Page 62 of Cruel Kiss

"Very thoroughly resolved."

"So if it comes up again?—"

"Whenit comes up again."

"If." I glare at him. "If it comes up again, it stays physical. It's not us. It doesn't happen during the daytime. It's—" I search for it. "It's night stuff.Onlynight. In the dark. And in the morning, we go back to hands-to-yourself and separate rooms and everything exactly the way it was."

"Strictly platonic," he says slowly, "except for the part where it isn't platonic at all."

"You know what I mean."

"I do." His mouth does the thing. "You want to be able to hate me all day and then knock on my door at two in the morning to bang out your feelings."

"If you'll recall, I didn't knock." I scowl at him. "Now, do we have a deal or not?"

He watches me, then smirks. "We have a deal, Ms. Meadows," he says.

"Good." I pull his shirt on over my head, because I'm not giving it back, I've decided. It's mine now, a spoil of war. "This never happened."

I go to the door. I don't look back, because if I do, I'll see him lying there in the golden light like a man who just got everything he wanted and would still give it all back for me. I can't afford to see that. Not tonight. Not in the dark, where I just made a deal I already know I'm going to break.

"For the record," he says from behind me, "you never got that water you needed."

I pause in the doorway. "Guess I wasn't thirsty after all."

I'm very careful to step over the board on my way out.

17

CALI

"You look dangerous," Ronan says approvingly when I come down the stairs the next week in a backless red dress.

"That's the idea."

He's in a black tuxedo, and speaking of dangerous, he looks like something you'd read about in a warning label. He holds out his arm, but I don't take it right away. I lift my hand up first, so the ring catches the light in the entryway—a thin gold band, nothing gaudy, but it's there, and it means something. I keep looking at it like it belongs to someone else.

"It's a bar association thing," I remind myself out loud. "For the firm. It's a performance."

"Spoken like a woman who has memorized her lines."

"We show up married. We look married. Everybody sees the powerful lawyer and his new wife, and nobody thinks twice about it."

"That's the whole point," he agrees.

"Then let's get ready to perform."

"I'm ready." He takes my hand and folds it over his arm, and his fingers brush the ring once, almost reverently. "Are you?"

The gala is at some hotel ballroom in Midtown with chandeliers the size of subway cars and a string quartet in the corner. It's lawyers, mostly. Lawyers and judges and the kind of people who own the firms that own the lawyers. Everybody knows Ronan. That much is clear the second we walk in. Heads turn. Conversations pause. A ripple goes through the room like a rock dropped in a pond, and we're the rock.

Ronan's hand settles at the small of my back. He's steering, a little, but mostly just present, warm through the red silk. We do the rounds. He introduces me the same way he always does, except now, there's a ring. People's eyes flick down to it, and the story rewrites itself in real time on their faces.Oh. Oh, that's the wife. That's the new Mrs. Akov.

Nobody says it out loud. They don't have to. I can read a room.

A silver-haired man named Crosby comes up and pumps Ronan's hand. He's a partner at the firm, apparently. He's got a big smile and a bigger handshake and he calls me "the woman who finally domesticated Ronan Akov."

"Congratulations," Crosby says. "Genuinely. We were all starting to think he'd marry the firm."