One More Taste

by Melissa Cutler

  Ty nodded to Haylie’s empty desk. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Haylie. You’ve got to rein her in. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but yesterday was her third late arrival since you hired her, and that’s not even mentioning how many days she’s taken an extended lunch. I love that girl to death, but I told you she’s the type to take advantage of a situation if you let out too much leash.”

  Given Ty’s imperious ways and the all-consuming distraction that Emily had become, Knox had forgotten all about his often-absent secretary. Though he chafed at Ty comparing his own daughter to a dog on a leash, that didn’t mean Ty wasn’t right about Knox needing to hold Haylie accountable as he would any other employee. As soon as possible, he’d sit her down and lay out some ground rules. But not today. Not when Emily’s possible danger crowded his every thought.

  “Where ya headed?”

  Knox closed his office door and kept moving. “I’m going to lunch.”

  “It’s nine in the morning.”

  That late already?

  “Breakfast, then,” Knox tossed over his shoulder as he pushed out the door to the lobby. His Cab’d app said a driver was still ten minutes away, but maybe the wait would give him time to figure out what to do or say to Emily now that he knew the truth.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Knox pulled his truck in front of Murph’s Gym and confirmed what he knew he’d find. That there was no apartment to be seen either behind or above or next to the gym. Even if there had been apartments for rent, there was no way a resort executive lived on this rundown shop-lined street of a lower-income San Antonio suburb. He knew what Emily’s salary was.

  He leaned against the hood of his truck and feigned casualness as he watched the smattering of men—and one woman—bust their tails in the sparse, no-nonsense gym that had nary a circuit training machine in sight amongst the free weights and pulleys and punching bags. Two men sparred inside the boxing ring. He busied himself watching them while he pondered what an idiot he’d been to cross the line and spy on Emily.

  Thankfully, she’d never find out.

  The rumble of a bus engine caught his attention and he looked down the street. As the bus pulled away from the curb, Emily came into view, walking in his direction on the sidewalk across the street three blocks down.

  He jolted to his feet, cursing, his heart racing. He flung the truck door open and dove in. In all his idiocy, he hadn’t considered what he’d do if he saw her. For a man who prided himself on always having his shit together, he sure was spiraling into a reckless fool. Over a woman, of all the pedestrian reasons. Men only fell to pieces over women in fairy tales. Not in real life, and definitely not a man such as Knox. Even in high school and college, with his dangerous combination of immature teenage brain, surging testosterone, and insatiable sexual appetite, he’d chosen his girlfriends and bedmates prudently and had never spiraled out of control. Never.

  Except that now, Emily was driving him to the brink of insanity. He’d entertained more foolish thoughts and crossed more ethical and moral lines in the past two weeks than the rest of his life.

  He turned the key in the ignition, but all the engine did was click.

  He threw his back against the seat and looked to the truck roof, as though Heaven itself were hovering over him like a cloud. “Really, Dad? Because she can’t catch me here, okay? Let me start the truck and get out of here.”

  Holding his breath, he turned the key again. Click.

  “Damn it, Dad. What do you want from me?”

  He looked down the street. Emily was a block closer. Any moment, she’d spot him and then what? What could he say that wouldn’t make him seem like a creepy stalker?

  Nothing, because that’s exactly what you are. Idiot.

  So this was what it was like to hit rock bottom. He needed to remember the way this felt so he could never fall into the same well of shame again.

  Closing his eyes, he gave the ignition one more try, praying as he turned the key. Nothing. When he opened his eyes again, the meathead who’d been standing behind the front desk at the gym was standing outside his door, now with a pair of dark sunglasses sitting atop a crooked nose that gave the impression he’d spent his fair share of time in the gym’s boxing ring. The embroidery on his gray polo shirt read Murph.

  Tamping his impatience to have to field questions from a stranger when what he really needed to do was get the hell out of there, Knox rolled down the window. “Yes?”

