Page 41 of A Taste Of Darkness

“Ma’am?” the woman said, her voice now distressed. She was so kind to me, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.

“If you ask me whether I want some water one more time…” I blew out a tense breath, reopening my eyes. “I will lose my freaking mind.”

“You haven’t had a drink in hours, Miss Adams.”

Hadn’t I? I didn’t even realize. For the past six hours, my mind had been running wild with theories of what was going to happen to me if Milo’s family found me.

What if hiding in plain sight failed and they captured me? As of now, I was positive it wouldn’t happen, but Milo was just one person. He couldn’t protect me from what was probably an army of people. And he certainly couldn’t control the mafia, even if he insisted he could.

“Still, I don’t feel like drinking or eating anything. Just leave me alone,” I said.

Nyla cautiously looked over to Milo, who had finally lifted his gaze off his computer screen. When he nodded for her to leave, I’d never seen anyone flee a scene as quickly as she had.

Unfortunately for me, Milo decided then to close his laptop and made his way over to me. He sat across from me and looked at me with some kind of expectation in his eyes that I didn’t understand. Was he expecting some kind of apology for snapping at his staff?

When I didn’t speak, he chuckled.

“Something funny?” I asked, sounding surprisingly rude even toward him. Nerves really turned me around, apparently.

Milo shook his head. “No, of course not.”

“Then why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re pretty hot when you’re angry,” he said, still looking at me like he’d never seen my face before. My eyes widened with surprise at his words, confusion streaming through my veins. “I knew you had a feisty side to you, but I didn’t know you could snap at innocent people who are just trying to be nice.”

“How’s that hot?” I asked. “All it does is make me a mean person, is all.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, cuore mio.” Milo leaned forward, telling me he’d touch me just before he reached one hand up to my face and cupped my jaw. My breath got caught in my lungs as his eyes moved down to my lips before meeting my own again. “Sometimes, you’ve got to be a little mean for people to understand you’re not interested in their game.”

“She was asking?—”

“Nyla was asking if you wanted something to drink,” he confirmed before I finished my sentence. “Every five minutes for the past six hours.”

I didn’t realize she asked every five minutes.

“It took you long enough before you finally snapped.” His thumb brushed over my bottom lip, and an unwanted shiver ran through my body almost instantly. “If you want to survive, you have to learn to speak your mind before you get annoyed. Lord knows your patience is incredible, but such a pain if you think about it.”

“How?”

“Six hours to make your decision understood?” He tsked. “You have to do better.”

“I’m not interested in doing better.” I liked how I was, liked my patience with people. I liked it when they were nice to me, and you’d never catch me losing my temper unless they were truly testing every bone inside of my body.

I didn’t want to change that.

“You have to learn to set realistic boundaries, Sterlie. Six hours to make yourself understood is ridiculous. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. It starts with an annoying question that you simply can’t make someone stop asking and ends with much worse. All because you’re too nice. All because your boundary is set to: I’ll just snap when it gets annoying in six hours.”

I pulled my knees up under my chin and hugged my legs.

“Sometimes, cuore mio, stepping into the dark is doing the right thing.”

23

ARRIVAL ALERT

Sterlie Adams

Milo was constantly looking around us. From the moment we got off the plane, he was on alert.

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