Chapter 10 Harper
HARPER
On Friday, the fifth day of my first week at the penitentiary, something unfortunate happened.
Dr. Mercer called in sick, and they sent a substitute. Apparently, some doctors made the rounds at various correctional facilities, filling in when needed. That would’ve been fine. Routine even.
Except for one thing. He looked strikingly similar to Silas. My abusive ex. Same build. Same sharp jaw. Same way of moving through a room like he owned every square inch of it. When he walked into the infirmary, my stomach dropped straight through the floor.
It’s not him, I told myself. But my body didn’t get the memo. My shoulders crept toward my ears. My fingers found the inside of my thumb, nail pressing into skin in that old, familiar rhythm.
Breathe. You’re fine. You got out. You’re safe.
The substitute doctor, whose name I’d already forgotten because my brain was too busy short-circuiting, gave me a cursory nod and buried himself in paperwork. He didn’t speak to me unless absolutely necessary, which suited me just fine.
I could handle this. I’d handled worse.
I was still telling myself that when the door buzzed open and Knox Blackwood walked in.
Something in my chest loosened. Which was insane. Absolutely certifiable. The man was a convicted murderer, for God’s sake. I should not feel relief at the sight of him.
And yet …
His silver-blue eyes swept the room in that calculated way of his, cataloging threats like breathing was optional but surveillance wasn’t. They landed on the substitute doctor. Lingered. Then slid to me.
“Sit,” I said, gesturing to the exam table.
He moved past me, close enough that I caught the warmth radiating off him. Close enough that I could smell prison soap and something underneath it. Something clean. Male. I shouldn’t have noticed. I definitely shouldn’t have leaned into it.
He folded his massive frame onto the table, and I noticed the split in his lip immediately.
Blood. Swelling. The telltale signs of a fist connecting with a face.
Again.
Oddly, his knuckles weren’t red at all. In fact, the split lip appeared to be his only injury. Did he get sucker-punched? And not fight back?
From the little I’d learned about Knox, I found that very unlikely.
Either way, this was his third visit here in five days. Busted knuckles on Monday. A suspicious split suture on Tuesday. Now a split lip on Friday. Either Knox Blackwood was the unluckiest man in this prison, or …
Or what? He got hurt on purpose?
The suture suspicion had been there on Tuesday. I’d even called him on it, but I didn’t honestly think it was true, and by the time the day was over, I’d convinced myself it was silly to think anyone would hurt themselves on purpose like that. Yet here he was again.
But this was an even more ridiculous thought. No one would voluntarily get punched in the face just to—
Just to what? See me?
I shoved that thought down so hard, it left bruises.
“Where’s the other guy?” I asked, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves.
“Other guy?”
“You were in a fight.” I stepped closer and reached for his chin.
My fingertips made contact first. Just the pads of two fingers against the hard edge of his jaw, but the instant I did, he went still.
The stubble there was rougher than I expected. Warm. The kind of texture that would rasp against softer skin. Against a woman’s cheek, for instance.
I shut that thought down. Hard.
Slowly, I tilted his chin up toward the light, and his gaze lifted with the movement, locking with mine.
Something flickered in those husky eyes. A warmth I hadn’t expected. Almost like surprise, but softer. Like he hadn’t anticipated my touch would feel like this either.
My breath caught. This wasn’t the first time I’d touched him, yet it very much felt like the first. Again.
For reasons I didn’t understand. Or maybe I did, but didn’t want to.
The split lip was still bleeding slightly at the corner.
“A split lip is a telltale sign of a punch to the face.”
“Maybe I ran into a doorknob.”
“Was it attached to a slingshot?”
I released his chin. Reached for the antiseptic. And realized, with growing unease, that I was going to have to get a lot closer to treat this.
Knuckles were one thing. A lip required precision. Proximity. The kind that made my pulse accelerate.
The problem was geometry. Knox was a big man. Long torso, broad shoulders, thick legs that hung off the exam table and created an obstacle course between me and his mouth. I tried approaching from the side, but the angle was wrong. I’d be working blind.
He must have noticed my awkward maneuvering because without a word, he shifted. Spread his knees apart.
Creating a space.
For me.
I stared at the gap between his thighs like it was a trap. Which, in a way, it was. Step into that space, and I’d be face-to-face with him.
