Chapter 37 Harper
HARPER
The kiss was different this time. The first one had been desperate, impulsive, a last-ditch effort to stop him from doing something stupid. This one was intentional. The kind of kiss that said, I choose this. I choose you.
Knox’s cuffed hands rose to cradle my face, the chain pulling taut between his wrists and waist as his fingers slid into my hair at my temples.
He kissed me like he’d been waiting fourteen years for exactly this moment.
Like he wanted to memorize the taste of me, the feel of me, the way I melted against him.
Heat shot down my spine and pooled low in my belly.
I arched into him, pressing the front of my body against his. He was hard everywhere. Solid. Built like he’d been carved from stone and brought to life just to ruin me.
I ran my hands up his arms, feeling the muscles flex beneath his prison-issue shirt. The fabric was rough, cheap, nothing like what I imagined he’d wear on the outside. But underneath it, he was all power and restraint and barely leashed intensity.
When I locked my hands around his neck, he made a sound low in his throat. Something between a growl and a groan that vibrated against my lips and made my knees go weak.
He was letting me become part of his future.
Eight weeks. In eight weeks, he could be free. We could do this whenever we wanted. Wherever. However. No alarms. No locked doors. No chain around his waist. No cuffs on his wrists. Just him and me and all the time in the world.
He’d be mine. And I’d be his.
“We shouldn’t do this,” I breathed against his mouth.
“Probably not.”
“It’s irresponsible.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“This is insane.”
“Completely.”
But neither of us stopped.
Knox’s bound hands trailed from my neck down to my collarbone, the cuffs a cold contrast to the heat of his skin, leaving a path of fire in their wake. He paused there, his fingers hovering at the neckline of my scrubs.
He pulled back just far enough to meet my eyes. Asking permission without words.
I answered by pressing my body harder against his.
His hand slid lower. Cupped my breast through the thin fabric.
I moaned into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound like it was something precious. His palm was rough, and even through the layers of clothing, I could feel the heat of him branding my skin.
“Do you know what I would do to you,” he murmured against my lips, “if we weren’t in here?”
“Tell me.”
His hand kneaded my breast, thumb brushing over the peak that had hardened to a point.
“I would kiss every inch of your body. Start at your neck. Work my way down.” His voice dropped to a growl. “I would take my time. Hours. Days. However long it took to learn exactly what makes you shiver.”
My thighs clenched together.
Eight weeks, I thought again. Just eight weeks, and this man could be mine in the real world. Waking up beside me. Making me coffee. Kissing me in the kitchen like we had all the time we’d been denied.
“I would take your nipple in my mouth and suck until you begged me for more.”
Sweet hell.
His hand drifted lower. Skimmed down my stomach. Paused at the waistband of my scrub pants.
“Knox.” I didn’t know if it was a warning or a plea.
“Tell me to stop.” His fingers toyed with the drawstring, the chain of his cuffs dragging lightly across my hip. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”
I should have said the word. One syllable. Four letters. It would have been so easy.
Instead, I rocked my hips forward, pressing into his touch.
He smiled against my mouth. Knowing. Devastating.
And then his hand slipped beneath my waistband.
I gasped as his fingers brushed over the thin cotton of my underwear. Even through the fabric, I could feel how warm his hand was. A stark contrast to the feel of the cuffs’ cold metal grazing against my skin.
“After I memorized every inch of your body,” he continued, his voice a low rasp in my ear, “I would spread your legs wide and kneel between them.”
His fingers found my center through the cotton. Pressed gently.
I whimpered.
“I would look at you. Pink and glistening and so fucking beautiful.” He nipped at my lower lip. “And then I would lean forward and taste you.”
His hand slipped beneath the hem of my underwear.
The first touch of his fingers against my bare flesh made me cry out. I bit down on his shoulder, suddenly terrified someone would hear, but Knox just chuckled low in his throat.
“The alarm’s still going,” he assured me. “No one can hear you but me.”
He stroked through my wetness, and when he felt how soaked I was, he let out a growl that vibrated through my entire body.
“You’re dripping for me, Princess.”
“Every night when I go home and touch myself, I think about you,” I admitted.
“Fucking hell.” His fingers circled my sensitive bud in slow, torturous movements. “You touch yourself, thinking about me?”
“Every night.”
“Tell me what you imagine.”
