The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 471

Chapter 231-1

The next night

+25 Points

I wake up all at once, my eyes snapping open to the absolute blackness before dawn. There’s no lingering fog of sleep, no slow transition from dreaming to waking.

My heart is pounding against my ribs, not with the cold, jagged terror of the last five days, but with a sudden, violent electricity that makes the hairs on my arms stand straight up.

The air in the room has shifted.

It isn’t the warm, dry air from the fireplace, nor does it smell like the sweetgrass and lavender Willow burned to soothe my soul.

It’s wet leather. Cedar. Freezing rain clinging to heavy denim and crushed gravel.

I turn my head sharply toward the empty space beside me on the massive king–sized bed, expecting to see him sitting on the edge of the mattress, stripping off his heavy boots, drenched from the storm.

The sheets are empty. The shadow beside me is cold and smooth.

“Locke?” I whisper into the dark. “Are you here?”

My voice sounds small, raw, and trembling. No one answers. The heavy curtains hang motionless over the

windows.

Yet the scent grows thicker. It blooms across the linen like oil on water, sinking into the pores of my skin, filling my lungs until every breath I draw is saturated with him.

I close my eyes, squeezing them shut against the empty room, and lay my head back into the pillow.

That’s when I feel it.

It isn’t a shadow. It isn’t a vague memory or a trick of my shattered nerves. It’s a physical weight, sudden and undeniable.

“Locke…” I breathe again, my chest heaving. “Please…”

A heavy, calloused hand rests against the bare curve of my hip. The heat of it burns straight through the oversized t–shirt I’m wearing.

The touch is unmistakable: broad–paimed, rough from labor and throttle grips, tattooed and scarred across the knuckles, but agonizingly gentle in its weight.

The thumb moves first, sweeping in a slow, deliberate line across the crest of my hipbone, dragging the shirt material upward, exposing my bare skin to the cool air of the room.

My hips rise off the bed on their own, reaching for that heat, desperate, starved, and aching

The words don’t come through the air, they echo deep within the marrow of my bones, rich, low, that dark growl that’s ruled my world since the day I met him.

His palm cups the gentle, subtle swell of my lower stomach, where our child rests nestled beneath muscle and bone. The heat radiating from his hand is blinding, a molten golden thread searing into my core, melting every last icy knot of fear that Stitch’s warnings and the killing flames had locked inside me.

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