I walked into the nursery, desperately wanting to hold my son, but as I scanned the room, I saw no Jill. And no Drake.
“Um, hi. Where’s Drake?” I asked the woman changing a baby. It was the same girl from this morning, young like Jill, with strawberry-blond hair.
“Oh, he’s not here.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Jill had to run a quick errand and she took him along.”
“Excuse me?” What. The. Fuck.
“She just lives next door.” The woman pointed to the wall. “She’ll be back in a minute.”
“Okay,” I clipped and plucked his diaper bag from his hook. Then I waited, arms crossed over my chest, foot tapping on the floor as I counted the seconds ticking by on the wall clock.
Three minutes and forty-one seconds later, the back door opened and Jill came inside with Drake on her hip. Her smile faltered for a moment when she spotted me.
I crossed the room and took Drake out of her arms. “Hey, baby.”
He started crying, like he did every day, and reached for Jill.
Like she had done to me this morning, I twisted and pulled him out of her reach when she tried to touch his hand.
“I’d prefer it if Drake wasn’t taken out of this building.” I walked him to his car seat and put him in, working the straps as fast as my fingers would move.
“Oh, okay,” Jill said. “I didn’t think it would be a problem. We were just next door.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak another word, so as Drake fussed, I clicked his buckle, looped the diaper bag over my shoulder and walked out the door.
The moment his seat was clicked into its base and I slid behind the wheel, my phone rang.
I checked the number and hit decline. One hundred fifty-five calls in the two months I’d lived in Quincy. Since I didn’t have to worry about daycare calling and there wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to anyway, I shut the damn thing off.
Drake’s crying stopped by the time we hit the highway.
And that’s when mine started.
I was so tired. Mentally. Physically. But mostly, I was tired of being alone.
All my life, the women in my family had been at the mercy of the men who kept them. My mother. My grandmother. My sister. I’d broken that cycle by coming to Montana.
If I let Knox or anyone help, wasn’t that like taking a huge step backward? What happened when I depended on him?
Except I couldn’t keep going like this. I needed . . . help. Admitting that, even to myself, made me just cry harder.
The tears fell in a steady stream as I turned onto Juniper Hill, winding my way down the lane. The lights were on at Knox’s house, casting a golden glow into the night. His truck was in the garage.
I parked and took out Drake, planning on going upstairs and making myself a dry and depressing peanut butter sandwich for dinner. But my feet carried me across the gravel to Knox’s front door.
He opened it before I could knock. His gaze tracked a tear as it dripped down my cheek.
“I want to not feel so alone. I want my kid to smile when I pick him up from daycare. I want Drake to have a normal life, and I feel like this is so far away from one, I can’t even see which direction to start walking. I want you to kiss me again. I want to never eat a peanut butter sandwich again. I want—”
Knox silenced me with his lips, banding one strong arm around my shoulders while the other lifted Drake’s car seat from my hand. His tongue dragged across my lower lip as his soft mouth pressed into mine.
Before I was ready for it to end, he pulled his lips from mine, but his arm stayed tight, pulling me to his chest. “There’s one want granted. What else do you want?”
I leaned into him and told him the terrifying truth. “You.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
KNOX
Memphis laughed as I strolled into the hotel room she was cleaning. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“I’m on a break.”
“Uh-huh,” she deadpanned. “You had a break fifteen minutes ago.”
“Twenty.” I handed her the latte I’d just picked up from Lyla’s.
“What’s this?”
“A latte.”
She stared at the paper coffee cup like I’d brought her a brick of gold, not a drink my sister had refused to let me buy. Memphis sipped from the black plastic lid, and that look of sheer joy on her face . . .
For that look, for a laugh, I’d bring her a coffee every day.
“Thank you.”
“It’s just a coffee, honey.”
Her eyes softened. “Not to me.”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
I stepped closer, fitting my hand to her jaw. “Like you need to be kissed.”
A smile lit up her face as she stood on her toes. She was too short to reach my lips so I bent and sealed my mouth over hers, my tongue sweeping across her lower lip.
She gasped, her hand with the coffee stretching for the TV stand to set it down. But her arm wasn’t long enough so I took it from her, setting it aside, then I swept her up and carried her to the freshly made bed and laid her on the plush white comforter.
Memphis clung to me as I gave her my weight, pressing her into the mattress and wishing like hell I’d thought to close the door.
This woman made me hungry. Ravenous. Her tongue tangled with mine and I let loose a low moan into her mouth. She tasted like sweet coffee and vanilla.
She was the best damn time I’d ever had and so far, all we’d done was kiss.
In the past week, I’d barely managed to keep my hands off her. I’d had to put at least one hotel floor between us to get any work done, but even then, I’d constantly found excuses to leave the kitchen and hunt her down. And I’d kissed her as often as she’d let me.
But as soon as I’d been on the cusp of tearing her clothes away, I’d stopped. And for a week, my showers had run as cold as the early November air.
Fuck, but I wanted her. If kissing her was any indication, we’d be goddamn fire in bed. But she wasn’t ready.
Memphis needed slow. Steady. Maybe I did too.
But I’d been real with her last week. I knew what I was stepping into. With her. With Drake. And it was time to let go of the past.
She whimpered as I nipped at her bottom lip. That sound shot straight to my aching cock so I tore my mouth away and let out a groan, dropping my forehead to hers as we breathed.
“Knox?” Eloise’s voice carried down the hallway.
Memphis gasped, trying to shove me away, but I didn’t budge. “Knox.”
“What?”
“She’s going to see us.”
“So?” My sister was either going to see me on top of Memphis or she’d see me standing with a larger than normal bulge behind my jeans.
Memphis shoved harder so I stood, swiping her hand and tugging her to her feet. She pushed the hair out of her face as I wiped my mouth dry and adjusted my dick. Her cheeks were flushed. She scurried away to the bathroom as my sister reached the threshold.
“Oh, there you are. What are you doing?”
I nodded to the coffee cup. “For Memphis.”
“Ah. That was nice.” She gave me a smirk, like she knew exactly what I was doing in this room. Maybe she did.