Read Online Kill Me Softly by Sarah Cross - Free Book Online

every relationship I’ve been in has ended in disaster. So it feels like … love destroys you. Like that’s all it does.”
    Mira wondered how he’d been betrayed. What a girl, or girls, had done to break his heart.
    And she told herself that she would never hurt him like that.
    Not that she would have the chance.
    Felix stood up, like the conversation was over. “Sorry, Mira … I didn’t mean to unload on you like that.”
    He went and stood at the edge of the graveyard, amid broken bits of stone angels, and stared out at the water. There was a crack in him, in the person he wanted to be. It was a crack she recognized, because it was in her, too.
    Mira sprang up, the photo fluttering from her lap, forgotten. She tiptoed toward him, like it was a dance with very precise steps, and rested her fingers on his back. Lightly, just so he’d know she was there.
    â€œIt won’t always be that way,” she said, trying not to sound naïve. She knew she was a girl he could trust. If he wanted to …
    The water glinted like glass, the sunlight breaking it into glittering shards. The endless heat, the moisture, and the heavy perfumes of summer made her aware of the physical, of every sense—and weakened the allure of daydreams.
    She wanted to wrap her arms around him, press her cheek to his back, and hold on tight. But she couldn’t make that leap. Not without some sign that he wanted that. It would be too humiliating if he pushed her away.
    Felix was quiet so long she didn’t think he was going to answer her. But then he turned, and her arms slipped around him before she could think about it—and suddenly he was holding her, too, very naturally, and he looked down at her, like he was trying to see who she really was. One side of his mouth turned up, so briefly it could barely be considered a smile—but at that moment, it was everything.
    â€œWe’ll see,” he said.
    Felix dropped Mira off at the Dream, told her to charge dinner to his room, and gave her a key to his suite. He had to get back to work, but he promised he’d get her a new room later—one with an intact door, where Blue wouldn’t bother her. Until then she was free to hang out at his place.
    Now she lay on Felix’s bed, leafing through an old fairy-tale anthology she’d found on his bookshelf, and daydreaming—remembering the way his arms had felt around her—while breaking apart the giant chocolate chip cookie she’d filched from the buffet.
    The book of fairy tales was in bad shape. The cover wriggled loose from the binding whenever she moved it, the table of contents was missing, entire stories had fallen out and disappeared. But flipping through it, she found most of the famous tales, and many that were new to her.
    â€œCinderella.” “The Red Shoes.” “Beauty and the Beast.” “The Juniper Tree.”
    Mira had seen most of the Disney fairy-tale movies, and had vague recollections of owning a Grimm picture book or two, but fairy tales hadn’t been a big part of her childhood. Elsa and Bliss had plied her with classic novels from an early age, so she’d gravitated toward those—Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder—and had only scattered memories of kids munching on candy houses, “can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man,” geese that laid golden eggs, glass slippers, and sparkly transformation sequences.
    Tonight, she’d chosen the book because it seemed an odd thing for Felix to have—a fairy-tale anthology surrounded by business tomes. But the more she read, the more the tales absorbed her.
    In “The Juniper Tree,” a boy who was decapitated by his stepmother came back from the dead to murder her. Cinderella’s stepsister chopped off her big toe in an attempt to fit into the too-small slipper and fool the prince. And “The Little Mermaid” was