Page 65 of Cruel Kiss

"I like to be prepared."

"So do I." He straightens off the bar, and for one second, I remember that he is just as dangerous as Ronan is, albeit in his own way. "I'd like to clarify, Agent Mercer: It's not beneath me. I just don't like being told where to stand."

"Likewise."

They hold it there, the two of them, a beat too long and a notch too tense. I look at Ronan, who just sighs and shakes his head.

"They're going to be a problem," I murmur. "Aren't they?"

"They already are." He steers me away with a hand at my back before either of them notices we've been eavesdropping. "Leave them to it. Navi will keep her occupied for the rest of the night. It's the most useful thing he's done all month."

As we depart, Crosby reappears near the ballroom's edge, phone pressed to his ear, one finger in the other. He mouthssorryat someone and slips out through a side door into the hall, the way a hundred men slip out of a hundred parties to take a hundred calls. Nobody in the room thinks a thing about it, least of all me. Just a partner working late on a Saturday. Just a man with a firm to run.

The rest of the gala passes in a blur of names I won't remember and a plate of food I mostly move around. Ronan doesn't leave my side. We leave a little before midnight. Paolo drives. Ronan'shand rests on the seat between us, not on me, obeying the daytime rules even though it's the deepest part of night.

The sitter—one of Juliet's replacements, vetted twice as hard—reports the kids went down easy. Ronan pays her, walks her to the car one of his men is idling at the curb, comes back inside, and locks the vault-heavy door.

I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs when he turns around.

Neither of us says anything. Every other time, there have been words, negotiations, my long list of grievances recited aloud. Tonight, I've got nothing left to recite. I'm too tired for that.

I just go up. He follows.

Not to his room. To mine.

The hate-fucking is grim and silent and it's over faster than usual. He doesn't call me his queen. He doesn't tell me to keep my eyes open, either, so I don't. I keep them shut the whole time, and I let myself pretend, in the dark, that the hands on me now are the same hands that were at my back all night, warm through red silk, steering me gently into a future that I can almost believe is real.

He lets me pretend.

Afterward, he doesn't ask to linger. He gets up, finds the sweatpants, and pauses at the door.

"Goodnight, Ms. Meadows," he says.

"Goodnight," I mumble into the pillow. "Close the door on your way out."

18

CALI

I wake up alone. It's exactly how I wrote the rules, so I don't know why my chest feels like somebody scooped it out with an excavator.

The other side of the bed is cold. He must've gotten up hours ago. Even more likely is that he probably didn't sleep at all, just lay there one door down with his eyes open, waiting for the world to try something. I lie there for a while making pleasant conversation with the aches in my thighs and boobs and the ache somewhere less locatable, the one that can't stop asking that silly schoolgirl question that women of all eras have asked themselves again and again after sleeping with a man they swore they'd never even look at again:

What does it allmean?

I get dressed fast, like I can outrun the thought. Jeans, a T-shirt, hair in a knot that saysnothing happened here.By the time I get downstairs, Ronan's at the stove.

He's in the reading glasses, too, just to test my patience. The slutty ones. His sleeves are rolled, spatula in hand, and there arepancakes coming off the griddle with those crispy lace edges I have never once in my life managed to produce. Isabella is at the table in her nightgown, chin on her fists, watching him happily. Hayden is drawing something with a lot of legs.

"Morning," Ronan says. He doesn't turn around. "Coffee's by the pot. Yours is the mug with the mantis on it."

Two things happen at once. First, the smell of coffee-made-right hits me, and my whole nervous system sighs dreamily. Second, I remember the mantis mug is the one Paula drank out of, the one with the ghost of a mauve lipstick crescent I scrubbed off a lifetime ago, and I decide, irrationally, viciously, that he shouldn't have picked that one.

"Thanks," I mutter.

He clocks the underlying attitude, but doesn’t deign to respond.

I take the coffee to the far end of the table, as far from the stove as the room allows, and I sit down next to Isabella. "Sleep okay, sweetie?"