. Surrendering. I spun us around so she had her back to the door.
“Knox?” she whispered.
Then I pressed my knee between her thighs and pinned her against the door with my hips as I plundered her mouth. She melted against me, eager and needy.
I was instantly hard.
The sexy little moan she made in the back of her throat when I ground my erection against her made me lose my fucking mind. I licked and kissed and tasted her until the air around us was electrified, until the pulse in my blood matched the beat of her heart.
I pumped my cock against her once, twice, three times, before shoving my hand between our bodies and under that skirt that I loved to hate.
When I found the silk edge of her underwear, I growled. I knew just by the touch it was one of the pairs I’d bought her. And I loved knowing she wore something I gave her close to her skin in a place I’d be the only one to see.
“He doesn’t deserve one second of your energy. Never did,” I said, yanking the underwear to the side with more haste than finesse.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her eyes glazed with desire. “Reminding you what you deserve.”
I thrust two fingers into her wet heat and swallowed her cry with my mouth. She was already rippling around me, begging to come. “Do you want me to stop?” My voice was harsher than I intended, but I couldn’t be soft, gentle, when she was making me harder than concrete.
“If you stop, I’ll murder you,” she groaned.
“That’s my girl,” I said, nipping at the sensitive skin of her neck.
I fucked her with my fingers, starting slow and building speed. I held her gaze with an obsessive desire to watch the orgasm I gave her ruin her. But I needed something more. I needed to taste her.
She whimpered when I dropped to my knees. The whimper became a low moan when I pressed my mouth between her legs.
“Ride my hand, Naomi. Ride it while I make you come. Remember who you are. What you deserve.”
It was the last order I gave, because my tongue was busy teasing circles over her sensitive clit. She tasted like heaven as she bucked against my face.
My dick throbbed behind my zipper with a need so intense I didn’t recognize it. Mine. I wanted to claim her, to make her mine so assholes knew they didn’t have a chance.
“Knox,” she whimpered, and I felt the clutch and pull of her around my fingers. It was fucking beautiful.
“That’s right, baby,” I murmured. “Feel me in you.”
I sucked gently while working the swollen bud with my tongue.
She let out a wrenching moan, and I felt her come apart around my fingers. She was a miracle. A work of art. And no one deserved her. Not Warner. Not even me.
But not deserving something wasn’t going to stop me from taking.
The waves broke. The clenching became a languid flutter, and still my cock ached. I wanted to thrust into her and feel the echoes of her orgasm on my shaft.
Then she was pulling me to my feet, and her fingers were at my belt. My palms went to the door as she reverently released my erection, and she sank to her knees.
“You don’t have to do this, Naomi.” My whisper was harsh with need. “I want to.”
Her lips were parted. I felt her hot breath on my thigh, and my cock jerked. She made an approving noise, and before I could say or do anything, those perfect pink lips were parting, and my tip disappeared between them.
It was like a lightning strike.
My last coherent thought was that the only thing that saved Warner Fuckface from the beating of his life was Naomi’s perfect mouth on my cock.
