Page 184 of Mile High Ruin

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Mila looks down at their joined hands. “I know how it sounds.”

“I don’t think you do.”

A faint flush rises into her face, but she doesn’t let go of him.

The first time I saw the two of them together comes back to me almost immediately. Mila screaming in the hallway. Daniel standing there looking horrified, one hand still around her arm because he had caught her when she stumbled away from him. Vadim appearing seconds later with murder already forming in his face.

I look at Daniel. “You scared the hell out of her.”

“I turned a corner.”

“You grabbed me,” Mila says.

Daniel looks at her. “You almost fell.”

“You appeared out of nowhere.”

“I was walking.”

“You walk too quietly.”

His mouth twitches.

“That was your first conversation?” I ask.

“More or less,” Daniel says.

Mila gives him a look. “You apologized about twelve times.”

“I thought your brother was going to shoot me.”

“He probably considered it.”

“I know.”

There’s something almost absurd about the ease between them now, considering how badly that first meeting went.

I look at Mila. “And after that?”

She hesitates. “We kept seeing each other.”

“Because neither of you could exactly go anywhere.”

Daniel gives me a dry look. “That helped.”

Vadim had made it very clear that Daniel wasn’t leaving until the people around him were satisfied he had nothing to do with Hale or the attack, and I’d been given essentially the same treatment under much more comfortable packaging.

Mila looks down at the table. “He was there all the time. At breakfast. In the garden. In the library when he got tired of sitting in his room.”

“You were watching me?”

“You were difficult not to notice.”

Daniel smiles slightly. “So were you.”

Her expression softens. It’s small, but I catch it.