Page 56 of Ruthless Edge

He doesn't confirm it. He also doesn't deny it. He just looks at me with something in his expression that I am not going to let myself interpret, and I think about Laura's hand on his arm.

"Go back to Laura."

A beat. "What?"

"Laura. Who you came with. Go back to her."

Knox blinks. "I didn't come with Laura."

"She found you pretty fast for someone you didn't come with."

"Laura finds everyone fast." He shakes his head, like he's clarifying something simple. "She's not my date, Emma. She's not anything."

I cross my arms. "I don't care either way."

Knox grins.

It's the slow kind, the one that starts at the corner of his mouth and takes its time, and I want to take it personally.

"You care a little," he says.

"I really don't."

"You just told me to go back to her. You don't tell someone to go back to a person you don't care about."

"I was being polite."

"You're not usually so polite."

I open my mouth.

"I'm not interested in Laura," he says. Simple. Matter of fact. "I'm not interested in anyone at this party except⁠—"

"Don't." I say it fast enough that he stops. He looks at me. "Don't do that. Don't finish that sentence and then make it a joke, or be charming about it. I'm not in the mood."

Silence.

Knox looks at me for a moment. Something in his face settles. "Okay," he says. Not a joke. Just, okay.

I go back to Tyler and tell him the auction question was genuinely that mundane, which Tyler finds funnier than it deserves, and we dance for another two songs. But Knox is back on the edge of the room now, and every time I look he's shifted slightly, always within my sightline, in a way that I eventually stop pretending I don't notice. Laura is there every so often too, but he doesn’t talk to her. He doesn’t even look at her.

He stays close for the rest of the party.

Not intrusively. He doesn't come back over. He just keeps finding reasons to be nearby. He talks to Declan's friends, gets another drink, laughs at something someone says, and every time I move to a different part of the room, within fifteen minutes he's drifted there too. It shouldn't feel like anything, but it feels like something.

By midnight I'm tired and ready to go, and I say so to Paige, who immediately frowns.

"You're not walking home alone."

"It's three blocks."

"After drinking."

"I haven’t had that much."

Okay, so I was tipsy, but I definitely wasn’t drunk.

"Declan." Paige turns to her brother, who is three feet away and already shaking his head.