Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You want me to come to London with you and attend your friend’s wedding?” Ellie repeated as they rode up in the elevator to Knox’s apartment.
It had taken until now for her to be able to answer him.
Because she had been too busy regrouping after she had almost made the mistake of thinking Knox was talking about their wedding when he’d said that was the occasion when she would meet the Wynter family!
How embarrassing a mistake would that have been?
And stupid.
Of course, Knox didn’t want to marry her. He barely knew her. She barely knew him.
Oh, there was definitely a fierce physical attraction between them, but that’s all it was.
All?
Ellie was finding it more and more difficult to even breathe when she was in his company.
“As my plus one,” Knox confirmed.
“You already said that,” she dismissed as she followed him out of the elevator straight into what was obviously the two floors of his penthouse apartment.
“We’ve only just met. What would your friends think if I came to London with you to attend your friend’s wedding?
Knox?” she called after him as he started to climb the spiral staircase to the floor above.
He was carrying her small suitcase but had left the box containing the ingredients for making their dinner on the breakfast bar.
“We were in the middle of a conversation!”
He turned to look over the iron banister at the top of the stairs. “I’ll be back down in a couple of minutes. In the meantime, make yourself at home.”
Ellie gave Knox’s broad shoulders and back one last frustrated glare as he disappeared from view. She turned that disgruntled frown onto examining where Knox lived.
She had thought her own apartment was pretty high-end, but this was on a whole other level.
Open plan downstairs, consisting of a modern black-and-white kitchen and breakfast bar area, along with a huge lounge area with an open fireplace on one wall and floor-to-ceiling windows on another.
The furniture was all modern, also black and white to match the kitchen.
There were two hallways leading off the sitting room, but Ellie doubted they led to bedrooms when Knox had taken her suitcase up the stairs.
Speaking of which, she wanted her suitcase to come back down those stairs.
She had been too stunned still to put up a fight when Knox parked in the private underground car park beneath this building.
She’d automatically gotten out of the vehicle once Knox had come round and opened her door for her.
He’d then taken her luggage from the trunk.
She had still been trying to gather her thoughts after Knox had spoken so casually about her going to London with him to attend his friend’s wedding.
Admittedly, she had never been to England, and it was a place she really wanted to visit. But she’d known Knox for less than a week. A week that, for many reasons, had been a fraught and emotional one for her.
Yes, there was no doubt that he made love like a dream and that he oozed sexual attraction. Knox didn’t just look dangerously sexy; Ellie now knew firsthand he was sex incarnate.
Even now, she quivered just thinking about their lovemaking this morning, culminating in him smearing his cum possessively all over her. All while Sally and Benny were in the adjoining office.
It had been primitive, savage, but it had induced those feelings in her too.
It was only after he’d left, when she had to face Benny and Sally again and her cheeks had flamed with color, that she’d realized that sort of wild passion couldn’t possibly be real.
That she didn’t dare allow it to be anything more than that in the newly ordered and uneventful life she had made for herself.
Being in Knox’s company again, first in the confines of the car driving here, completely aware of him while he waited for her to shower and pack a small suitcase and the box of groceries, and now alone with him in his apartment, she could feel her resolve crumbling and her defenses disintegrating.
Knox might be as rough around the edges as he had described himself, but he also oozed sexuality from every pore of his body. His deep, husky voice alone sent quivers of lust down Ellie’s spine.
His cock, the only part of him Ellie had seen naked this morning, was long and wide, with a thick vein pulsing along its length, the bulbous top a deep and glistening red.
Watching Knox’s large hand, wrapped about and pumping that length to completion, had probably been the sexiest thing Ellie had ever seen in her life.
She couldn’t have looked away if she’d tried. And she hadn’t tried.
She thought she would probably forget to breathe and pass out completely if she ever saw a completely naked Knox.
“I hope that wicked smile is because you’re thinking about what you’re going to do to me in bed later.”
Ellie turned in time to see Knox coming back down the spiral staircase. “I don’t have a wicked smile,” she snapped. “I’m not thinking about going to bed with you, later or otherwise!” That claim sounded far too loud and defensive, even to her own ears.