  “Sounds like you gotta problem with the truck,” Murph said in a pack-a-day New Jersey accent.

  “It won’t turn over. Happens all the time.” At least, all the time since he’d moved to Dulcet.

  “Let’s pop the hood and have a look.”

  That seemed his only option at the moment. Perhaps if he had his head buried under the hood, Emily would walk right past without noticing. He popped the hood, then stepped out of the truck. “You’re Murph, the owner here?”

  “That’s me. I saw you poking your eyes around the gym. You looking for someone in particular?”

  Emily was closer, only a block away.

  “I was, actually.” Because what was the harm in telling Murph about his misunderstanding? Surely the man had never heard of Emily.

  Another pink-faced, no-neck meathead drifted out from the gym, this one sweating like a roasted pig and with dirty white bandages wrapped around his knuckles. “Is that an ’85 Chevy, there? I had one of those back in the day. Lemme take a look with you, Murph.”

  “Thanks,” Knox said, glancing around. Emily had vanished. He felt his shoulders relax a little and drew a full breath for the first time since he’d turned down this street. “I’ve got some jumper cables in the back, if either of you could offer your battery.”

  “Who’d you say you were here looking for?” Murph asked. “Either me or Big Tommy, here, probably knows the guy.”

  “Actually, it’s a woman. I’m looking for Emily Ford.”

  Murph stopped fiddling with the engine. He rose to his full height, a few inches taller than Knox’s six-one. Murph’s face was stone hard. He cracked his knuckles while sneering at Knox, a totally different man than the one who’d come to help him with his truck, a violent man. Whatever his opponents in the ring had done to his nose, Murph had messed them up exponentially more. “Who the fuck are you and what do you want with her?”

  Knox opened and closed his mouth, thrown for another loop. Murph knew her? “We’re friends.”

  The other man, Big Tommy, shoved Knox’s shoulder. The next instant, he grabbed Knox’s shirt and twisted as he slammed Knox’s back against the side of the hood. In the corner of Knox’s vision, he saw a handful of other men walk out of the gym to watch the spectacle. “How ‘bout you give us your name and we’ll tell her you stopped by.”

  Knox raised his hands in the universal signal of surrender. He could’ve fought these guys and gotten away relatively uninjured, but he definitely wouldn’t have won. “Wait … she lives here? At the gym?”

  Big Tommy gave him a shake that rattled his teeth. “I smell bullshit.” He slammed Knox’s back against the truck again. “I’m pretty sure a friend would know where she lives.”

  “Damn straight,” Murph said.

  “Murph, she told us this might happen someday,” one of the men standing behind Big Tommy said.

  “That what would happen?” Knox asked. Had Emily predicted that someone would come around the gym asking about her? Is that why she had bodyguard-types looking out for her? The bodyguards combined with her fake identity gave Knox a sick feeling in his stomach. Who are you running from, Emily? Before he could really contemplate that question, Murph brought out a cell phone and snapped a photo of Knox, then walked to the back of the truck and snapped a photo of the license plate.

  “Knox?” came a woman’s voice behind the crowd. Emily, dressed in jeans and a snug red sweater was walking along the sidewalk in their direction. Her hair was down and tumbled over her shoulders in waves of curls. In he
r hands she cradled a paper coffee cup. “What are you doing here? How’d you find me?”

  No sense in lying about that one. “Personnel file.”

  “Are you … stalking me?”

  Murph folded his arms over his chest. “Looks that way to me.”

  Knox shoved Big Tommy’s hand away from his chest and stood tall. “No. Yes, actually.” Because he was kind of stalking her, even if his motivation was noble.

  “Want me to make sure this creep never bugs you again?” Murph said.

  Emily sipped her drink, pretending to contemplate the offer, then cast Knox a side-eye coupled with a sly smile that filled him with heat, like a gust of hot wind that swept through him and pulled him along in its wake, dragging his awareness closer to her until the world around her fell away. It was unlike any lust Knox had experienced before and he hated it. Never had he felt so pathetically out of control. Rock bottom, indeed.

