18. Adriana
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Adriana
Knox is staring at me again.
He’s been doing it all evening, when he thinks I’m not paying attention, which is foolish because I’m always paying attention.
Right now he’s leaning against the bar with a glass in his hand and his eyes on me instead of the room, and the look on his face is the one he gets when the mask has slipped a quarter-inch and he hasn’t noticed yet.
Warm. Unguarded. The kind of look that has no business being on a man fulfilling a contractual obligation.
I’m laughing at a story the bartender is telling about a regular who tried to pay his tab in rare coins, and the laugh is real, loose and careless in a way I wouldn’t have recognized on myself three months ago.
My whole body feels lighter tonight. The company landed the Whitmore account this afternoon, the biggest signing since the turnaround began, and Knox insisted on celebrating, which meant a bar he knows where nobody cares whose name is on whose building.
I catch him watching and the laugh fades into a question.
“What?”
He blinks. The mask slides back into place, smooth, and he lifts his glass.
“Nothing.” A pause, and then quieter, almost to himself: “A smile suits you.”
The words land in a place I wasn’t guarding, and the warmth of them spreads through my chest before I can stop it. He says it the way he says all the truest things, offhand, tossed away, as if it costs him nothing when it obviously costs him a great deal.
I don’t have a clever response. For once, I just let the warmth sit where it landed.
“I have a gift for you,” I say instead, reaching into my bag. “Before you get too comfortable being charming.”
His eyebrows climb. “A gift. For me. From you. I’m documenting this moment.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
I set the small box on the bar between us. He opens it and goes still.
Inside, on a velvet square, sits a diamond stud. Small, clean, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it. He picks it up and turns it between his fingers, and the recognition moves across his face slowly, then all at once.
“Where did you get this?”
“Your mother sent it to me.” I pull the photograph from my bag and slide it across the bar. “Along with this.”
Knox looks down at the photo and makes a sound between a groan and a laugh. It’s him, sixteen or seventeen, slouched against a wall in a leather jacket with his hair too long and a diamond glinting in his left ear, radiating the specific energy of a teenage boy who thinks he’s invented rebellion.
“Oh God.” He presses his hand over his face. “She kept this? She kept the piercing?”
“She kept everything. There are more photos. You had a phase.”
“It wasn’t a phase. It was a lifestyle choice.” He peers through his fingers at the picture. “I looked incredible, for the record.”
“You looked like every mother’s worst nightmare.”
“Exactly. Incredible.” He picks the diamond up again and holds it to the light, and when he looks at me, the humor is still there but there’s a layer beneath it, the quiet recognition that I went through his mother to get this, that his mother gave it to me willingly, that the two of us have been building a thing around him that he’s only now catching the edges of.
“Thank you,” he says, and he means it, and he doesn’t dress it up in a joke for once.
“Put it in.”
“Here? Now?”
“You wore it at sixteen. I want to see if it still works.”
He holds my eyes for a beat, then grins, slow and dangerous, and pushes the stud through his left ear with the ease of a man who’s done this before.
It catches the bar light, and it does still work.
It works in a way that makes my stomach tighten and my mouth go dry, because the combination of his jaw and the diamond and the look he’s giving me is doing a thing to my composure that I refuse to acknowledge out loud.
“Verdict?” He turns his head to give me the profile.
“Adequate,” I manage.
“Adequate.” He laughs. “The woman buys me jewelry and calls it adequate. I’m wounded.”
“Your mother bought it. I just delivered.”
“And yet you’re the one blushing, Rosewood.”
I am not blushing. I’m warm because the bar is warm. I reach for my drink and take a long sip, and I don’t look at the diamond or his jaw or the way his throat moves when he laughs, because I’m a disciplined woman with a plan and the plan does not include losing my mind over an ear piercing.
The night goes on. The celebration loosens us both, the bar filling and emptying around us in waves while we stay anchored at our end of it. His knee presses against mine under the bar and neither of us moves away.
Then a woman appears.
She materializes at Knox’s elbow in a way that suggests she’s been watching him from across the room and finally decided to close the distance. Tall, dark-haired, wearing the easy confidence of someone who’s been here before and expects to be welcomed back.
