13. Cali #2
There's zero judgment in him. But after a lifetime with Todd and his endless comments about my size and appetites, all my many flaws, I'm hypersensitive and self-aware at meals. So I stick to dainty little bites, even though it's so good I want to moan and eat enough to actually feel full for once.
While we eat, we talk. It's easier than it has any right to be.
He asks about Hayden and Isabella and actually listens to the answers.
He asks follow-up questions, remembers that Hayden likes facts and Isabella likes mayhem.
He tells me about his cousin, Navi, who he describes as "an idiot I'd take a bullet for. "
"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 feel light.
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.
I don't know which of those facts I'm more stunned by—that one was my whole life for years, or that the other is happening right now.
This is all too much and it's happening too fast. I take the spoon from Ronan before he can do it a third time, because if he does, I'm going to have to throw the dataset out of the window and do something highly illogical.
He lets me. He just watches, that almost-smile sitting easy on his face, and doesn't say a single word about it.
Not until the check comes, at least.
It arrives in a leather fold, set discreetly at the edge of the table. That's when I decide that this all could use a firm clamp of the brakes.
I spent ten years learning the true costs of letting a man pay for the life around me. I am never, ever doing that again.
So I reach for the folder. "I've got this."
Ronan doesn't move to stop me. He just watches, faintly amused, as I flip it open.
It's empty. Weirdly, there's no bill. Instead, I find a handwritten thank you note, signed by the chef.
"What the hell?" I ask.
"It was settled before we sat down," he explains.
I look up. "That's not—I want to pay my half. Actually, I insist on paying my half."
"I'm sure you do." He's standing now, sliding into his jacket, unhurried. "And I respect it. Which is why I made sure there was nothing for you to fight me over. You can't pay a bill that doesn't exist."
"That's—" I'm sputtering uselessly. "That's cheating!"
"If that's what you think, then you're really not going to like what I tell you next."
I freeze up, blood draining from my face. "What did you do?"
"Your company had an outstanding invoice. Forty-one thousand and change to a SaaS vendor. It was ninety days past due, with a service-suspension notice scheduled for Monday," he says. "It was holding up your data infrastructure. I had it cleared this morning."
I suddenly feel woozy and wobbly.
"You—what? You can't—! How do you even—? That's my company, that's— You don't just pay a—"
"Goodnight, Ms. Meadows," Ronan says.
And before I can find a single one of the four hundred thousand things rising up the back of my throat, before I can demand an explanation or refuse the gift or throw the empty leather folder at his beautiful, infuriating face, he turns and walks out of the restaurant, hands in his pockets, leaving me alone at a candlelit table with a single chocolate-streaked spoon and the sweetest taste still lingering on my mouth.
Son of a bitch.
I think I'm being manipulated again.
And, God help me…
I think, this time, I like it.