  He curled his toes and swayed, resisting the magnetic pull of her.

  She took another drink, then tossed the cup in the trashcan next to the gym doors. “Thanks for the offer, Murph, but I have a soft spot for this particular creep.”

  She did?

  “If you’re sure,” Murph said. “But say the word and I’ll make sure he never looks at another woman that way again.”

  Until that exact moment, he hadn’t been aware of looking at her any particular way. He balled his hands into fists in his pockets to keep from swabbing his face as he forcibly tried to relax his expression.

  “Thanks, Murph. I’ve got your cell on speed dial, so keep it close in case I need to take you up on it,” Emily said, winking at Knox.

  Knox huffed. What the hell kind of alternate universe had he stumbled into?

  Big Tommy and Murph, along with their buddies, executed a slow, menacing walk back into the gym, fierce scowls on their faces and their eyes boring into Knox.

  Knox smoothed a hand over his shirt and straightened his tie, trying to reclaim a fraction of his dignity.

  “So, what brings you out stalking on this fine day?” Emily asked, that sly smile in place.

  That now familiar electric heat slid up his spine again and wrapped around his chest and throat, squeezing the air from him every time he looked at her.

  Are you ready for me to feed you the way you need to be fed?

  Yes.

  No. It could never be that way between them. Once had been too dangerous for both of them.

  He shook the errant thoughts from his head and decided he was out of options except to give the truth to her straight. “The way you talked about your friend’s abusive relationship yesterday made me think you know a thing or two about what she’s going through. And Haylie mentioned that you sleep in your office at the resort most nights. After I saw you sleeping in there this morning, I got concerned about you, so I looked up your personnel file and violated just about every privacy law on the books because I needed to know if your situation at home was bad. Like your friend’s.”

  The sly smile vanished as her expression went completely neutral. Was she pissed or flattered? He couldn’t tell.

  “Hence the stalking,” she said.

  “Yeah, I own that. Because then I got even more worried when I looked up the address from your personnel file and it came up as this gym.”

  “I rent a studio on the second floor from Murph. As far as why I sometimes sleep in my office, I work long hours. Sometimes, the extra hour of sleep I get by sleeping there instead of commuting back and forth is worth it.”

  A studio apartment above a gym? He knew what she made as an executive chef at the hotel, and she could certainly afford better than that. Which brought him back around to the question of why she used Murph and his tough guy friends as bodyguards. “So then I looked up your name and social security number, to search for clues about where you lived from another angle. There was no Emily Ford born the year you were. The information you provided Briscoe Ranch was falsified.”

  Her face went white. “You’re over the line.”

  “I know.” He was over the line, in too deep, and out of control in every way when it came to her.

  “Don’t do this to me,” she said so quietly that he might have doubted she’d spoken at all if he hadn’t watched her lips move. Her gaze shifted to the gym. Specifically, to Murph.

  Knox stepped to the side, blocking her line of sight. “I’m not going to do anything with that information. You can trust me on that. But I have questions.” He had so many questions crowding his mind, and he couldn’t seem to articulate any of them. He wanted to know if Emily was her given name, how she’d come up with the last name ‘Ford,’ where she’d grown up, why she didn’t live somewhere nicer, closer, than above the gym. But those were mere details, immaterial compared to the most important question of all. “Actually, I only have one question. Are you safe?”

  She blinked at him as though stunned. In the moment before she wrenched her face away, he caught a glimpse of pain, as though he’d wounded her with his concern. It took her a long moment to infuse her features with her indomitable strength again. Knox caught himself holding his breath awaiting her reply, praying she hadn’t been in some unseen danger the whole time he’d known her, something that he could have protected her from sooner.

  “Keep my secret,” she finally said.

  “Yes. Forever.”

  “The discrepancies in the information about me that you found online, was it an easy puzzle to piece together?”

