Page 54 of Til Death Do Us Part (Kornilov Bratva Duet 2)

She lifts an eyebrow and shrugs. The simple movement sends her stumbling forward. She catches herself with a palm to my chest, and I react as though she burned me. I peel her hand off me and throw it back at her side.

“Never mind,” I say. “It doesn’t matter. You need to get to bed.”

“Whose bed?” Hannah asks, her mouth tipping into a sloppy smile.

I sigh. I do not have the patience to deal with this. I’ve barely tolerated Hannah’s presence here, mostly because she spends all of her time glaring at me like I’m scum and trying to turn Molly against me, and now she is coming onto me? No. Absolutely not.

“Yours,” I say sternly, sliding down the counter and putting more distance between us. “Or, at least, it is yours so long as you don’t touch me again. Where’s Molly?”

“Sleeping,” Hannah purrs, resting her hip against the counter and crossing her arms.

I realize for the first time that she is just wearing an oversized T-shirt. I assumed she had shorts on underneath, but no. I am seeing far too much of her thighs, and while it isn’t tempting, it is maddening.

“What the fuck is your problem?” I growl.

“Yes, get angry,” she says, her eyes widening with a perverse kind of pleasure. “I liked seeing you get angry the other day. You have a powerful punch. I wonder what else you can do with those hands.”

“I could snap your neck like a twig,” I say, my voice a low rumble. “Try to seduce me away from my wife again, and I won’t hesitate.”

Forgetting my drink on the counter, I walk around the island, grab my bags, and jog up the stairs to Molly’s room.

I plan to tell Molly immediately. This is exactly the kind of thing that could be twisted and distorted to make me look like a cheating piece of shit, and I don’t want anything to come between us. Anything else, that is. There are already a million obstacles between us and a happy ending, but I won’t let a lying bitch like Hannah be one of them.

When I walk into Molly’s room, however, she is sitting in bed with the laptop I bought her open, smiling at the screen.

“You’re home,” she says.

Home. That single word is more powerfully seductive than anything Hannah just tried in the kitchen. The simple idea that Molly is happy to see me and wants me here, that I could ever belong here with her and Theo, is enough to get my engine revved.

“Hi,” I say, dropping my bags and crawling across the bed. I lean over the computer screen, stroke Molly’s cheek with my palm, and tilt her face up for a kiss. Her lips are soft and pliant, and she releases a small moan as I slip my tongue into her mouth and nip at her lower lip. When we pull apart, her brown eyes are glazed over.

“Wow,” she breathes.

I roll over and lie next to her, my hand slipping under the covers to rest on her exposed thigh.

“What was that for?” she asks.

I shrug and circle my finger over her smooth skin. “Just hello.”

“In that case, goodbye.” She waves at me, her hand curled under her chin. I frown, confused, and then she grins and leans in for another kiss.

This feels perfect. Magical. Dreamlike.

Yet, there is a current of guilt sitting in my stomach as Molly strokes her hands down my chest. I need to tell her what her friend tried to do. She deserves to know.

We are both breathless when she pulls away. “We should say goodbye a lot more often if hellos are going to be that good.”

I grab her hand from my chest and kiss her knuckles. “What are you still doing up? I assumed you’d be asleep.”

She rests back on her pillow and points at her computer. “Just reminiscing.”

I twist over to see her screen, and my stomach drops.

It’s a picture of Molly and Hannah when they were younger. Just teenagers. Molly’s eyes are bright, her smile carefree and wide. She looks happy, her arm slung over a younger Hannah’s shoulders.

“It’s the only picture I have of the two of us together,” Molly says. “I had to search through, like, twenty old classmates’ Facebooks to find it, but there it is. Both of us before life kicked the crap out of us.”

She laughs, but then frowns. “Sorry, that sounds dark. It’s just …”

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