That’s a clinical position, I told myself. Being a nurse meant being in intimate positions sometimes. Stethoscope under clothes. Hands on bare skin. This was no different.
No different.
I stepped between his knees.
Immediately, I realized what a spectacular lie I’d just told myself. This was nothing like pressing a stethoscope to someone’s chest. This was standing in the V of a man’s thighs, close enough that his body heat bled through my scrubs. Close enough that when I looked up, his face was right there.
I tried to ignore how his breath ghosted across my wrists as I worked. Tried not to notice that his lips were full, slightly parted. The bottom one was plush, even with the split marring it. The kind of mouth that belonged on a movie screen, not in a prison infirmary.
The kind of mouth a woman could get lost thinking about.
I was not that woman.
I was a medical professional. I noticed these things clinically.
Clinically.
“So …” His voice was low. Almost conversational. “First week’s almost over.”
I blinked at the small talk. It felt strange, coming from him. Normal. Like we were coworkers at a water cooler instead of a nurse and inmate in a concrete cage.
“It is.”
“What’d you think?”
I huffed out something that might have been a laugh. “It was … eventful.”
“Yeah?” One eyebrow lifted. The corner of his mouth that wasn’t split twitched upward. “Interesting eventful or regretting-your-life-choices eventful?”
“Jury’s still out.”
He paused. “For what it’s worth, you handled it well. The eventful parts.”
Something warm bloomed in my chest. I ignored it and steered the conversation back to my original question.
“Seriously”—I motioned to his lip—“where’s the other guy?”
“There is no other guy.”
I paused, cotton swab hovering. “You expect me to believe you got punched in the face and just walked away?”
He shrugged. Deliberately casual.
Too casual. Like he was hiding something.
Three times he’d wound up in my infirmary, three times I’d had my hands on him, and three times he’d shown up with damage that required exactly that.
Coincidence. It had to be coincidence. Tuesday was just a complication from Monday. And Monday, he hadn’t even met me before coming in here.
So, questioning this was silly. Right?
I brought the antiseptic-soaked cotton to his lip again. His gaze snapped to mine and held there. Didn’t waver. Didn’t blink. Just … held. Like he was daring me to look away first.
I didn’t.
My fingertips brushed the edge of his mouth, and I felt him inhale. Slow. Controlled. Like he was trying very hard not to react to my touch.
That made two of us.
There was no reason to feel … what the hell was I feeling? Nerves? It made sense, I suppose. In any other setting, touching a man’s lips would be intimate as hell. Especially a man who looked like he’d been carved specifically to destroy a woman’s common sense.
A man who sucked the air out of every room with the intensity behind his focus.
“I’ve done a little digging on you,” I admitted.
“You were digging into me?” Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile, but close. Like the idea of me being curious about him was … unexpected. Welcome even.
His voice dropped half a register. “Should I be flattered?”
The low rumble of his tone did things to my nervous system. Unprofessional things.
“You’re one of my patients.” I kept my voice light. Nonchalant. Like I hadn’t spent an embarrassing amount of time last night staring at my ceiling, wondering about this man. “I’ll be tending to your … doorknob injuries for the foreseeable future. Call it professional curiosity.”
Curiosity. That’s all it was. Because objectively speaking, if I’d seen him anywhere else—a coffee shop, a grocery store, literally anywhere outside these concrete walls—I’d notice him.
The tattoos crawling up his neck and disappearing into his buzzed hair might signal he wasn’t some standard accountant, sure.
But by all accounts, the man had everything going for him in the looks department.
Which made me wonder: why? Why would someone who looked like this, who could’ve had any normal life, end up here?
“And what did you find?”
“You’ve served fourteen years of a twenty-five-year sentence.
Lost parole twice.” I met his gaze and dabbed at the split again.
My fingers brushed the corner of his mouth, and I watched his breath catch.
His lip was soft beneath my touch. Softer than I expected from a man this hard.
I had the sudden, insane urge to trace the curve of it.
To see if the rest of his mouth was that soft.
What was wrong with me?
Another swipe. Another moment of his eyes locked on mine, unreadable and intense.
“You must really piss off the parole board.”
Humor flickered in his expression. “I have that effect on people.”
“From what I read, you confessed. But refused to show remorse.” Or give details about why he’d done it.
While motive wasn’t always something you could find on crimes, you also didn’t tend to sit here across from a confessed murderer who seemed, well …
not villainous. The contradiction was impossible to reconcile.
