6. Knox
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Knox
She kisses me, and the sweet taste of her goes straight to my head.
For one half-second, that’s all there is before my senses catch up and my eyes fall shut without my permission. I find myself answering it, tipping into her mouth and leaning into her lips.
My hand finds the small of her back and I pull her in by the waist. She comes against me without resistance. The angle changes as the kiss goes deeper, slower, her free hand opening flat against my chest as the heat of it rolls down my spine.
Somewhere off to the side, a glass breaks, muffled, and a few gasps go up after it. It all reaches me from very far away, drowned under the feel of her mouth and the single insistent thought that I do not want this to stop.
I came here expecting a dull night and a long list of things I didn’t want to do. A confrontation, maybe. A scandal worth watching from across the room. Anything but this.
Adriana Rosewood, full of goddamn surprises.
Not that I’m complaining.
We break at the same time, both of us reaching for air, and for a moment, I don’t pull back. I stay close enough that our breath mixes, and her eyes open to find mine. Hooded, a little unfocused, and unreadable, giving me nothing back.
I almost forgot where we were.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
William’s voice cracks across the space, way too loud, and it breaks the thing that had narrowed the whole room down to her and me. The spell, the hush, whatever it was, gone in an instant, and the gala rushes back in around me.
He comes a step toward us, then another, and beside me I feel Adriana go rigid, the give of a moment ago gone stiff under my arm.
I move before I’ve decided to. A half-step, just enough to put my shoulder between her and him, my body a wall between her and the room, so no one can read what I can feel coming off her.
“Get the fuck out of my way, Beaufort.”
He glares past my shoulder at Adriana, and the grief act he wore ten minutes ago is nowhere on him now.
Then I feel it, low behind me where no one can see, her hand closing around the hem of my jacket, two fingers and a thumb gripping hard enough that the small tremor in them travels up through the fabric.
So I don’t move. I plant my weight and stay exactly where I am.
His jaw works as his glare cuts back to Adriana. Whatever he sees in her face, or doesn’t, tips him over.
“Really, Adriana? This is what you do?” His voice climbs. “On your high horse all night, pulling that stunt with the slideshow, and then this?! You make a spectacle of yourself in front of everyone! Where the hell is your shame?!”
She goes rigid behind me again. And I feel the room shift at the same time, the murmurs climbing, a few phones lifting at the edges of my vision. She’s holding her face still, but the stillness is brittle now, half-second from cracking.
My jaw tightens. It takes actual effort not to roll my eyes at the sheer nerve of him, this man who spent ten minutes on a stage blaming his wife for his own affair, now clutching his pearls over a kiss. The audacity would be funny if it weren’t so tiresome.
“I don’t think you get to talk about shame, Langford.”
He turns to me. I look down at him, a head taller than him, and let my eyes drift past him to Blythe, who has gone paler under my blank stare.
“Seeing as you knocked up my girlfriend and looked rather proud of yourself.”
“That doesn’t mean you get to put your mouth on my wife!”
This man can’t be fucking serious.
My irritation tips over into a thing I haven’t felt in years, the itch to put my fist through his face and watch him fold. I feel my hand close at my side when the grip on the hem of my jacket lets go.
Adriana steps out from behind me. She moves around my shoulder and forward, until she’s standing level with me, and then a half-step past, close enough to William that he has to look at her straight on.
She lifts her chin and meets his eyes without a trace of fear, and the room goes quiet to watch her do it.
“It’s none of your business anymore, William.”
I watch it hit him. His mouth opens and nothing comes out of it.
“Whether I ruin myself or humiliate myself in front of every person here, you don’t get a say in it. You made this marriage an embarrassment all on your own. You don’t get to be shocked that I returned the favor.”
She holds his eyes without quivering.
“And don’t mistake any of this for me losing my head. I knew exactly what I was doing when I put those photos on that screen, and I’d do it again. Petty or not. The only thing I regret is that it took me this long.”
A ripple goes through the nearest guests, a stifled laugh somewhere, and the sound of it does to William what the kiss did. His face twists and he lurches forward, trying to get around me, hand coming up as if to take her arm.
Then Adriana turns to me.
“Let’s go, Beaufort,” she says calmly.
