The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 45

Chapter 34-1

Knox

The next morning

I’ve never liked waiting.

Waiting suggests uncertainty, and uncertainty is what happens to men who don’t plan properly, who don’t keep enough leverage in reserve. It happens to losers who allow other people to believe they have choices, when choices are the very first thing that a smart man removes from the table.

So no, I don’t fucking like waiting.

And yet here I am, parked across the street from Zara’s building for the second day in a row, watching the entrance through the windshield of Cain’s truck while my fourth coffee goes cold in my hand.

It irritates me that she’s reduced me to this, and it’s irritating because Zara has always been easy to read.

That was part of what made her useful in the beginning, even back ten years ago when I was best friends with Mayhem, back when she was Cobra Callahan’s quiet daughter watching me with those huge dark eyes, like I had hung the moon just by glancing in her direction.

She loved me then with the kind of desperate, unguarded devotion that made every decision after that simple. Men spend their lives trying to earn loyalty like that. I sure as hell didn’t have to earn hers – she just gave it to me.

Then she left. And somehow, since the moment she walked out on our marriage, everything has become noise and stress.

Zara refusing to understand that the agreement I offered was the only way to keep things stable. Cobra choosing her over reason and money. Zara looking me in the eye yesterday and saying no as though the word belonged to her now.

That’s the part I can’t get over. Not her leaving. People leave all the time, and then they come back when they realize what leaving costs.

It’s the refusal, the sheer fucking nerve of it. The sudden spirit and backbone in a woman who spent years looking at me like my attention was something sacred.

Yesterday’s little visit should have fixed this whole clusterfuck. Being thrown against a wall and smacked around should have reminded her what she’s dealing with. What she’s risking.

Instead, she said no. And not the hesitant no I’d heard a thousand times before. Not the soft no that really meant ‘convince me’. Not even the emotional no that could just be waited out.

A real one.

My fingers tighten around the coffee cup.

Someone’s been feeding her this courage. Someone’s been standing close enough to make her believe she can afford to defy me.

172

Chapter 14

Clam

A-movement at the front door catches my eye, and every thought inside me stills. For one long second, I genuinely think that I’m seeing the wrong thing, the wrong people, the wrong reality.

Because the man who steps out of the building, right behind Zara, is the last person on earth that I expect to lay eyes on.

Locke Tanner.

Everything inside me goes completely still. The world narrows until all I can see is them.

Her. Him. Together.

Rage floods my bloodstream as Zara looks up at him from under a waterfall of loose, dark curls… because I know that look. I know exactly what it means.

She looks at Locke like her body recognizes him before her mind has time to catch up. Like he’s not a man that she’s trying to understand, but something she’s already accepted. Something she’s chosen.

Locke says something to her, and Zara smiles. The kind of smile that belongs to the night before. Then Locke bends his head and he fucking kisses her.

He touches her jaw with one hand, and she rises into him without hesitation, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt as though she’s done it before, as though the distance between them is an inconvenience rather than a boundary.

A bitter laugh leaves me as I watch them, because of course it has to be motherfucking Locke Tanner.

The one man in Cobra’s entire operation that I’ve never been able to get a read on, the one man who always kept conversations strictly business. The one man who handled millions of dollars, moving between clubs without ever revealing a single unnecessary thing about himself. He’s the closest thing either club has to a ghost.

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