This is… nice. Watching their connections with each other, their genuine love for each other, reminds me of my relationship with Adam.

It reminds me of Declan’s family too, with all the siblings, and the laughter and the chaos.

I watch as Will and Declan fight over the last lemon cupcake, and Leo and Sam bicker about the landscaping she wants to be done in the spring. Meg is happy to nibble on her cake and snuggle up to her man, glowing with a life growing inside her.

It makes me yearn, in ways I never have before. But I know one thing: I’m so happy to be a part of it, no matter how small.

I grip Declan’s hand in mine, and he squeezes it, three times, and smiles down at me, his eyes happy, and it makes me happy that I’m the reason for that smile.

Life sure doesn’t suck right now.

***

“I can’t believe I had dinner with Leo Nash and Will Montgomery tonight,” I say with a gusty sigh as I walk into our hotel room.

“Umm, who am I?” Declan asks with a laugh and pulls me against him for a long, deep kiss. “I’ve been waiting to do that for—”

“About five minutes, since you almost had sex with me in the elevator,” I say with a laugh.

“Not my fault that the elevator is so fucking slow in this place,” he grumbles against my neck. I know that if I let him, he’ll drag me off to bed and give me another night that I won’t soon forget, but I’m not ready for that.

Yet.

“Sit with me?” I ask, gesturing to the fireplace. I flip it on and sit on the sofa, in the middle, so no matter where he chooses to sit, I’ll be smashed up against him.

He sits, wraps his arm around me, and I lean into him, my cheek on his chest, and watch the fire. I can feel his lips brushing back and forth on the top of my head. His fingers dance softly up and down my arm.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m so much better than okay, I don’t think there’s a word to describe it,” I answer him honestly. “Thank you for today. For this whole weekend.”

“It’s completely my pleasure,” he replies and tips my face up to meet my lips with his own.

“I started getting tattoos on my arm when I was seventeen,” I blurt out, surprised that I said the words aloud. Declan shifts so he’s still holding me, but I’m facing him now, and he can see every emotion that crosses my face.

This is far more intimate than anything we’ve ever done while naked.

“Go on,” he says softly.

I swallow hard and try to decide where to begin.

“Start at the beginning,” he says, as if he can read my mind.

“I’ve never been a cutter,” I say, my eyes trained on the neckline of his plain white T-shirt. “Hurting myself never appealed to me, but I can understand why people do it, Declan. Sometimes life just hurts, and if you can control any of the pain, it makes you feel like, even for those few moments, you’re in control.

“My childhood was challenging. I grew up fast when Mom died and Dad found solace in a bottle. I was an adult far sooner than I could vote. Life didn’t suck, but it was a struggle, and when I was seventeen, I met a tattoo artist who didn’t ask for ID when I lied and said I was eighteen.”

Declan tilts his head to the side, listening intently. He’s not just listening, he’s hearing me. And that gives me the strength to keep talking.

“So I started up here,” I say and pull my sleeve up so he can see the ball of my shoulder. “I’d heard that it hurt really bad up here, and I wanted it to hurt. I know that sounds crazy and stupid—”

“You are neither of those things,” he says. His voice is calm, but his eyes are on fire.

“It did hurt,” I continue. “I wanted the calla lilies because those were my mom’s favorite and pink for breast cancer awareness.”

He reaches up and traces the lines with just the tip of his finger, making me break out in goosebumps.

“As you know, tattoos can become addictive, and for a while that was my drug. I had the whole arm done, from shoulder to mid-forearm, in the span of about two years. The artist I was seeing wouldn’t go down to my wrist because he said I was young and one day I might have a job that I would need to cover it for, so he said to just think on it.”

“You never added to it,” Declan says.

“No.” I shake my head and watch his fingers tracing the lines, the vibrant colors of my ink. “I stopped getting tattoos altogether when I was twenty.”

“Why?”

I take a deep breath and bite my lip. “Because I liked it too much. The pain. I would have gone every day if I could afford it, and when someone suggested I pierce my nipples, and I seriously thought about it, I knew it was time to stop.”

“Lots of people have piercings,” he says logically. “Your navel is pierced.”

“They do, and the navel happened around the same time as the tattoos, but if I’d taken that step down that road, I would have mutilated my body, Declan. I didn’t, and don’t, want that. I like the ink on my arm; the navel is enough. I don’t need anything else.”

“Thank you for trusting me with this,” Declan says, his voice rough.

Tell him you love him!

“I do trust you,” I say instead and point to his own ink. “What does yours mean?”

“I was a young musician in college,” he says with a sly grin. “You do the math.”

Chapter Thirteen

~Callie~

“I don’t know,” I murmur, walking from room to room in the unusual farm-style house that my new realtor, Peggy Lewis, has found to show me. I thought, and Declan agreed, that it was a good idea to find a new realtor, given that Pete didn’t seem to understand that help me find a house didn’t also mean let me take my pants off for you.