I couldn’t explain it. Not if my life depended on it. But Harper had awakened something inside me that I’d buried years ago. Something I’d shoveled dirt over and tamped down and told myself was dead for good.
Hope.
Pathetic. Dangerous. Stupid as hell.
I’d accepted that I’d rot in this concrete cage until my sentence ran out or my heart gave up, whichever came first.Then Harper’s fingers had curled around mine. Warm. Soft. Alive.
One touch.
That’s all it took to wreck fourteen years of carefully constructed apathy.
I was so fucked.
20
HARPER
It was ridiculous, the way I found myself smiling as I wound through the prison parking lot toward my car.
The cold wind bit at my cheeks, sharp enough to make my eyes water. Didn’t matter. My mood refused to sour. Which was also ridiculous.
I’d known Knox Blackwood for a matter of weeks. WEEKS. And here I was, grinning like an idiot in a freezing parking lot because a convicted murderer had held my hand.
God, my hand still tingled where his skin had touched mine. Warm. Impossibly warm for a man who lived in a concrete cage. I flexed my fingers now, half expecting the sensation to fade.
It didn’t.
This is insane,I thought. Two years. I’d spent two years with Silas, and now, after weeks with an inmate, I was supposed to believe I had feelings?
No. Absolutely not.
This had to be something else. Appreciation. Surface-level attraction. Some misguided coping mechanism my traumatized brain had conjured because Knox was the first person I’d met who could probably squish Silas like the cockroach he was.
That was it. That had to be it.
Except the memory of his touch had burrowed somewhere beneath my ribs and refused to leave. It spread through me like warmth returning to frostbitten fingers, slow and aching and impossible to ignore.
Which was poetic and stupid and so not the point.
The point was that I was still scared of Silas. There. I admitted it. And honestly? I wanted to vomit at the thought. I was supposed to be strong. Confident. A woman who’d clawed her way out of hell and rebuilt her life from the ashes. I shouldn’t be cowering at shadows.
But I was.
And maybe that’s why Knox felt so significant. Because for the first time in two years, someone else was standing between me and other monsters.
I seriously needed to get home, pour myself a glass of wine, and dissect what the hell this meant. Because whatever was happening inside my chest when I thought about Knox’s silver-blue eyes softening as he looked at me needed to be examined. Aggressively. Preferably with a bottle of Pinot.
Real feelings? After weeks?
Impossible.
Right?
I fished my keys from my purse and rounded my car.
Then I froze.
A piece of paper was tucked beneath my windshield wiper, flapping weakly in the wind. I glanced around the lot. Empty. No ticket. Not a no-parking zone.
