Page 13 of Cruel Kiss

"So I've been told." He takes a sip of the coffee and settles back against the bricks. "This is good coffee."

"I know. I only make it for people who deserve it."

He glances up at me. "Am I in that category?"

"No," I say. "But I couldn't very well drink mine in front of you without offering you some. My mother raised me right, even if the rest of my life is a smoking crater filled with shit."

He huffs another laugh into his cup.

I look at him sideways. His eyes are barely open. There are actual bags under them, enough to make a normal man look a decade older. But somehow, I don't mind the little preview of middle age on Ronan. It looks good on him. Humanizing, in a way that softens me toward him. I can picture gray in his hair and beard, a certain gravitas in his facial expressions. I might have an older man kink I was not previously aware of.

Really shit timing to learn that about myself, all things considered. The last thing this situation needs is silver fox sexualization.

"You look terrible, by the way," I tell him, more to convince myself than to insult him.

"That matches how I feel then."

"Good. You deserve it."

Haughtily and bitchily, I sip my coffee. The sun is coming up over the brownstones across the street, that pale early light that makes everything look fresh and new. It's such a normal morning. Birds and garbage trucks and coffee. You'd never know that, twelve hours ago a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound man died on my landing after I stabbed him in the side and then my ex-lover came soaring in like Batman to finish the job.

"You know what the wildest part of all this is?" I muse.

He laughs again. "I couldn't begin to guess. The list is endless."

"It's that this is my life now. It's a Tuesday morning, and my neighbors are all preparing to go to work, to care for their kids, to drag the garbage to the curb or whatever. I bet most of them slept great last night. But I didn't, because a man broke into my house to kidnap me, another man shot him on my stairs, andnow, I'm sitting here drinking coffee about it. Two murderers and a couple cups of joe. La-di-freaking-da." I shake my head. "Three months ago, my biggest problem was that I didn't think I'd hit my goal weight before Santorini."

"To be fair, you did hit forty pounds under your goal weight. From three thousand miles away."

I nearly spit out my coffee. "Was that ajoke?" I demand. "Did you just make a joke about the scale? The scale that started this entire disaster?"

"I've been sitting on your steps for six hours," he says. "I've had a lot of time to develop new material."

"That is not funny."

"It's at least a little funny."

"It is not even one percent funny.”

But I'm biting the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling, and he sees it, damn him, and the corner of his mouth ticks up, and for one second, it's like none of it ever happened. Like maybe we really are just two people on a stoop with coffee, and the worst thing in the world is a joke that's a little tasteless, although definitely worthy of at least an audible snort through the nostrils.

Then I hear little feet in the hall behind me. I turn to see Isabella hurtling onto the scene, still in her nightgown, Doctor Fuzz clutched to her chest.

"Mr. Ronan!" she says, delighted.

"Good morning, brave girl," Ronan says in that buttery-smooth purr he saves just for her. "How's our little doctor friend today?"

"He's tired. He had a lot of dreams." Isabella plops down on the step right next to Ronan, ignoring me completely, and holds out the shoebox for inspection. "See? He's very cozy."

"Very cozy," Ronan agrees, peering in with appropriate gravity. "That's a well-cared-for caterpillar. You're doing an excellent job. I bet he's ready to make a cocoon soon and take a nice, long nap."

Hayden appears behind her, hair sticking straight up identically to his sister's, squinting in the light. He takes in the whole scene—Ronan on the steps, me above him, the missing front door—with a kind of scientific squint that must be hard-wired into our shared DNA.

"Where's the door?" he asks.

"It, uh… broke," I say vaguely. "We're getting a new one."

"How does a door break?"