  The dread in her voice made his ribs tighten. He wished he had a better answer for her. “For anyone mildly interested and with access to the internet, it would be simple.”

  Closing her eyes, she muttered a curse under her breath.

  The gym rat’s words came back to him. Emily warned us this might happen someday.

  Who was after her? A man, but who? She’d been eighteen when she forged a new identity. A violent ex? Her father?

  “I’m sorry. For everything. I took advantage of you. And I put your job in jeopardy by invading your privacy. What can I do to make things right? What do you need? You have the keys to my house. Stay as often as you’d like, for as long as you like. If you need a new identity, if you need to go underground again, I can help with that, too. I can—”

  She placed a finger over his lips. Her expression softened. “Thank you for being worried about me. Would you like to come upstairs, see my place?”

  That was a terrible idea. He’d already crossed too many lines tonight, and together they’d crossed even more. Their relationship didn’t need any more complications. The only correct answer would be for him to decline politely, then get in his truck and see if it’d start, then drive away and put her in his rearview mirror. And he should give her the restaurant straightaway so he could be done with the out of control feeling he had when he was around her. But his mind and heart weren’t seeing eye-to-eye at the moment. “Yes. I’d love to see your apartment.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Knox followed Emily through the gym doors and past a silently snarling Murph. The glares of dozens of meatheads followed them up the stairs at the back of the room. The second-floor fitness rooms opened in front of them and to the right, but they went left, down a hall to a door labeled with a bronze plaque that read Employees Only.

  The door opened to a clean, white-walled studio, sparsely decorated and with a tiny kitchen. She led him to a two-seat table near the kitchen and sat him down, then walked to the fridge. It looked as empty as his had been before she’d filled it. From the door, she took out a mason jar of jam and a glass carafe of milk. While she busied herself on the counter with her back to him, he took the opportunity to study the apartment closer.

  A corner of the space was devoted to metal garment racks stuffed with clothes and framed by sheer curtain panels. A light blue folding screen separated a king-sized bed with a fluffy white duvet from the living room area. His attention landed on the beige, overstuffed sofa that dominated the living room, hi
s thoughts drifting back to the night before and to the stop by Emily’s office on Haylie’s tour of the resort. “Do you sleep on the bed or the sofa?”

  Jesus H. Christ. Everything he said to her was inappropriate, over the line. Since the day they’d first met, he hadn’t been able to stem the tide of dumb shit coming out of his mouth when he was around her. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. Would you forget I asked that?”

  The shadow of a smile appeared on her lips. “No, it’s okay. Where I sleep depends on my mood. When I’m stressed or feeling out of sorts, I like to tuck into a sofa and burrow under a heavy quilt. Otherwise, I sleep right in the middle of the bed and take up all the space.”

  She appeared at his side and set a plate in front of him. Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crusts off, both cut into triangles. She reached towards his face. He froze, unbreathing, bracing for her touch. Her fingers did not settle on his face, but his tie. She worked the knot loose, then popped open the top button of his shirt. “You and these suits. Always so constrained.” She stroked a hand lightly over his hair, sending chills over his skin.

  He was milliseconds away from lifting his hand to cup her hip and drag her up against him when she stepped away. She returned a moment later with two tall glasses of milk, then assumed the seat across from him.

  “Eat,” she said, lifting a half sandwich to her lips.

  He hadn’t known he was hungry until he looked at the sandwiches. Bright red jelly with chunks of strawberry oozed from the triangles and pooled on the plate. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a peanut butter sandwich, especially one with the crusts cut off. What he was sure of was that he’d never seen a better-looking meal, or enjoyed one with better company.

  The peanut butter was thick and salty on his tongue, the jelly tartly sweet. He washed down his first bite with a long drink of the milk. It was bracingly cold and as dense as cream. His last memory of drinking whole milk was from his grandparents’ ranch, his mother’s people, when he’d been thirteen. What a summer that had been.