Page 92 of Knox Unleashed
“Yeah?” I prompt.
Her eyes search mine, and whatever she sees there makes her smile shyly. “I think I might be falling in love with you, Knox. Actually…no…I think I already am. And I know that’s probably really stupid, but…”
Suddenly, I don’t know why I didn’t say it to her when I thought it. Because it’s obvious she’s the woman I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with.
“Yeah,” I say. “I figured that might be happening.”
Her brows knit. “That’s all you’ve got to say when I just laid my heart?—”
I grab the back of her neck, tightening my fingers in her hair, and kiss her like I’m going to every day for the rest of our lives.
A future I never imagined passes before me. Maren on the back of my bike. Maren sayingI do. Maren giving birth to our kids. Maren with me at the very end, whenever it comes, hopefully a really long fucking time from now so I have the chance to experience a million days like this with her.
“I love you too,” I say finally.
That stops whatever she was about to say next.
Or maybe the kiss did.
But she’s silent.
Possibly shell-shocked.
I get the feeling, I am a bit too.
“You do?” she asks.
I nod. “Maren. I’m an acts-of-service kind of guy. I don’t fix trucks for people who don’t matter to me. I don’t post my menoutside of businesses and offer protection for free. I don’t follow people home to make sure they get there safe because I assume we’re all grown-ups and can take care of ourselves.”
Her lips part at that.
“You matter, Maren. Your last name blinded me to who you really are.”
Her breath catches, and then, she smiles as if she can’t believe her luck. And I’m thinking I can’t believe mine either. “So, we love each other?” she asks.
I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, sweetheart. I think we clarified this. I fucking love you. You made me feel like the luckiest man alive by saying you love me too.”
She looks pensive, for a second. “Do you think I need to worry about getting tested later?”
“If you’re asking me what the risks are, I’d say, on my end, they’d be low. Always used a condom. Never had one split or break. I know that’s not the only way you can catch shit. Sure you don’t want to know this, but the club girls get tested every month, and they’re the only women I’ve fucked recently.”
Maren sits up straight. “Oh my God. I skipped one important question.”
“Too late,” I say, squeezing her. “You already said you loved me.”
She slides off my lap but stays close. “Monogamy, Knox. I can’t share you, ever. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, I need to know. Because when we talked about it originally, when it was going to be a short-term thing, you said —”
“That I never thought I’d hand my balls to one woman.” I take her hand and open up her fingers so I can rub my thumb over her palm. “But here we are. You can trust me to not fuck anyone except you. Not sure I’d even want to, given how good your cunt feels when it’s squeezing my cock.”
Maren’s face screws up, but she’s smiling. “I hate that word. So, I’m not sure why that sentence felt so good.”
I laugh hard, at that, and playfully try to tug her back over me, but she buries her face in my chest.
“I’ll book the tests,” I say. “I’ll try for later on this afternoon so you can get on with cleaning up downstairs. I’ll leave some of the prospects here, watching the store, given we don’t know where those men ended up.”
“I appreciate that, but do they need to be quite so…biker-y?”
“Yeah, sweetheart. They’re bikers. Not going to ask them to be anything other than that. But if you’re worried they’re gonna put customers off, I’ll get them to be a bit more discrete. Watch from the road, that kind of thing.”
