Page 158 of Hard Bargain

Knox exhaled. The words came before he’d fully decided. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll come.”

Liam grinned. “Good. I was prepared to keep going until you caved.”

A faint smile pulled at Knox’s mouth.

Jacob stepped forward, collecting two of the coffee mugs and moving toward Liam. But before he turned, he looked at Knox. “Glad you’re coming,” he said.

Simple words, but they loosened the knot in Knox’s chest that had been pulled tight for weeks. For the first time since arriving in LA, the ache inside him didn’t feel quite so solitary.

* * *

The bar was quieter than Knox had braced for. Not a trendy LA club packed wall-to-wall with influencers and wannabes. Just a comfortable room full of people having conversations and minding their own business.

Knox set his third beer down and kept his hand around the neck of the bottle. Three drinks was the line he’d set for himself, and he hadn’t crossed it. He had come into the evening determined not to let his guard slip, to stay clearheaded enough that nothing careless could escape him. And somehow, against expectations, he hadn’t spent a single moment wanting to leave.

Liam sat across from Knox in the curved leather booth, animated as ever, telling a story about an audition where he’d been asked to “show vulnerability” while eating a granola bar.

“I made a choice,” Liam said defensively.

“You sobbed over oats,” Jacob said, taking a sip of his scotch.

Liam looked offended. “The scene called for emotional repression.”

Jacob’s mouth twitched. “It was a breakfast commercial.”

Knox laughed before he meant to.

Over the past few weeks, the distance between him and Jacob had slowly started to soften. For two men equally terrible at opening up, that wasn’t nothing. They spoke more easily now, trusted silence more, and the awkwardness that had defined those first days had worn down into something warmer.

His gaze drifted to Mason. He was hard not to notice. The man was distractingly handsome, with dark hair, broad shoulders, near-black eyes, and an easy confidence that drew attention without seeming to try. But it wasn’t just his features that made him attractive; it was the way he looked at people as though he actually meant to hear them.

Maybe that was why, when Mason asked, “What did you leave behind?” Knox actually answered.

He stared at the bottle in his hand, watching light catch in the glass. “There was someone,” he said. “I got scared. Not of him. Of how much he mattered.”

The table had gone silent.

Knox kept his eyes lowered, his thumb moving absently over the label. “Instead of trusting in what we had… I ran.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then Liam asked, so gently it barely felt like a question, “You love him?”

Knox froze.

The answer was simple, but giving it voice felt terrifying. It took effort to force the word past that fear. “Yes.”

Liam held his gaze. “And does he care about you?”

Knox’s heart hurt. He thought of Dominic’s hands holding him close. Of the groceries that had appeared in his mother’s kitchen. Of the nurse, the apartment, the way Dominic washed him in the shower with hands so careful they didn’t match anything else about him. The endless, steady acts of care Knox had been too scared to trust. “He hasn’t said it. But yes.”

Liam didn’t miss a beat. “Then why did you leave?”

Knox looked back at his drink. How did you explain a terror older than reason? Something that lived in your bones so long it disguised itself as instinct—whispering leave first, leave before they do—until you had mistaken survival for wisdom.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said at last. “Once I felt how much losing him would destroy me…”

“You left him first,” Mason finished quietly.

Knox dragged a hand over his face. “Yes.”