was something unbearably intimate, almost erotic, about lifting the bottle to her lips with him watching her. She gulped the liquor to wash away the sensation, but the shuddering burn only made it more intense. “Boyd shouldn’t bother you anymore.”
One of those dark, stern eyebrows swept up. “That must have been a hell of a conversation you had with him. Boyd would crawl over broken glass to bother me.”
“Oh, there’s something he loves more than watching you squirm—money.” She shrugged. “I bribed him.”
That won her a swift frown. “You shouldn’t have given him anything—”
“We made a bet,” she cut in. “He lost.” She lifted the bottle to her mouth again and took a lingering sip this time. She imagined she could taste him on the glass—impossible, with the deep, jagged flavor of the tequila cutting through everything. “Do you really want to keep talking about him?”
“No,” Knox conceded. He rubbed at his knuckles, his gaze tracing the bottle as it hovered close to her lips. “But that’s another thing I’m shit at. Doing what I want.”
The air in the room squeezed tight around her. “Maybe you need some practice.”
He reached out, and time itself seemed to slow. His fingers closed over hers as he folded them around the bottle. He tugged, pulling her with him as he lifted the tequila to his lips and took a sip. “You know I’m a terrible idea, right? There’s nothing good inside me. Nothing about me that ends well.”
She could think of a few things, and they all started and ended with those hands. That mouth. “I’m not trying to break you to ride, Knox. Fixing you isn’t my job. But…”
“But?”
Saying it out loud felt like a tiny betrayal—but leaving the words unspoken didn’t stop them from being true. “Don’t you ever get sick of being the steady one? The one who’s never allowed to fuck up? Don’t you ever get tired?”
He stared at her, those dark eyes so close. The air between them crackled. His fingers flexed over hers, his grip a hair short of painful. When he finally spoke, his voice rasped over her like sandpaper. “All the fucking time.”
The confession hung between them, heavy with something caught between desperation and pain. Something that echoed deep in Nina’s gut.
“We’re here right now.” Gently, she disengaged their hands and set the tequila aside. “We can forget about all that, just for tonight, and take what we want. Or I can go back to my room. Either way, no harm, no foul. But it’s up to you. It has to be.”
He studied her in tense silence, all his secrets piling up behind his eyes. His fingertips brushed her cheek, trailing heat as he rubbed his thumb over her lower lip.
Nina froze. One wrong word or move might make him turn away from her again … but she couldn’t spend all her time being so careful. Either he wanted this—wanted her—or he didn’t.
She licked his thumb.
A growl rattled up from his chest. A moment later the thunder echoed him, cracking loud overhead and rumbling through the room. Knox slid his hand around the back of her head, plunging his fingers deep to tangle in her hair.
And then he kissed her. Hard.
It was nothing like the kiss before his fight. That had been for show, and Knox had been too startled to react. That brief contact didn’t compare to his mouth moving over hers, open and hungry, or the way he pulled her closer. He released her hair, only to curl both hands under her thighs and drag her up his body.
Everything about him was rigid and unyielding, from his trembling self-control to his muscles. Even his dick pressed against her through their clothes, stiff and insistent, tempting her to wrap her legs around his hips and grind closer.
He moaned into her mouth, his grip on her tightening. He finally broke the kiss, but only to close his teeth on her jaw in a teasing nip. “Take off your shirt.”
Caged in his arms, Nina could only drag it halfway up. She squirmed, trying to ease the fabric over her breasts without sacrificing a single millimeter of contact, but that only chafed the worn cotton over her nipples. “Help me.”
He hoisted her higher, bracing one arm around her lower back. “I’ve got you. I’m not going to drop you.”
She leaned back and dragged the tank top over her head, not caring where it fell, then clutched his shoulders as he took advantage of the vulnerable expanse of