All Chained Up (Devil's Rock #1)(13)

She glanced toward the dark outline of her laptop sitting across the bedroom on her desk. A quick online search could answer that question. It was a matter of public record.

She started to push herself up on the mattress but then stopped. Sinking back down, she rolled over so she couldn’t see the dark shape of her laptop, deciding there were some things she didn’t need to know.

She stared at the dark wall of her bedroom, surprisingly awake, still thinking about her day. What drove men to do horrible things that ended with them getting arrested and locked up? Even if they didn’t care about hurting someone else, who wanted that life?

Finally her mind relaxed enough and her muscles went limp. She drifted into a troubled sleep, only to wake up gasping in the predawn light, her chest aching hard with ragged breaths. She dragged a hand down her clammy face.

She had been running through a dark, unending tunnel, passing cage after cage of monsters, all snarling through the bars for a piece of her. At last the tunnel ended and she reached a cement wall. No going forward. No escape. She spun around, her back colliding with the cold wall, her breath crashing wildly in her ears.

A great, hulking shape advanced on her, hunting her, his face cast in shadows, his long legs eating up the space between them. Her fingers curled into the wall behind her, nails cracking from the force. He reached for her, clasping her shoulders, covering her quaking skin with his hard hands. He pushed his face close until she finally had a glimpse of him. Until his cobalt eyes devoured her, touching her everywhere.

Thankfully, she woke before anything else could happen, but she remembered it with such clarity that she could still taste the fear in her mouth. And something else. An unidentifiable emotion. It was weird. She rarely remembered her dreams.

Rising from bed, she started to get ready for work and tried to forget those eyes and the sensation of those hands on her,

She tried to forget that her impulse, in that moment, had not been to scream.





FIVE


SHE WAS BACK.

He’d overheard yesterday that she and the doctor were only supposed to come here on Thursdays. And then not at all once they had a new doctor working full-time on staff. The fact that they were back the very next day had to be the doctor’s doing because she didn’t look happy to be at the prison again.

One look at her pinched expression as she moved around the infirmary said it all. She never looked his way as she assisted the doctor through the steady stream of patients. As far as Knox was concerned, her absolute refusal to look at him only indicated the opposite. She was acutely aware of his presence. People didn’t last hours in the same room without glancing at each other once or twice.

He, however, had all the time in the world to look at her. He probably shouldn’t, but there wasn’t anything else to do. He counted the different colors in her hair, stopping at seven. He wondered what it looked like, what it felt like, out of the tight ponytail, sprawling across her pillow. Her skin captured his imagination, too. Her cheeks reminded him of peaches, so soft and fresh. Like nothing inside here. It added to her air of innocence.

Martinez arrived at his side to check on him, carrying a tray of food with him. Grateful for a reason to no longer torture himself by checking out the nurse, Knox focused on the LVN. He was a decent guy. A different breed from most of the guards in this place.

“This might not even scar. Much,” Martinez remarked, eyeing Knox’s forehead.

He snorted as he finished his food, certain that Martinez was cracking a joke. At this point, what did he care about scars? He wasn’t entering any beauty contests.

Martinez took Knox’s empty tray and left him alone again. Refusing to watch the nurse anymore like some salivating dog, he tried to doze, but every time he was about to nod off he caught a whiff of pears when she passed too close and he tensed with alertness.

Any hope for sleep was obliterated altogether when she approached his bed, dragging the rolling tray after her, its wheels whirring on the cement floor. “Sorry.”

He cracked open his eyes to slits.

She did look sorry as she stared down at him, her features drawn almost too tight from the severity of her ponytail. She looked like she wanted to be anywhere else in the world than here. Talking to him. “Dr. Walker wants me to check your vitals.” She held up a monitor as if offering proof that she wasn’t coming around him to simply chitchat. She actually had a job to do. “Would you mind sitting up, please?”

He smiled slightly at her polite tone. So proper. He wondered if she ever let her hair down. Ever loosened up? Was it just him and this prison that had her so on edge or was Nurse Davis always this tightly strung? Was there a husband that knew how to make her laugh? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Was there a boyfriend, then? A guy that knew how to drive her wild? Whose back she clawed and hair she pulled when he went down on her?

Christ.

“Hold out your arm please. A little higher. Thank you.” She placed the cuff around his bicep, her fingers cool against his flesh. He watched her as she went about the task of taking his blood pressure, pumping the bulb several times. She was close enough for him to smell pears again, and even though her hands were cool, her body radiated warmth. The cuff released with a hiss of air. “Good BPI,” she murmured, moving to type his numbers into the laptop sitting on the nearby stand, her gaze trained on the screen, focusing with such intensity that he knew she deliberately avoided looking at his face.