Page 26 of Cruel Kiss

CALI

I might be overtaking Mother Teresa as the most tolerant woman in human history, because a week goes by, and I don't kill Ronan.

Even though there are a hundred small chances every day, I take none of them. Am I gracious and benevolent? I suppose I must be. Am I infinitely forgiving? All signs point to yes. Am I divinely chosen and doth my patience surpasseth all others? I mean, if you say so. I'm literally just a girl.

The motherfucker is testing my limits, though.

And he damn well knows it.

The coffee is the worst part. It just shows up, morning after morning, without fail. I don't ask for it. I never do, never would. But I'll be sitting at the kitchen island squinting at my laptop, and out of nowhere, boom, there it is, right at my elbow, in my preferred mug, made exactly how I like it, which is a lot of cream and just enough sugar to be embarrassing.

I don't remember ever even telling Ronan how I take my coffee. As a matter of fact, I'm quite sure I didn't. He just watched me make it once, back in the beginning, took those thorough mental notes of his, and, well, here we are.

Satisfied.

Butmadabout it.

I keep waiting to catch him doing it, so I can tell him to knock it off. But he never lets me catch him. It just appears, like it grew there.

That's manageable. I could live with that.

What I cannot live with is the reading glasses.

He comes down the stairs the third morning of our new cohabitation with a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm, sits at the far end of the island, crosses one knee over the other, and puts on a pair of reading glasses.

Reading glasses.

We're talking thin black frames. Sophisticated. Elegant. Downright slutty, if you ask me.

And on this man, no less?

Oh, he's playing with fire. He's playingdirty.

It's working.

It is also deeply unfair. I turn into a frozen gargoyle with my coffee halfway to my mouth. He doesn't notice, or at least, he shows no outward signs of noticing. He's reading whatever it is, his eyes roaming down the page behind the glasses, one thumb turning the corner, and he looks so unbearablycalmabout itthat I want to throw something at his smug head just to break those manwhorish glasses of his.

"Something wrong?" he asks, without looking up.

"No," I snap, entirely too fast. "Why would there be something wrong?"

"You made a small sound." He turns a page. "Like a kettle deciding whether to boil."

"I'm fine. Read your—your whatever that is."

"Filings."

"Yeah. That."

He goes back to his filings.

I go back to hating my life.

And then it's the pancakes. Personally, I'm starting to get a little tired of them. But Isabella could eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every meal for the rest of her life. Even though we've negotiated to the point where she'll accept some fruit and eggs on the side, because I can't be depriving my children of both nutritionandpersonal safety, it's still pancakes as the centerpiece whenever I'll allow it.

Luckily, Ronan runs point on the whole process. He's perfected the fine art of those crispy lace edges that I have personally never once achieved in ten years of trying, and he flips them one-handed while questioning Hayden about how exactly do gills work.

He looks like a man auditioning to be somebody's husband.