Page 18 of A Smile Full of Lies
I scowled at him. “Don’t joke.”
“I’m not,” he said, quietly now. “You’re right to be freaked out. I should’ve left a note or something.”
“A note?” I snapped. “Knox, youlet yourself into my housein the middle of the goddamn night! You don’t leave anote, you call and wake me up like a normal person.”
His gaze didn’t waver.
“You’ve barely slept since your gran’s funeral. I didn’t want to take that from you.”
That stopped me cold.
He said it so simply, like it was obvious. Like it madeperfectsense. And maybe it did…in his mind.Because this was Knox. The same man who remembered my favorite sandwich from a single throwaway comment seven years ago. Of course he noticed I hadn’t been sleeping. Of course he’d try to protect the one night I finally managed it.
That damn calm, steady look in his eyes… it made it hard for me to stay mad at him.
My arms stayed crossed, though. Mostly so I didn’t do something stupid like lean against him, or let him get closer, or hell… grab him by the front of his shirt and haul him against me like some kind of sex-starved maniac.
“Next time,” I said through gritted teeth, “just fucking call or knock.”
Knox didn’t respond right away. He just looked at me, really looked at me, and I hated the way my body reacted. I couldn’t stand the way I burned under his gaze, even though he wasn’tdoing anything. He wasn’t touching me, wasn’t smirking, wasn’t even leering. He just stood there like he always did — calm, composed, too damn steady — and it wrecked me.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
My arms tightened across my chest.
“You scared me half to death, Knox. That’s not okay.”
“I know,” he said, voice low. “And I am sorry. I just… didn’t want to wake you unless I had to.”
I stared at him.
“That’s not your call to make.”
“I know that too.”
And the worst part? He actually sounded like he meant it. No excuses. No deflection. Just giving me that quiet, remorse-laced calm. Like he understood exactly how badly he’d messed up and wasn’t trying to justify it.
That was the most frustrating thing about Knox. He was never wrong enough to fully rage at. Worse than that, he was just earnest enough to keep me off-balance, to make me feel like the overreactive one, even when I wasn’t.
I shifted my weight and glanced toward the clock on the microwave. 3:12 a.m.
My stomach twisted.
“You really driving to Mobile this late?” I asked, suspicion still curling around the edges of my voice.
“Yeah,” he said, lifting the keyring slightly. “There’s an emergency at the Knox Cybersecurity office. I’ve got a crew on site, but the lead dev called in sick and we’re rolling out big updates this week. They need someone on site who knows the system inside and out. Nobody knows it better than me.”
That tracked. I hated how much it tracked. I offered him a grudging nod.
He moved toward the door, his boots thudding heavy against the hardwood floor.
“I’ll text you when I get there.”
I blinked and cocked my head.
“Why?”
He paused, hand on the doorknob, and looked back at me.
