Page 27 of Cruel Kiss

Not mine. Obviously not mine. Butsomebody's.Some hypothetical woman out there who doesn't know what he is, who gets to keep the pancakes and the coffee and the slutty reading glasses without any of the bloodstained tarps or the associated body count.

I catch myself watching the back of his neck while he stands at the stove. The line of it. The curve of it. It's manly, somehow, where his hair stops and curls ever so slightly at the edges. I don't know how long I've been doing it before I catch myself. When I do, my cheeks go blotchy with embarrassment. I lurch up so fast I nearly knock my stool over, and hurry to go find something extremely urgent to do at the far end of the room.

There's a tingling in my stomach that I refuse to name. Butterflies? No. Definitely not. Not for Ronan "Asshole" Akov.

"You okay, Mommy?" Hayden asks, looking at me strangely.

"Great," I say breathlessly, combing hair out of my face. "Just remembered a thing."

"What thing?"

"A grown-up thing. Don't worry about it."

By Saturday, I decide I have to get out of the house.

Not for any reason. There's no real reason requiring my sudden departure. The kids are with my mother for the afternoon—shadowed by Ronan's guards, of course—the house is quiet, and Ronan himself is once again perched on the couch, buried deep in his papers.

And I cannot be near it for one more second. I need to be in a car, alone, going somewhere, doing anything, so that I can start the long, painful process of remembering who the hell I am.

"I'm going out," I announce.

He looks up. "Where?"

"Errands."

"Which errands?"

"None of your business." I grab my keys off the hook and step into my shoes.

He shrugs and flips a page over. It's so easy and argument-free that I'm tempted to turn back around just to bicker about it, because if I've learned anything lately, it's that nothing worth having comes with that little fuss.

But you can't look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm getting freedom? You bet your sweet, syrup-covered ass I'm taking it.

So I march out to the car and hurl myself into the front seat, breathing heavily for no reason at all. I wait a second to see if Ronan intends to follow me, but the front door stays shut. Fine by me.

I feel the eyes of the ever-present Bratva guards looking at me curiously, but I ignore them. If I can't see them, they can't see me. Or so the thinking goes.

To double down on that wishful thinking, I go searching for my biggest A-List movie star sunglasses. I have to riffle through the glove compartment for them, but before I can fish them out, something else catches my attention.

Something that does not belong there.

It's small and black. About the size of a matchbox, stuck to the inside back wall of the compartment with a little strip ofadhesive, and it has a single, tiny light on one end that flashes every three seconds.

I don't know a lot about spy equipment. But I've seen enough movies to know a GPS tracker when I see one.

I sit in the driver's seat for a second, holding it between two fingers. Surely I'm mistaken. He can't… He wouldn't…

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Of course he fucking would.

Then I spring out of the car, haul ass back up the front steps, burst through the vault door, and run rampant into the den, where the felon with boundary issues is reading the sports section.

I hold the tracker up between two fingers, out at arm's length, like it's a dead mouse I fished out from behind the fridge.

"Explain this shit, and do itfast."

He looks up, sees it. He does not, to his eternal discredit, look even a little bit surprised.

"That's a GPS tracker," he says simply.