Page 50 of Cruel Lies

"Can I ask you something real?" I say, after the plates are cleared and we're in that easy lull between courses.

"You've been asking me real things all night."

"Something realer." I turn my wineglass by the stem. "Are you relieved it's over? My thing. With Todd. Because I am. I keep waiting to feel—I don't know, devastated, and instead, I just feellight.I mean, he's the father of my children, and I married him thinking he was the love of my life. And now, I sometimes go minutes at a time without thinking of him. Is that wrong?"

Ronan considers me for a long moment. "It's not wrong," he says. "But I'd be doing you a disservice if I let you believe it's over."

The lightness curdles a little. "What do you mean?"

"Men like your husband don't quit." He leans forward and his irises pick up the candlelight, burning blue. "They lose, but then they regroup, and while they lick their wounds, they tell themselves a story where they're the wronged party. You humiliated him in front of his entire profession. He won't let that be the end of it."

I start to protest. "He doesn't have a leg to stand on. I have everything. You saw the data. The LLC, the company papers, the?—"

"You have everything that's true," Ronan reassures me. "But truth is only necessary. It isn't sufficient. The law isn't a machine that takes facts and outputs justice. It's a system. And every system can be played. There are a dozen ways a spiteful man with the right lawyer can tangle you up. Motions, delays, jurisdictional games, discovery requests designed to bleed you dry of every penny you have left. He freezes an account here, contests a filing there. He doesn't have to win. He just has to make it cost you more than you can afford. Your money is a finite resource, Ms. Meadows. So is your sanity. In the end, you'll settle for less than you're owed just to make it stop."

"That's horrifying."

"Such is life." He sits back. "I'm not telling you this to frighten you. It's only because you deserve to know the field you're standing on, and because nobody else is going to."

"Is that a sales pitch?"

"Not at all." His eyes hold mine. "A man selling you on the law doesn't tell you it's a casino. But I'd rather you walk forward with your eyes open than have someone you trust hand you a comforting lie. It seems to me you've had enough of those."

I don't have an answer for that. Fortunately, he doesn't seem to need one. He settles back in his seat and we're quiet for a moment as the restaurant hums and burbles around us.

Dessert comes soon after. It's some kind of molten, indecent, architecturally impossible chocolate thing, with a scoop of cold, pale vanilla bean ice cream melting beside it.

Problematically, there's only one spoon.

"Can you use that fancy Italian of yours to ask the waiter for one more spoon?" I ask Ronan.

He smiles sinfully. "I can share. I have a dirty mouth, Ms. Meadows, but not like this."

Then he takes up the spoon in his lithe fingers, drags it through the dessert, and holds it across the table toward me.

"Open."

I look at the spoon. Chocolate drips off the edge, slow and thick.

For a year, I starved. Grapefruit for breakfast. Wilted salad for lunch. The StairMaster at four in the morning while the house slept, my legs burning, my stomach empty. All of it for a man who never wanted me anyway.Too curvy. Not the way you used to be.

My body still remembers all that hunger, all those mornings I went without.

Then I lean forward and close my mouth around the spoon.

It's the best thing I've ever tasted.

Bitter and sweet, rich and dark, the cold against the warm. I can't help it—I whimper. Ronan watches me with an intensity that has nothing to do with dessert and everything to do with my mouth. The candle is too warm, and the room is too small, and I am suddenly very aware of my own pulse.

"Good?" he asks.

"Acceptable," I manage as I lick my lip clean.

He cuts another piece and feeds it to me again, slower this time, watching the spoon and then watching my face, and the strangest thought floats up through the chocolate haze, fully formed, almost funny:

My ex used to count my calories.

The billionaire just hand-fed me dessert.