Page 82 of Ruthless Edge

"I didn't know you were there. I didn't know you'd won. If I'd known—" his voice goes rough for a second and steadies, "—I would have been there. If I'd known you were waiting for me, Emma, there isn't a fucking chance I would've stayed away."

I press my face harder against his shoulder. Part of me wants to believe him so badly that I don't trust the wanting. Part of me is doing the math, running back through everything, looking for the place where his story breaks and doesn't. I can't find it. He looked confused when I said the gala. And I believe him that he really didn’t know.

He sat beside me every day. He brought me coffee. He drove me two hours one way and defended me to a condescending hotel manager and ate lunch with me and talked to me like I was the only person in the room worth talking to. And three years ago, before all of that, he asked a girl he trusted to check on the auction for him, and she lied, and he never knew.

He never knew.

I don't know what to do with that. I genuinely do not know where to put that information in my body.

"I really liked you," he says. Still quiet. Still with his hand moving through my hair. "I really liked you, Emma. From the beginning. I don't know how to make you believe that but it's true."

I pull back.

He lets me, but he doesn't go far. His hands stay on my arms and we're close enough that I can see his face clearly in the dim light from the building, and what's there is not the easy warmth he usually has on. It's something without a layer of charm over it. Just Knox, unguarded, looking at me like he's afraid I'm about to walk away.

Three years. Three years of a story I built out of a lie.

"I need to think," I say.

"Okay."

"I need to not be here right now." Actually, I need time to pull myself together, because I don’t know how to feel.

"Okay." He doesn't move his hands. "Emma. The gala is tomorrow."

I wipe my face with the back of my hand. "I know."

"Will you be there?"

I look at him. His hands on my arms. His face in the dim light from the building. The person I've spent three years certain I understood, and the enormous and terrifying and not yet fully real, that I had him wrong.

"I don't know," I say.

Stepping back, his hands fall away and I turn and walk back toward the building, and I don't look back, because if I look back I'm not sure I'll keep going.

The side doors are heavy and cold when I push through them, and the noise of the room hits me, applause and voices and Dr. Neely's warm professional cadence, and I stand inside the doors for a second and breathe.

I need to clear my head.

I need about forty-eight hours and a very long run and possibly a conversation with someone who will want to talk about Knox, who will let me process it.

Finding my jacket from the coat check, I go out the front doors into the March cold, and I walk, and behind me the auction is still going, and somewhere in that building Knox Carter just spent two thousand dollars and told me things I could’ve never even imagined.

I walk until the building is behind me and the campus is quiet and the only sound is my heels on the pavement and the sound of a night that doesn't know it should feel different.

I don't know what's true.

I don't know what any of this means.

Chapter Twenty

Emma

I've walked from the window to the bathroom door and back eleven times after a full night of not sleeping and letting my thoughts spin over Knox.

I know it's eleven because I started counting somewhere around the fourth or fifth and have not stopped, which is the kind of thing that happens when I'm trying to give my brain something small to do so it stops doing the large thing it keeps doing. My thoughts go to this morning. Driving to the hotel. Prepping the gala room. Catching Knox just out of the corner of my eye as he worked through the tasks on his list.

No, I shake my head. I don’t want to think about him right now.