Page 3 of A Vicious Love

Harrison leaned back in his chair. “But that would be every night.”

Jamison shot him a look.

Harrison smiled wider.

I reached for my own chair and pulled it out. The legs scraped across the floor loudly enough to make my skin heat, and I sat quickly, smoothing my dress over my lap while Jamison immediately started talking to Marcel.

Ports. Contracts. Something about an account. I waited for a break in the conversation, but one didn’t come. Eventually, I turned toward Jamison anyway.

“Hand, please.”

His head moved slowly in my direction. “What?”

“Hand, please,” I repeated, as gently as I could.

His eyes narrowed.

I kept smiling. Maybe it was humiliating to ask for crumbs in public. The smallest proof that he remembered I belonged beside him instead of three feet beyond the edge of his attention. But if I didn’t ask, he wouldn’t give it to me.

Jamison reluctantly placed his hand in mine.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He looked away before I’d even finished speaking.

I settled his hand in my lap and held it between both of mine. Black ink covered his fingers down to the knuckles, blending into the larger tattoo across his hand. Crow marks. Old Harlan lines. Symbols I’d traced in my head a thousand times before I’d ever dared touch them.

My thumb moved over one near his index finger.

“How was rehearsal, sunshine?” Harrison asked.

I looked across the table. “Good. Really good, actually. We had our last performance last night.”

Emmie immediately turned toward me. “Your last one? Sienna, I wanted to come.”

“I got stuck in Villain for three days,” she added.

I smiled. “Oh, Emmie, that’s so sweet of you. Yes, it was the final one. The theatre was nearly full.

“Stuck in Villain,” Marcel repeated dryly. “Emmie took a liking to a stray dog outside one of my hotels.”

“He was limping,” Emmie protested. “And a puppy.”

“It was a fully grown mastiff.”

Emmie looked at him. “He had a baby face.”

Harrison laughed. “The dog slipped his lead, ran through the hotel kitchen and disappeared into a restricted service tunnel. Marcel locked down three city blocks because his wife went after it.”

“I wasn’t leaving him down there.”

“You crawled beneath an active freight line,” Marcel said.

Her nose wrinkled.

“And then Marcel refused to let her leave Villain until the dog had been cleared by two veterinarians, the tunnel had been searched and her security detail completed remedial training,” Harrison finished.

Emmie lifted her glass. “His name is Theodore. He lives with us now.”