So defensive, she recognized, that she instantly sounded guilty of wanting to do exactly that.
Something Knox was well aware of if his husky chuckle was an indication. “Hm, we’ll return to that subject later.”
“Knox, it was a mistake coming here. I need to go to my own apart—”
“Have you eaten anything today?”
“You can’t just say you want to take me to London with you to attend your friend’s wedding and then start discussing whether I’ve eaten today.”
“Sure I can,” he teased. “In fact, I just did.”
“Then to answer your question, I seem to have completely lost my appetite since someone barged into my office this morning and—and—”
“Yes?” He arched dark brows.
She frowned. “Is our intimacy this morning the reason you think you have to take me with you to your friend’s wedding next month?”
“Ellie, darling, once you know me better, you’ll realize I never do anything I don’t want to do.”
“You went to see the babies yesterday.”
“Because I wanted to,” he stated flatly.
“Of course I wanted to, if only for Karen and Geoff’s sake.
I just also knew it was going to be emotional for me.
” Knox wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her body flush against his.
“I haven’t been a monk since my divorce became final eight years ago, but I also haven’t invited any other woman to come with me to a family occasion or the wedding of one of my closest friends. ”
“Then why are you inviting me?”
“Because you’re special.”
She gave a firm shake of her head. “I’m really not.”
“I’m not going to argue with you on that point, because we obviously don’t agree on it.” He released her and stepped back. “What did you decide to bring us for dinner?”
She turned away, her cheeks burning. “The ingredients to make spaghetti bolognese and garlic bread, if that’s okay with you?”
“You’re really going to cook for me?”
Ellie frowned. “I said I would, and I didn’t bring that box of food all the way here to just stand and stare at it. And it isn’t just for you. I need to eat too.”
“Which means you didn’t eat earlier,” he chided, moving across the room with the graceful strides of a predator to begin taking the food out of the box. “I heard what you said.” All teasing had left his voice. “But I’m not going to let you leave here this evening.”
“You can’t keep me a prisoner here—”
“I could,” he cut in, turning to face her. “But I’m not going to. I just want to keep you safe. You need to stay here until Day gets the message you are no longer his punchbag or his banker.”
Ellie was so mortified by this subject that she could no longer meet Knox’s gaze. “That could take weeks, months.”
“I think that after the weekend, you’ll find that the restraining order is doing its job.”
“But you said you now have one of the Wynter security teams guarding me and watching Andrew.” Not that she had seen, or expected to see, any of the men Knox had protecting her. Knox wouldn’t have them as one of the teams he controlled if they weren’t exceedingly good at their job.
“I do, and I have no doubt they are doing a very good job of that, in both cases,” he confirmed her thoughts. “But for my peace of mind, I would prefer, for now, if you stay here with me. At least until after the weekend.”
And who was going to protect her from Knox during that time?
Not that Ellie feared she would come to any harm by Knox’s hand. As she’d thought once before, Andrew had a look of goodness and wasn’t, and Knox exuded an air of danger like no other man she had ever met, and yet he was infinitely gentle and protective toward her.
“I’ll chop up the onion while you put the water on to boil for the spaghetti, okay?” he encouraged now.
“You’ve done this before,” she realized.
“I think cooking meat and onion is something a group of soldiers know how to do.” He took a sharp knife from the wooden block and began to peel the onions.
“It starts off as cottage pie, then the second day, add a few spices and tomatoes and you have spag bol, then on the third day add hotter spices, along with some sweet peppers and chutney, and it’s a tasty curry.
All from a base of minced beef and onions.
Voilà.” He indicated the neatly sliced and diced onions
Ellie put the water on to boil before pouring a little virgin olive oil into a frying pan and cooking the perfectly diced onions.
Knox, having cleared away the debris from peeling the onions, now opened the packet of minced beef and tipped the meat into the pan at exactly the moment the onions were fried to perfection.
It was amazing to Ellie how comfortably they worked together, especially after the strangeness of their conversation before that. But they moved about the kitchen in complete harmony, and were never in each other’s way. As if they had been doing this for years.