Page 114 of Cruel Lies

I glance at him sideways. "That's sad, Ronan."

"Maybe." He doesn't argue. He just looks out at his city.

I turn away from the glass and look at him instead. The man owns two yachts, a gorgeous penthouse, and an entire law firm, and yet he stayed at my house last weekend to make pancakes at my stove in a rumpled shirt.

I haven't figured him out yet. But in all the ways that matter, I feel like I know him. Who heis.His aura, his essence. His soul, if you want to go that far.

He's a bad man with a good heart. A dangerous man who knows when to put his weapons away.

Above all, anhonestman with a bright line between truths that matter and lies that don't.

I like that.

"If you don't like this, I have a house upstate," he remarks. "In the country. It doesn't look like it came out of a magazine."

"No?"

"There's a lake. A dock. Trees. It's the one place I own that I actually like." He turns to me. "I'm mentioning it now because I want to take you there. You and the kids. We can go up for a long weekend. Hayden can look at whatever's in the lake, and Isabella can bring the caterpillar, and you can sleep in and not do your makeup in a phone camera."

"A whole weekend," I say. "With my kids."

He looks at me, gray-blue eyes shining in the low lights. "Would you like that?"

It's so easy to picture. Hayden tromping happily through the shallows with a net, Isabella chasing frogs, Ronan and I lying in the sun on a dock with nothing to do and nowhere to be. It sounds like a thing you'd see on a commercial. An impossible dream, invented in some dreary ad agency to sell prescription medication or life insurance or whatever.

But it could be real. All I have to say is...

"Yeah," I say. "Okay. Let's do that."

Ronan smiles.

It's a slow thing, but it's a joy to watch it unfold. It starts at one corner of his mouth and ripples outward. It takes its time getting to the rest of his face.

But it reaches his eyes this time. All the way.

There are so many places on his face I could spend hours gazing at. His jaw. The little scar near his eyebrow. The shock of dark,half-curling hair falling over his forehead. His eyes, half-gray and half-blue, watching me watch him.

He's a beautiful man. I knew that from the first night at the bar. But it's not the beauty that's getting me right now. It's the smile and everything that provoked it.

I think, for the first time, without fighting it:I could fall for this man.

Maybe I already am.

"Good," he says quietly. "It's settled, then."

Then he doesn't say anything else. He just looks at me, and little by little, the look changes.

We got interrupted at my house by a little girl's bad dream and a caterpillar in a shoebox. And then I fell asleep waiting for him. He did the honorable thing and just took my shoes off and held me while I slept. Then there was a whole week of meagonizingabout the fact that we keep getting interrupted.

Right now, though, there's no one here to interrupt us.

"Ronan," I say.

"Yes."

"There aren't any kids here."

He chuckles as he makes a show of looking around, like Hayden and Isabella might be hiding under the couch cushions. "No. Doesn't look like there are."