“Knox Beaufort.” She places her hand on his arm, fingers curling around his bicep with a familiarity that sends a jolt through me before I’ve registered why. “It’s been ages. You look… exactly the same.”
Her smile is warm, inviting, aimed at him with the precision of a woman who knows exactly what she’s aiming at.
Knox straightens. “Camille. It has been a while.”
“Too long.” She steps in closer. Her thumb traces a small circle on his arm, an idle gesture, the kind a body does from muscle memory, and my hand tightens around my glass.
There it is. The feeling, instant and irrational, crawling up through my chest. Not strategic. Not performed. Possessive in a way I have no right to be and no interest in examining.
“I heard you’re seeing someone,” Camille says, glancing at me with polite disinterest. “Or is that just the papers being dramatic?”
Knox opens his mouth to answer and I don’t let him.
I slide off my stool, cross the two feet between us, and settle myself onto his lap. My arm goes around his shoulders, my body fitting against his with a familiarity that isn’t faked, and I turn to Camille with a smile so sweet it could cause a cavity.
“Not just the papers,” I say. “But it’s nice to meet you.”
Knox goes very still underneath me. Then his hand finds my hip, settling there as though it’s always lived in that exact spot, and when I glance at him his eyes are bright and his mouth is pressed into a line that’s fighting a grin.
“People are watching,” I murmur against his ear, giving us both the excuse.
“No, they aren’t,” he murmurs back.
But his hand tightens on my hip, and he doesn’t move me, and when Camille excuses herself thirty seconds later with the tight smile of a woman who got her answer, neither of us shifts back to where we were.
I stay on his lap. His thumb traces slow circles against my hip bone through the fabric of my dress, mirroring the gesture Camille used on his arm, and the irony of it isn’t lost on me.
“Jealous, Rosewood?” His mouth is close to my ear.
“Strategic.”
“Liar.”
I turn my head and his face is right there, inches away, the diamond catching the light at his ear and his eyes holding mine with an intensity that has stopped pretending to be anything other than what it is.
“Take me home,” I say.
He doesn’t ask whose home. He settles the tab with one hand, the other still on my hip, and we leave the bar pressed together, and the night air hits us and neither of us lets go.
***
His apartment is dark when we come through the door, and I don’t reach for the light.
His hands find me in the dim. One at my waist, one sliding up my back, and he turns me until my shoulders meet the wall and his body is against mine, close enough that my breath changes rhythm on contact.
“Adriana.” My name in his mouth, low, a question and a warning at once. “If you want to stop…”
“I don’t want to stop.”
He kisses me, and this one has none of the gallery’s playful edge.
This is a man who’s been holding himself back for weeks and has just been given permission to let go.
His mouth moves against mine with a patience that borders on cruel, slow, thorough, tasting me as though he intends to memorize it.
My fingers find his hair and grip, pulling him closer, and the sound he makes vibrates through my whole body.
His hands move down my sides to my hips, lifting me off the floor, and my legs wrap around him on instinct as he carries me through the dark apartment with his mouth still on mine. My back meets the bed and he follows me down, and the weight of him is grounding in a way that surprises me.
Then he pulls back. Looks down at me in the low glow from the window, and his eyes track over my face with an attention so deliberate it borders on devotion.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
I am. My hands, my breath, the tremor running through my ribs. Not from cold, not from fear. From the enormity of this, of letting someone this close after the last person I let in used the closeness to carve me hollow.
“Hey.” His thumb traces my jaw, tilting my face up. “Stay with me. Right here.”
I nod, and he dips his head and presses his mouth to my throat, just below my ear, and the gentleness of it cracks a thing open in my chest that I didn’t know was sealed.
His hands are unhurried. He peels the dress off my shoulders the way you unwrap a thing you intend to be careful with, his lips following the fabric down, pressing warmth into every inch of skin he uncovers.
My collarbone. The curve of my shoulder.
The hollow at the base of my throat where my pulse hammers against his mouth.
And he’s paying attention. That’s the thing that undoes me, the thing I wasn’t prepared for.
Every time my breath changes, he pauses.
Every time my body tenses, he slows. He reads me the way he reads a room, with total concentration, except there’s no performance in it.
No angle, no strategy. Just Knox, focused entirely on me, learning what makes my back arch and what makes my breath catch, cataloging every response the way I catalog details about him.