Virtuous(36)

Only when we’re ensconced in the back of a toasty warm cab do I realize how cold I am. How long were we outside? I have no idea. Could’ve been five minutes or an hour. My brain is still scrambled from the Kiss with a capital K. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been kissed. The last time, I was fifteen, before my life changed forever.

Two boys kissed me that year, but what a difference it is to kiss a man rather than a boy. There’d been no overabundance of spit or awkward tongue thrusting with Flynn. No, his kiss was sublime and skilled, even if it included only the touch of lips and nothing more. He knows what he’s doing. And the spontaneous way in which it happened… I’ll be thinking about that long after this interlude with him is a distant memory.





Chapter 7





In the backseat of the cab, he puts his arm around me and nuzzles my hair.

I lean into him, wanting to be closer to him.

“Did I f*ck up by kissing you?” he asks, his voice gruff.

I raise my head off his shoulder to meet his gaze. He seems genuinely worried. “What? No. You didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod because the words I wish to say are stuck in my throat. I can’t look away from him. He draws me in with his magnetic appeal, and the closer I get to the heat, the more enthralled I seem to be. His kindness to Aileen and her children makes him even more attractive to me than he was before.

I need to be careful. I know that. I can’t afford the kind of disruption he could be in my well-planned and well-ordered life. But right now, in this moment, with his arm around me, his scent filling my senses and his nearness making me want so much more, being careful isn’t my top priority for the first time in eight years.

We ride uptown in silence, until the cab stops outside a high-rise.

Flynn releases a low curse. “Can we go around the block?” He rattles off a new address, and the cab merges into traffic again.

“What’s wrong?”

“Paparazzi camped out front waiting for me.”

“How could you tell?”

“I recognize them. They’re paid to follow me.”

“Paid to follow you… What that must be like...”

“It’s no fun, especially when you value your privacy and that of your friends.” He asks the driver to pull into a driveway that slopes downward to a metal door. “Stay here for a sec.”

I watch him get out of the car and punch a code into a number pad that opens the metal doors. Then he gets back into the car. Handing a fifty-dollar bill to the cab driver, he says, “Will you take us in please?”

“Will I be able to get out of here?” the cabbie asks.

“Yeah.”

We descend into the parking garage we were in the other night. The cabbie lets out a low whistle at the sight of the Bugatti.

Flynn directs him to turn around on the other side of the garage, well away from the priceless vehicle. He gets out and reaches for me. “Thanks for the lift. The door will open for you.”

“Could I bother you for a photo with the car?” the driver asks in broken English.

“Sure,” Flynn says, even though I can see he’s impatient and not really in the mood for pictures. Still, he stands with the driver, smiles for the photo I take of them with the driver’s camera. We wait to make sure he actually leaves the garage before we head up to his place.

“That was nice of you,” I say in the elevator.

“What was?”

“Taking a photo with him.”

He shrugs off the compliment. “It was no big deal.”

I like him all the more for his humility. “It was to him and to Aileen.”

“My dad likes to say it doesn’t cost anything to be nice to people.”

“I think I’d like your dad.”

“I know he’d like you.” He reaches for my hand and leads me into his apartment. “Can I take your coat?”

Still processing what he said about his dad liking me, I unwrap my scarf and hand it and my coat to him.

“I could go for some hot chocolate,” he says. “You?”

“I never say no to that.”

“Come help me. I’m lost in the kitchen.”

“Can you boil water?”

“It’s best if I don’t do that on my own.”

I roll my eyes at him because I can tell he’s being outrageous on purpose, but since he’s also being adorable again, I go into the kitchen to help.