Page 84 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

She sobs my name, her hips bucking against my mouth, and I don’t let up—I fuck her with my fingers, my tongue circling her clit in tight, relentless strokes until her whole body goes taut.

“I can’t—” she gasps.

“You can.” I slide my thumb against her ass, pressing just enough to make her gasp. “Come for me, Harper.”

She shatters with a scream, her back arching off the ground, her pussy clamping around my fingers like a vice. I ride her through it, my tongue relentless, until she’s limp beneath me, her chest heaving.

But I’m not done.

I crawl back up her body, lining my cock up with her dripping entrance. Her eyes flutter open, dark and dazed, and when I push inside her in one smooth thrust, she moans, her nails digging into my shoulders.

“Fuck,” I grit out, my hips snapping against hers. “You feel too good.”

She wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me deeper. “Harder.”

I oblige. My balls slap against her ass with every brutal thrust, her clit rubbing against my pelvis just right, and when she starts trembling beneath me again, I know she’s close.

I crush my mouth to hers, swallowing her moans, letting her taste herself on my tongue. Her hips jerk erratically, her breath coming in sharp, broken gasps, and when I murmur, “Come with me,” against her lips, she does—her body clenching around me, her cry muffled by my kiss.

I follow her over the edge with a groan, my cock pulsing deep inside her as I spill every drop. For a moment, all I hear is our ragged breathing, the rustle of the hedges around us, the distant hum of the estate at night.

I press my forehead to hers, her arms winding around my neck.

“I love you, Harper,” I whisper, the words raw, unplanned.

She sniffles, her fingers tracing the ink along my ribs. “I love you too, Maddox.”

I kiss her again—soft this time, slow—and when I pull back, her smile is the only thing I see.

29

KILLIAN

I’m standing at my desk waiting on the final guest list for the midsummer event. Harper’s running it as lead event director and Sophia’s debuting her flagship store inside it, which still does something to my chest every time I think about it directly.

My daughter used to be a headline. Three years ago I had a standing arrangement with two different PR firms and a lawyer who kept my private number saved under a code name. There was a stretch where I couldn’t open a newspaper at breakfast without bracing first, scanning the page before I let myself actually read it, because there was always a real chance her name would be on it attached to some version of events that had nothing to do with what actually happened. Now she’s a business owner with a P&L she actually reads, asking smart questions in meetings, pushing back on vendors who try to overcharge her because she’s young and pretty and they assume she won’t notice.

She notices everything.

It feels like yesterday I had her in the crook of one arm at the hospital, asleep, smaller than anything I’d ever held. By that same afternoon, years later, I was on the phone with lawyers trying to keep her name off three different front pages before she’d even had breakfast. Somewhere between those two memories she became this. Capable. Sharp. Completely unwilling to let anyone tell her what she couldn’t do.

Harper’s had as much to do with where Sophia is now as I have. The boutique was Sophia’s idea but Harper’s the one who took it from an idea to a floor plan, a budget, a launch date that’s actually going to happen. She color-coded the entire vendor timeline without being asked to, caught a contractor trying to double-bill the lighting installation before it ever reached my desk, talked Sophia down from three separate panic spirals in a single week without once making her feel small for having them. But the refusal to accept a limit just because someone handed it to her, the stubbornness that’s kept her standing through every version of herself the tabloids tried to write, that’s never belonged to anyone but Sophia.

Proud doesn’t cover it. There isn’t a word that does.

I find myself thinking, more often than I’d admit to anyone but myself, about what it would have meant to have someone like Harper in Sophia’s corner ten years ago, back when the headlines were at their worst and Evelyn was more interested in managing optics than managing her daughter’s actual wellbeing. Harper showed up to a job and ended up rebuilding something neither of us knew needed rebuilding. I don’t know how to thank a person for that properly. I’m not sure the gesture exists.

My inbox pings. Marcus, Mallory’s assistant, with the final reservation list. I open it expecting nothing complicated.

Most of it’s exactly what Harper and Mallory already confirmed. Confirmed guests, vendor headcounts, the handful of personal invites that came through Sophia and through me, board members who always show up for the photos, regional press who always show up for the wine. I scroll through it on autopilot, the way I scroll through most of what crosses my desk this time of year, half my attention still on the conversation I need to have with Beaumont about his vote before the week’s out.

It’s all going fine until it isn’t.

Jason and Rebecca Miller.

Harper’s parents.

I read the names twice, certain I’m misreading something, and the second read confirms the first. My first instinct, the old one, the one that’s kept this estate running for two decades, is damage control. Who’s seen this list. How fast can it be quietly amended before anyone else notices. But underneath that, faster than I can suppress it, is something closer to fear, the kind I haven’t let myself feel since the divorce, the kind that comes from realizing someone I love is about to be ambushed and I’m three steps behind whoever set the trap.