Page 61 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“It's nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”

“Harper.” Asher's voice, low. “What's going on?”

And there it is again, that tone, the one that makes me feel like I could actually put something down if I tried, and I've been carrying this since Tampa and I'm tired and I'm angry and he's looking at me with those warm blue eyes and I open my mouth to say something deflecting and professional and measured and what comes out instead is everything.

“My parents destroyed my job,” I say. “In New York. It wasn't downsizing, I was never going to say that to Killian in a hiring meeting, but it wasn't downsizing. They showed up at my office. They showed up at my apartment. They told my employer I'd been stealing from the company which I had not, I would never, but it created enough of a situation that HR got involved and my company pulled me aside and said we believe you but we need this to go away and the cleanest way to make it go away was to classify it as a layoff and let me collect unemployment. Which they did. Which was kind. And I still lost everything I'd spent four years building because my parents decided my stability was worth less than their next ask.”

Nobody moves.

“So when I got to Tampa and Sophia dragged me here and Killian gave me a job I wasn't going to explain any of that in the interview because I needed to work and I wasn't going to stand in front of my boss and say by the way my parents are the reason I needed this job in the first place. And then everything happened and I thought okay maybe I can breathe here, maybe this is actually—” I stop. “And then I woke up and, yeah, maybe my internal freak out got the best of me and I left you,” I look at Killian, “alone in bed, but it wasn’t like any of us talked about a future anything at all, and I spent two weeks eating lunch with Raph and getting anonymous room service and trying to figure out if the thing I thought happened actually happened or if I'd managed to catastrophically misread the entire situation.”

I press my lips together.

“So there it is. That's the whole thing. You wanted to know.”

Asher is off the couch before I finish the sentence. Not fast, just deliberate, crossing the room until he's close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look at him.

“Baby,” he says, low. “Why didn't you tell us any of this before?”

Something hot and frustrated flares behind my sternum.

“Before what, Asher?” My voice comes out sharper than I intend and I don't pull it back. “Before I started working here? Before you and Maddox fucked me? Or before Killian showed me his secret elevator?”

“Bullshit.” Maddox from across the room, flat.

I turn to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“I said bullshit.” He pushes off the bookcase. “You're not actually angry at us for not knowing something you didn't tell us. You're angry because you've been waiting for us to prove we meant it and we handled it wrong and you'd already decided what it meant before you gave us a chance to explain.”

“Oh good,” I say, “now you want to chime in.”

“I've been trying to chime in for two weeks, Harper.” His voice is tight in a way I've never heard from Maddox, who is the least tight person I've ever met. “Stop acting like we mean nothing to you.”

The words land in the center of my chest.

“You first, Maddox.”

The silence that follows is the loudest thing that's happened in this room all evening.

I turn toward the door. My hand finds the handle.

I don't make it.

Maddox moves fast, faster than someone who carries himself like he has all the time in the world has any right to, and his hand comes around my arm and he turns me, not rough but absolutely certain, spinning me back until my shoulders meet the door and his body is close, one forearm braced beside my head, and his other hand catches my wrists and guides them up above me in one smooth motion.

He looks at me.

I look back at him.

“You first,” he says, quieter now, and then his mouth finds mine.

I shiver as Maddox’s teeth graze my neck, his fingers dragging slow circles over my clit through the thin cotton of my panties.

“Bad girl,” he murmurs, voice rough, “still wearing these.”

They’re gone in a single tug, his hand sliding back, pressing firm, relentless.

I gasp, back arching, and he chuckles low against my throat.