Page 40 of Cruel Lies

"Goodbye, Mr. Akov."

"Goodbye,kotyonok."

I leave before either of us get any other bad ideas.

11

RONAN

She left.

I keep turning it over while I stand at the window, watching the street below swallow her up. A dark head in a sea of dark heads, then nothing, gone, vanished into the lunch crowd like she was never here at all.

She left, and she took both untouched whiskeys' worth of my pride with her.

I am not a man who hears the wordnovery often. It isn't because I am charming, though I can be when it serves me.

It isn't because I am rich, though I am that, too, in ways the IRS will never know the true depths of.

It's because of what I am underneath the suit and the civilized veneer. People sayyesto me because some animal part of their brain understands what happens to the ones who don't.

But Cali Bradshaw doesn't know what I am. To her, I'm just another version of Todd in a better-fitting jacket. Smooth, rich, charming, and utterly full of shit.

I wasn't lying about what I told her the night we crossed paths at the lounge, though.

I'm not a good man.

And she has no idea just hownot goodI am.

I pick up her glass off the cabinet. Two fingers of a thirty-year-old single malt I've been saving for an occasion just like this. And yet she didn't so much as wet her lips with it. If I were less patient, I'd be insulted.

But I know better than most that all the games worth playing take a long, long time to come to fruition.

I down her drink in one swallow, if only because someone should. It'd be a sin to pour out something this delicious. The liquid does nothing to cool the thing she's lit in me.

I've wanted plenty of women in my life, and gotten most of them, and forgotten nearly all of them by the time the sun came up.

This feels different.

She thinks she said no.

What she actually said wasnot yet.She just doesn't know it.

The thing about me, the thing my father beat into me before I learned to be the one doing the beating, is that I am very, very good at waiting. Todd thought he was playing chess. Cali handed him his own king carved out of his ribs.

I respect that. God, I respect that.

I will respect her boundary, too. I am not Todd. I won't show up at her door, or have my people follow her. I won't manufacturesome chance encounter at her favorite coffee shop dressed up as fate.

But respecting the boundary and doing nothing are two very different things.

I have work to do.

My phone buzzes against the marble desk. Not the firm phone. Not my personal one, either. The one that rings is the third one. I look at the screen.

NAVI AKOV

I answer. "Tell me you're wrong."