Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Knox
She took my hand.
After everything, a year of circling around each other, of walls and careful distance and two steps forward and three back, Daisy May Wylde took my hand in the dark from her porch swing and led me inside and up the stairs like we were going to bust down that wall between us once and for all.
I followed her and didn’t say a word, because I had learned the best thing I could do at times was let her lead…
The bedroom smelled like her—the faint lavender stuff of Sage’s bath oil. I could never smell lavender and not think of Daisy now. She turned to face me.
In the low light of her bedside lamp, with her red hair loose around her shoulders and her jacket still on over her nightgown, at last, she was everything I had been waiting for. And I had been very patient.
“You’re here now with me, and all you can do is stare?” She fluttered her eyelashes.
“I’ve earned the right, haven’t I? Been a good boy, waiting for you to come around?”
She played her lower lip between her teeth and nodded. She shimmied the jacket off her shoulders and let it fall. All that remained between me and her body was the long quilted gown with the zipper in front. I chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” She asked.
“Nothing. I’m simply wondering what you’re wearing under this granny robe.”
“Granny—? Hey, I’ll have you know that this is a very comfortable gown to wear around the house.”
“I don’t doubt it. I’m a huge fan. Drives my fantasies wild, curious to get a peek underneath.”
“Me first. I need a peek at you and all your muscles,” she complained.
“You could have looked any time you wanted over the past year. Just asked, if you’d have noticed me.”
“I noticed.” Her chin lifted slightly. “Didn’t want you to think I noticed.”
“It worked. But now?” He quirked a brow.
“Now take this off.” Her fingers curled into my Henley, pulling me down to her mouth.
She kissed me the way she had kissed me in the cottage earlier this afternoon, like she had stopped arguing with herself about it and was simply doing the thing she wanted to do all this time.
It was the best version of her I had ever encountered, and I intended to encourage more of this side of her considerably.
She lifted my Henley up. I removed it overhead and tossed it to the side, flexing my pecs for her. The way her eyes and fingertips roamed over my body did things to my already strained self-control.
“My turn.” I walked her backward to the bed and reached for the zipper of her nightgown.
Inch by inch, I unzipped her and slipped it off.
My Daisy—yes, the practical woman—did not disappoint, with her white cotton panties and matching bra.
I stripped those from her, too, at last…
leaving nothing between my eyes and her body.
“Beautiful.” I ogled her, although my fingers ached for a tour.
Breasts, a pleasant handful with rosy erect nipples, greeted me.
I ducked my head and kissed each one of the freckles on the creamy skin of her shoulders.
A glance lower afforded me a view of her thick thighs and neatly trimmed pussy.
My tongue darted out to wet the center of my lower lip. All of her relaxed under my admiration.
“I can’t believe you’ve been hiding a body like this from me,” I complained, taking in her beauty, memorizing her figure.
“Knox.”
“Give me a second, sweetheart.” I set my knee on the bed and brought her down with me, like a dip during a dance, and she laughed at the surprise. My mouth found her pulse at her throat, sucking there, and her laugh became breathy and then… something else entirely.
I took my time with her. Daisy made for excellent study, from the particular catch in her breath when my hands moved over her ribs, to the way her back arched with my mouth on her nipples.
Her fingers slid into my hair, gripping when I worked her nipple with my tongue until she made the sound I was cataloguing alongside everything else, the one I intended to pull from her as many times as the night allowed.
“You’re still in your jeans,” she informed me.
“Yep. Working on it.”
“Work faster.”
“Sweetheart, I have been waiting for this moment with you. Don’t rush me now.”
She made a sound of frustration that I felt in my chest like a victory, because I wanted her to finally need me so damn bad.
And here we were. Her hands went to my belt buckle, and I let her.
I was patient, but not a saint. She undid the button and the zipper, reached in and wrapped her hand around my cock.
I growled as she lightly stroked me. Her lips caught between her teeth the entire time.
“You bite your lips any harder, you’ll draw blood,” I warned.
“I need you, Knox.”
“Yeah? Say that again. I like hearing you ask for me.”
“Need you. Now. Please?”
I shoved boots, jeans and boxers away and stood tall for her heated gaze as it raked down my body.
When I finally stretched out over her, skin to skin, her leg hooked over the back of mine, pulling me closer, I pressed my forehead to hers and held still for one moment. Just to feel the full weight of finally being here, with her, after all of it.
She tipped her face up and kissed me softly.
