Chapter 90 JUNIPER

Chapter 90 JUNIPER
The dip left me breathless in a way that had nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with the look on Knox's face as he pulled me back upright — like he'd surprised himself as much as he'd surprised me, but for a second I couldn't process any of it.

The crowd was still cheering somewhere around us,My hair was undoubtedly a disaster.

My pulse was pounding everywhere at once—in my throat, behind my eyes, against my ribs—and my brain had apparently decided this was an excellent time to abandon all useful functions.

Knox's hands were still loosely settled at my waist. One remained warm against my spine, as though he'd forgotten to let go.

Or maybe he simply hadn't decided he wanted to.

He was looking down at me with an intensity that made the entire club seem to blur around the edges.

For one suspended second, it didn't feel like there were hundreds of people watching.
There was only him. And me.

And the uncomfortable realization that whatever this was supposed to be—fake, temporary, carefully choreographed for Tracy—it was starting to feel dangerously real.

I opened my mouth..Nothing.
Not one word. Apparently, Knox Reyes had successfully knocked every single syllable in the English language straight out of my head.

“You okay?” he whispered.

“That was—” I started, then stopped, because apparently my brain had decided to abandon me at the exact moment I needed it most.

I didn't know what that was. A performance? Definitely.
Proof for Tracy? Supposedly.

Except somewhere between his hands on my waist, the way he'd moved me with effortless confidence, and the way he'd looked at me afterward, it had stopped feeling like either.

It had become something I didn't have a name for.

“Good?” Knox supplied, a slow grin pulling at his mouth.

His tone was teasing, but his eyes weren't quite as certain as his voice.

I swallowed. “That’s one word for it.”
I stepped back—just slightly.

Just enough to put a few precious inches of air between us, because standing that close to him while my heart was still trying to escape through my ribs seemed like a spectacularly bad decision. His eyes followed the movement.

“Tracy definitely saw,” I said.

His grin widened. “Oh, she saw.”

“Good.” I nodded, trying very hard to sound unaffected. “Mission accomplished, then?”

His gaze dropped briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes. “Not even close, Speckles.”

My stomach performed an entirely unnecessary little flip, and a shiver slipped down my spine before I could stop it.

His expression changed immediately.
“You okay?” he asked quietly, the usual cockiness softening into something more uncertain. His eyes flicked over my face, then down to where his hands rested at my waist.

“I think my soul left my body,” I admitted. “I'd like it noted for the record that I did not consent to that dip. You didn't warned me there would be a dip.”

A real laugh escaped him, low and warm.
“Noted,” he murmured, fighting a grin. “Next time I’ll submit the choreography for your approval first. Maybe get you to sign a waiver.”

"Hahaha very funny.." I took it as my cue to step back, desperate to put a few inches of much-needed air between us before my brain caught up with whatever the hell my body was doing.

His hands didn't loosen. If anything, they tightened. He pulled me gently back against him.

“Knox—”

“Relax.” He started swaying with me, slow and easy, keeping us moving with the music.

No dramatic spins. No surprise dips. Just this—quiet, unhurried movement, his hand spread warm against my back as though he had no particular intention of removing it anytime soon.

I blinked up at him, trying to reorganize my thoughts into something resembling a coherent sentence.

“Are we still dancing?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought the performance was over.”

His eyes flicked past me. I followed his gaze. Tracy stood across the dance floor, arms folded tightly over her chest, jaw clenched, watching us.

Her face was doing something complicated between fury and genuine, undeniable defeat. One of her friends had a hand on her arm, saying something I couldn’t hear over the music.

Tracy didn't say a word. She just stood there, staring at us with the intense concentration of someone determined to uncover the trick behind a magic act.

“Oh.” I sighed. “She's still watching.”

“Like her life depends on it.” His mouth twitched.

“Pretty sure she’s still trying to find the loophole. Give her another ten minutes and she’ll be analysing our body language frame by frame like she’s investigating a federal crime.”

I snorted. “You’re enjoying this.”

“Maybe a little.”

“A little?”

His mouth curved into a slow, unapologetic grin. “Fine. A lot.”

“Sadist.”

“Efficient.”

I rolled my eyes, but somehow I found myself settling more naturally into the slow sway, my hands resting against his chest.

His arm curled a fraction tighter around my waist, drawing me closer beneath the shifting lights.

“Just keep dancing,” he murmured, his mouth near my temple.

“Why? Havent we already proved the point.”

His gaze returned to mine. “Because…”
He paused. His eyes dropped to my lips. My breath caught..Then he looked back at me.
“I don't particularly want to stop dancing  just yet.”

For once, there was no smug grin. No sarcastic comeback. No obvious attempt to turn it into a joke.

I stared at him, waiting for the punchline anyway. It didn't come. “You're impossible,” I finally whispered.

His mouth twitched. “And you're still dancing with me.”

I had a retort ready. Unfortunately, it never made it past my brain. Because, annoyingly, infuriatingly, he was right.

And the worst part? Some small, reckless part of me didn’t want him to let go either.

He turned us again, a slow, deliberate circle that kept Tracy in the corner of my vision and his hands firmly in place—one at the small of my back, the other spanning my hip like he was still learning the shape of me through the dress.
Every few steps his grip adjusted, tightened.

“You don’t feel even a little bad at all about her?”

Knox considered that for a second, genuinely, which surprised me more than a flippant answer would have.

“A little,” he admitted. “Not about tonight. About before. I let things drag on longer than they should have because it was easier than having a real conversation. That part I feel bad about.”

His thumb moved in a slow, absent arc against my waist—something I was fairly sure he wasn’t even aware of doing.

“Tonight, though? Tonight I don’t feel bad about at all.”

“That’s very self-aware of you.”

“I contain depths, Speckles. Rare ones. You should feel lucky.”

“There’s the ego. I was wondering when it’d resurface.”

“It never really left.” He guided me through another small turn, closer still, until my cheek nearly brushed his jaw.

“It was just momentarily overshadowed by how good I looked dancing.”

I laughed—a real one, surprised out of me despite myself—and something in his expression shifted at the sound of it, softer, more open than the easy performance he usually wore in public.

His hands tightened again, just enough to keep me moving with him as the next song bled into the last. Neither of us made any move to stop or pull apart.

He pressed a slow kiss to my forehead—unhurried, deliberate, lingering there longer than any performance required.

The warmth of it sank straight through me. I gasped softly before I could stop myself, the sound catching somewhere in my throat, small and betraying.

“W-what are you doing?”

He stilled for a second. Then cleared his throat, the roughness in it not quite hidden.

“For Tracy,” he murmured against my hair. His voice had gone lower than the excuse deserved, quieter than it needed to be for anyone but me. “She’s still watching.”

I started to glance past his shoulder—

He turned us before I could finish the motion, a smooth half-circle that put his back to the rest of the floor and left me facing only him. The lights shifted across his face. Tracy disappeared from view.

"Right," I said, trying to ignore the strange flutter in my chest. "For Tracy."

My hands stayed pressed against his chest. I told myself it was only because there was nowhere else to put them, that gravity and proximity had made the decision for me, nothing more deliberate than that.

I told myself a lot of things in that moment, and none of them felt remotely convincing anymore — not the excuse about Tracy, not the reminder that this was supposed to be fake, not the small, stubborn voice insisting none of it meant anything beyond the terms we'd agreed on weeks ago.

I still didn't know if I wanted him to stop.
Worse — somewhere between the dip and this slow, unhurried sway that had nothing left to do with an audience, I'd stopped hoping he would.