Page 41 of Knox

Cillian blinks, hazy and confused, as he looks down at his wrist. The device’s tiny green indicator light blinks five times and beeps.

“What the fuck is this?” he demands.

“A tracking device,” I grin, watching his gray-blue eyes go dark with rage.

“You put a fucking GPS on me!” he hisses, clawing at the iron, trying to find a release mechanism.

“When the dog keeps slipping the fence,” I say, tapping the bracelet, “the handler puts on a leash.”

“You son of a bitch! Take it off right now!”

“No, no. That’s no way to talk to your employee.”

Cillian seethes, his chest heaving as he glares at me. “Get. It. Off!”

“Feel free to run wherever you want now, little Prince,” I say, walking toward the exit.

I check my watch, and smile back at him.

“I’ll even give you a twenty-minute head start. See how far you make it.”

“Knox!”

He screams my name in rage, but I’m already walking out of that hipster hellhole.

And I am fucking smiling because I know I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight.

CHAPTER 6

CILLIAN

It is officially war.

For the past week, Knox and I have done nothing but push each other’s boundaries, testing to see who will be the first to snap.

Honestly, I’m surprised the giant hasn’t packed his bags and quit yet. He doesn’t look like a man with a high tolerance for bullshit, yet he keeps surviving my best ideas.

Like when I dragged him to my art class. I had the contemporary dancers perform an interpretive routine right around him while the painting students splashed them, and Knox, with color, to create a live, “moving masterpiece.”

Then there was the time I screamed at the top of my lungs at three in the morning. Knox kicked my bedroom door off its hinges, rifle ready, only to find me sitting cross-legged in bed, “polishing” the largest, thickest, most ridiculous collection of neon dildos I could find online.

One of the dildos even had horns.

Or my absolute gem, when I bought a baby pink convertible Porsche with a built-in unicorn horn and sparkling tail and forced the six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Knox to drive me through Manhattan.

Which was worth every penny.

But the bastard pushes right back.

He took his first revenge hit at five in the fucking morning, emptying a bucket of ice water over my face just to drag me out of bed to jog and practice hand-to-hand combat in the back garden.

For “security,” of course.

Then, every time I had a business meeting at a restaurant, the monster would reach across the table and steal the biggest bite of my food, claiming he was testing it for “poison.”

And to completely break my sanity, Knox used a stupid security clearance loophole to lock up half of my closet, making me wear combat boots, Kevlar vests, and freaking helmets even to places like the supermarket.

So yeah.