My cheeks burned, but I was past the point of embarrassment. Past the point of anything except his fingers and his voice and the coil of heat winding tighter in my belly.
“Your hands on me. Your mouth. You on top of me, inside me.” I gasped as he increased the pressure. “Making me scream.”
“I would make you scream,” he promised. “I would lick you slow. So slow, you’d writhe on the bed, grabbing the back of my head, holding my mouth against you.”
He drew his fingers lower, gathering my wetness, then returned to my core with renewed intensity.
“I would have you sit on my face, Princess. I would hold your thighs down and worship you with my tongue until you came apart.”
My hips were moving of their own accord now, rocking against his hand, chasing the friction I so desperately needed.
“Knox.” My voice cracked.
“Tell me what you want.”
“More.”
His fingers dipped lower. Found my entrance. Pressed just the tips inside.
I grabbed his shoulders, nails digging into muscle.
“I would fuck you with my fingers first.” He pushed two fingers in to the first knuckles. “Get you ready for me.”
Deeper. To the second knuckles.
“And when you were right on the edge, begging for release …” He drove his fingers fully inside me, curling them to hit a spot that made me see stars. “I would bury myself so deep, you would feel it for days.”
His thumb found that exterior bundle of nerves, and my entire body jolted.
“Oh God.”
“That’s it, Princess.” He began to pump his fingers, slow at first, then faster. “Fuck my hand.”
Some distant, clinical part of my brain cataloged what I was doing.
Grinding against an inmate’s hand in a prison infirmary while an alarm shrieked and guards ran through the halls.
The old Harper would have been mortified.
Would have stopped, smoothed her scrubs, and buried this moment so deep, it never saw daylight.
But this Harper? This version of me, flushed and trembling and so far past the point of return that she couldn’t even see it anymore?
She wanted more.
Because it was dangerous. Wanton. Forbidden in every way that should have made me pull back but instead made my pulse hammer harder.
This was so far from the woman I’d built myself into—the careful, controlled, untouchable version I wore like armor—that it felt like shedding skin.
And, God, the freedom of it. To want something this reckless, this raw, and to take it anyway.
To give myself over to what my heart and body had been starving for, even if it burned everything else to the ground.
Knox’s fingers inside me, stretching me, hitting that perfect spot over and over. His thumb circling in exactly the right rhythm. His breath hot against my neck as he worked my body like he’d been studying it for years.
“You feel so fucking good,” he groaned. “So tight. So wet.”
“Fourteen years,” I breathed, my hand trailing down his chest. “No one’s touched you in fourteen years?”
“Not once.”
The thought of it made me ache. This man—this beautiful, dangerous, devoted man—going more than a decade without being touched. Without being wanted.
I needed to change that.
My hand slid over the planes of his stomach, the ridges of muscle I could feel, even through his shirt. Lower, until my fingers met the cold metal of the chain circling his waist. I didn’t hesitate. I slipped beneath it, finding the waistband of his prison pants underneath.
Until I felt the hard length of him straining against the fabric.
“Harper.” His voice was strangled.
I slipped my hand beneath his waistband. Past the elastic of his boxers. And wrapped my fingers around him.
He was big. So big that my fingers couldn’t close around him completely. Hard as steel and already leaking at the tip.
Knox let out a sound that was barely human. A growl from deep in his chest that made my inner walls clench around his fingers.
“Fourteen years,” I whispered against his jaw. “I’ve got a lot of time to make up for.”
I stroked him from base to tip, gathering the moisture at the head, using it to ease my way back down.
“Fucking hell, Princess.” His fingers stuttered inside me. “You keep doing that, and I’m going to lose it.”
“Then lose it.”
He groaned. His mouth found mine again, kissing me hard and deep as we worked each other toward the edge.
If anyone had told me six months ago that this would be my life, I would have laughed in their face.
But right now, with Knox’s fingers curling inside me and his length pulsing in my hand and his mouth devouring mine like I was oxygen and he was drowning, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
“I would fuck you from every angle,” he growled against my lips. “Against the wall. On the floor. Bent over every surface until neighbors filed complaints.”
My hand moved faster. His fingers pumped harder.
“I would take you in my mouth,” I confessed. “Swallow you down until you hit the back of my throat.”
“Fuck, Harper.”
“I would let you take me from behind. Pull my hair. Make me scream your name.”
“You can’t say things like that to me.” His thumb pressed harder against my center. “Not when I’m already about to explode.”