Chapter 13: Limited Virtues

Declan was leaning on the car when I came up the steps on Vanderbilt.

He looked at the folder in my arms and opened the passenger door without a word.

He drove us through the tunnel with one hand on the wheel and the other hand open on the seat between us.

I took it.

"How bad?" he said, at a red light in Red Hook.

"He wrote me a list."

"I know. Skylar texted me the headline."

"There were check marks, Declan."

He parked behind the studio and cut the engine.

"Maggie's spare room is across the bridge," he said. "I can drive you there."

"I don't want to be alone with that paper."

"Then sleep upstairs. I'll take the couch."

"No."

"Hannah."

"I'm done waiting," I said.

He turned in the seat.

"Your papers aren't signed."

"Filed or not, I'm done. Three years of waiting for a man to come home, and I'm not doing it for you."

"Say that again."

"I'm done waiting."

"Louder."

"I'm done," I said, and it rang off the windshield.

He laughed once, low, and shook his head.

"I am a man of limited virtues," he said. "I spent the last of them on your wrists."

"Then you're out."

"I'm out."

We took the stairs two at a time.

He pushed the apartment door shut with his shoulder while I pulled at his jacket.

He kissed me against the wall of the dark hallway.

It was not slow this time.

His mouth was hot and his hands were in my hair.

I pulled his shirt out of his jeans and put my palms flat on his stomach.

He hissed.

"Cold," he said.

"It's raining."

"Of course it is."

He lifted me by the backs of my thighs, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed the scar through his eyebrow.

He carried me to the bed and laid me down on it.

Then he knelt on the mattress and pulled my sweater over my head.

My bra was plain and gray.

I had bought it for a husband who never once looked at it.

Declan looked at it for exactly as long as it took to unhook it.

"God," he said. "Look at you."

He put his mouth on my breast and his tongue against my nipple.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Held Her at the Concert from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.