Page 40 of Darkest Kiss

“Wait, really?” My brow wrinkles. “Where?”

“In the old apartment across the street. I had to watch you closely.”

“You mean you had to watch the Vitellis’ office.”

“Like I told you before, I don’t have a choice.” Rian drums his fingers on his glass. “Once I saw you… once I saw what you did, I was gone for.”

“What I did?” I take a sip of wine. “You’re speaking in riddles.”

He looks at me. “You saved a kid. I was watching one day when there was a car crash at the empty place next door to the bookstore. The car rammed into a phone pole and caught fire. And you, like an angel, pulled a little boy out of the car.”

I remember it. The acrid smoke, the crying boy, the jammed seatbelt.

“You saw that?” I ask, taken aback. “I was just doing what anybody would do.”

“No, you weren’t. The kid’s mom was clearly out of it when she got out. She sat down on the curb, bleeding all over the place. But you had eyes only for the kid. You put your coat on him, took him to his mom, and you didn’t leave his side until the ambulance drove away.” His eyes spear me, swimming with some emotion I can’t name. “Do you know how many kids would kill for that kind of undivided attention? That kind of care?”

I reach out, touching the back of his hand. “Did… did something bad happen to you when you were a child?”

He stares at my hand caressing his and nods, but doesn’t say anything. God, how bad was his childhood? I’d guessed it was bad, just based on knowing him for a week, but now I’m thinking it was worse than that.

I don’t know what to do, so I just keep stroking his hand. “Hey Rian?”

He lifts his gaze and his face softens. “Yes?”

“You saved me,” I remind him. “I don’t know what kind of demons are in your past, but you aren’t kidnapping girls and forcing them to participate in fucking auctions. No matter how many men you’ve killed, your soul could be blacker.”

That amuses him. “Very true.”

The food arrives in small perfect courses and I eat all of it. Rian watches me more than he eats, which I'm getting used to. The bodyguards watch the doors, the glass, and the sky.

For the next forty minutes, it's nice. He tells me a story about someone he works with named Hale that's mostly about Hale not talking and looking all broody. I laugh, an actual laugh. His whole face changes when I do it.

And I think, traitorously, that I could get used to making him look like that.

I set my napkin down near the end of the meal. "I'm going to find the restroom."

"I'll have someone walk you."

"Rian. I'm going to pee, not flee the country. It's twenty feet, you can watch me the whole way." I stand and push my chair back.

The window beside my head explodes.

I don't understand it at first. There's a sound, a flat crack.

Then the glass behind where my skull was half a second ago turns into a spiderweb and then into nothing. I blink.

Rian is already moving.

He hits me like a wall. One arm hooks around my waist and takes me to the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of me. He covers me with his whole body. Every inch of his enormous frame shields me from the open air where the window used to be.

"Stay down." His voice is perfectly calm, which is terrifying me. "You’re stuck to the floor like glue. Don’t try to look around."

There is an odd sound, almost like several hummingbirds flying too close.

“Shit,” Rian says. “Hold on.”

Then the guns start firing as the world comes apart above us. More glass shatters and rains down, pinging when it hits the floor. I hear the mechanical whine of something in the air, small and close. My brain struggles to catch up as one of the bodyguards shouts and starts firing at the sky.