It nearly wrecked me.
“Knox,” she whispered against my mouth.
“Still here.”
“I know.” A breath. “I know you are. Always here for me.”
There was an entire conversation in those four words that we did not have out loud, and I heard every word.
“Always, sweetheart.”
I moved down her body, mapping her with my tongue and storing it all away for later use.
By the time I got to her inner thighs, she was making demands with both hands and her hips that I was more than happy to comply with.
I dragged my thumb slowly through her folds, just to watch her squirm.
I put my mouth on her clit and she came off the bed with a sharp, breathless sound that I decided immediately was my new favorite sound in the known world.
“Oh, God, Knox—”
I pressed my calloused hand on her lower stomach to calm her, and dragged my tongue across her clit, flicking, teasing, and pleasing her. Had her thighs shaking and her hands fisted in the sheets before she pulled me back up by the arm with the specific urgency of a woman who was very done waiting.
“Now, Knox, please,” she begged.
“Please, what?”
“Give me all of you.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
I grinned and reached for my jeans on the floor and pulled a condom out.
“Do the honors?” I placed the little package between her teeth and yanked, ripping it open. She added a purr to it that I didn’t hate.
I took her hand in mine and together we smoothed the extra-large condom onto my cock.
“Are you sure it’ll fit?” Her worry was cute.
“We’re gonna make it fit. And you’re gonna feel exactly why I’ve been so damn patient for this perfect moment right here.”
I settled between her thighs. She peered up at me with her eyes dark blue and direct, her red hair spread across the pillow and her cheeks flushed.
I kissed her slowly before I pushed in, an inch at a time.
Mm, the moan she made as I stretched her tight walls until fully seated, was enough to make me come before I was ready if I wasn’t careful.
I held still, jaw clicking tight, giving us a moment to breathe while every nerve ending I possessed staged an argument for moving immediately. She shifted under me, adjusting her knees a little higher, her hands pressing flat against my back.
I moved at last. There was nothing in the world but this. Her eyes locked on mine, as if she needed to see me right there with her. This wasn’t only about losing herself in the moment—but trusting me to be the one she lost herself with.
The press of her body beneath mine fueled the rhythm we found together without negotiating it. Her sounds she made as I built the pace, quiet at first, then less so, spurred me on. And her head tipping back against the pillow, throat exposed, ruined me completely.
I had earned this with her.
Her nails dragged down my back like claws, and I did not mind one bit. I growled. “Claw me up, draw blood, take me like good girl.”
I pressed her thighs higher and changed the angle, and the noise she made hit me hard, pulled everything in me toward the edge I had been keeping at arm’s length. I paused before I could combust.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she breathed.
“Not a chance.” I reached between us and fondled her clit.
Her whole body wound tighter beneath me, and I drove her through it even higher.
There was no warning when she broke, but a scream of my name.
Her walls tightened around me and that was it, control snapped, and I fell with her over that perfect edge.
I collapsed on her, but careful not to press full weight. For a long, shuddering minute neither of us moved, just heaving chests catching air. I rolled to my side and pulled her against me, her back to my chest, her breathing still uneven and warm against the arm I had curved around her.
“You knew it would be like this between us the whole time,” she whispered. Not quite an accusation.
“I had a strong suspicion,” I chuckled, more than pleased that I was right.
The huff of laughter that moved through her shook the bed, and I held her a little tighter because I could now. She let me. One hand wrapped around my forearm, and she went quiet.
“Are you okay?” I murmured into her hair.
“Better than…” She nodded, drifting off.
I lay there in the dark of her bedroom in her farmhouse at the edge of her orchard, listening to her breathe, staring at the ceiling, and understood with complete clarity that I was in serious, irreversible trouble. Had been for a while.
Waiting and watching and showing up and telling myself that whatever she was willing to give me was enough—it had been enough, because I made it enough. The alternative was walking away from a woman I was already too far gone on to walk away from cleanly.
Now this. Her warm and sleeping body lay trusting in my arms. Us in her bed, in the middle of her busy life. The one she had been carrying alone for so long, she had almost convinced herself it was how things were supposed to be.
Not anymore. I wasn’t going anywhere. And sometime soon I would have to say that out loud so she could understand my intentions, not file away or deflect or cover them with a quip about friendship.
She deserved to hear it plainly, from a man who meant every word, that this was more than friends, so much more.
Daisy slept. I stayed awake a good while longer, watching over her, and I did not mind that either.