His ghost of a smile vanished.
And turned to ice as the substitute doctor entered the room. As the doctor asked a couple questions, I hadn’t meant for my shoulders to creep up half an inch.
But they did. And Knox noticed. Those laser eyes tracked the movement like a predator noting a change in the wind. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, and something dangerous flickered across his face before he shuttered it.
Once the doctor was gone, Knox’s hand moved. Slow. And for one heart-stopping moment, I thought he was going to touch me. Thought those fingers were going to reach up and—
But he just adjusted his position on the table. Creating a barrier between me and whatever had made me flinch.
Shielding me. With his body.
Like it was instinct.
“Who’s the new doctor?” His voice had dropped.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You’ve been here longer than I have. Figured you’d know.”
“I don’t come to the infirmary often.”
“Says the man who’s here for the third time this week.”
His cheeks twitched upward. I turned back to his lip, grateful for something to focus on that wasn’t the way he was looking at me. Like he was solving a puzzle. The puzzle of the nurse who flinched at the substitute doctor.
“He giving you a hard time?”
“No.” I knew I said it too fast. “He’s fine. Just here to cover for Dr. Mercer.”
Knox said nothing. But his gaze drifted in the direction of the substitute doctor again, and when it came back to me, it was different. Sharper. Like he’d filed something away for later.
Great. Now a convicted murderer was reading me better than my own therapist.
“So …” I said, steering us back to something that had been eating at me. Because how did I reconcile the man in front of me with what he’d done on my first day? “Are you going to tell me why you got in that fight on Monday?”
No answer.
“Why not just tell me?” I pressed.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Because I don’t want to scare you.”
Something in my stomach flipped. “Scare me how? Make me afraid of you?”
Why was I waiting for his answer so anxiously that I almost forgot to breathe? And why was I noticing how he once again seemed to shrink a bit, trying to make himself less intimidating?
“I’m six foot four, two hundred forty pounds, and a convicted murderer.” He said it flatly. “I’m sure you’re already afraid of me.”
The thing was, my fear was fading. Eroding a little more each time I saw him. Which was probably a sign I needed a better therapist.
“I already saw what you’re capable of,” I continued. “Doyle comes back every day to get his wounds dressed. You beat the absolute shit out of him. I need to understand why.”
A beat.
“Am I done?” he asked.
The question hit me like a closed door.
Just like that. Conversation over. He’d spent days showing up with mysterious injuries, asking who hurt me, studying the scar on my face like it was a personal offense.
He made himself smaller so he wouldn’t tower over me.
He looked at me like I was the most fascinating thing he’d encountered in fourteen years of concrete walls.
But I ask one question. One. And he shut down.
The familiar sting of it spread through my chest. Silas used to do this too. Control what we talked about. Decide when a conversation was over. Dole out intimacy like rewards and withhold it like punishment.
I wasn’t that woman anymore. The one who accepted crumbs and called them a meal.
I stepped back. Put distance between us. Let the professional mask slide back into place.
“Well”—I snapped off my gloves and tossed them in the trash with more force than necessary—“now that I’ve tended to your lip and checked your stitches, we shouldn’t need to see each other again anytime soon.”
I expected relief. Indifference at the very least. Instead, he cocked his head. Studied me. And something in his expression shifted into what I could only describe as quiet certainty.
Knox rose from the table, unfolding all six foot four inches of him until he towered over me. But then he did something strange. He bent his knees slightly. Lowered himself. Until those silver-blue eyes were almost level with mine.
This close, I could see the silver flecks in them. Could count his eyelashes if I wanted to. Could feel the warmth radiating off his skin.
My breath caught.
His voice dropped even lower. “Well, you survived your first week.”
“Barely.”
“You did more than survive.” Those silvery-blue eyes held mine. “You impressed me.”
Before I could figure out how to respond to that—or why my face suddenly felt warm—he straightened.
“Enjoy your weekend, Harper.” My name in his mouth. Low. Rough. Like gravel wrapped in velvet.
It shouldn’t have affected me. It did.
I lifted my chin. “Good luck with your parole, Blackwood.”
He held my gaze for one beat. Two.
“See you Monday.” He said it like a fact. Like a promise. Like one way or the other, he’d make sure he’d be back in this infirmary.
Why did I find myself looking forward to it?