It’s only a second, her eyes on mine, her back to the room.
To everyone watching it’s the look of a woman turning to the man she chose.
But this close, even with the little I know of her, I can read what it costs her to keep that look in place.
The held breath, the thing behind her eyes asking me, without a word, to do this with her again.
To play along, to get her out.
So I do.
“After you.” I step back and turn, one hand opening toward the doors in a slow sweep. She goes, and I fall in at her side, and only then do I look back at William, still standing there with his fists and his ruined evening.
I let my smile go lazy and mean.
“Take my ex-girlfriend home, Langford.” My eyes cut to Blythe and I hold her gaze for a second, long enough that she looks away first. “Don’t worry about your wife.”
The crowd opens for us. Phones track us to the doors. I stay close at her shoulder, near enough that we read as one thing to every watching face. She holds her chin exactly where it needs to be until the doors swing shut behind us and cut the noise off clean.
I don’t know what happens next, and that almost never happens to me. What I do know is that this night is far from over.
***
“You can just drop me off here. Thank you.”
They’re the first words she’s said to me since we left the venue in my car. Before I can answer, the door’s already opening and she’s stepping out onto the curb in front of a bar.
I should have driven off.
The evening had been long enough. I’d done the gallant thing, more than the gallant thing, and a smarter man cuts a clean exit while the night still thinks well of him. She’d dismissed me as plainly as a woman can dismiss a man.
So I can’t quite explain how, an hour later, I’m on the stool beside her with my chin propped on my arm against the bar, watching Adriana Rosewood drink her way through the night that broke her.
The composure I’ve spent years half-noticing across other people’s parties is coming apart one glass at a time, the careful edges going soft, and I can’t look away from it.
She lifts her empty glass and tips it at the bartender. “One more.”
“Adriana.”
“I’m fine.” She isn’t. Her words have gone loose at the seams. “I’m celebrating. My marriage died tonight. People throw parties for less.”
The bartender looks at me. I give him the small shake of the head that means water, and he moves off to not-quite-fill her order.
I watch her instead. The wreck of her, the smile that isn’t one.
Honestly, I never wanted Blythe, kept her at arm’s length and never let her past the front rooms of my life. But even so, when I learned what she’d done, I kept wanting to burn something to the ground. No feeling in it and my pride still came away skinned.
So I can only imagine how it is for her. A woman who married the man, who tried to build a life with him, who wanted his child and got blamed in front of a crowd for being the reason it never came. If a betrayal with nothing under it gutted me, hers must be carving her hollow.
I’m not exactly a gentleman but I’m also not enough of an asshole to leave her like this.
Adriana wraps her arms around herself, a small motion she doesn’t seem aware of. Sighing, I shrug out of my jacket and settle it over her shoulders.
She blinks down at the lapel as though it appeared by magic. “What’s this?”
“You’re cold.”
“I’m not.” She pulls it closer anyway.
She’s drowning in it, my jacket swallowing her down to the knuckles, and I have to stop the corner of my mouth from curving.
For a while she just turns her glass on the bar, her eyes dropping to the wood. Then she says, not looking at me, “Can I ask you the question again? The real one.”
“You can ask.”
“The baby…” Her voice has lost the steel it had in the ballroom. “I keep doing the math, and I want it to be yours.”
I go still.
“That sounds insane.” A short laugh, wet at the edges. “I know it does… But if it’s yours, then I’m just a woman whose husband cheated. Garden variety. Survivable.”
She finally turns her head, and her eyes are too bright and too honest, the drink having burned off every filter she owns. “Instead of the barren wife who couldn’t give him the one thing, so he had to go get it somewhere else. You understand? If it’s yours, I’m less… pathetic. No offense.”
My gaze stays on her after she’s done talking.
She’s gone back to her glass, but her free hand has found the edge of her thumbnail, picking at it.
I watch her mind run somewhere far past this bar, through a hundred rooms I can’t see, every one of them a version of tonight she’s trying to make hurt less.
There’s no good answer to give her. There’s only the true one, and the true one takes the small mercy off the table.
I clench my jaw against it for a second. Then I give it to her straight.
“None taken.” I turn my glass a quarter on the wood. “But I’m afraid I have to disappoint you.”