Page 18 of Rent a Mob Boss

The image hits me like a fist, and I come hard enough that my vision whites out for a second, jaw locked, my free hand braced against the door while my fist fills with the hot, sticky results of what Quinn is doing to me without trying.

Then there’s the silence. Just my breathing, slowing down. The car moves through the dark while I sit here slumped against the seat, broken into pieces.

There’s a handkerchief in my breast pocket, and I use it now because I am, despite all current evidence, a civilized man. By the time I’m finished cleaning up, Sal turns onto the long road that leads to the front gate. I am now nothing more than a man coming home from a business errand. I am not the man who just came until his ears rang in the back seat of his car over a girl who doesn’t know she’s taking him apart piece by piece.

The gate opens, and we roll through the driveway. The house is lit and quiet. Upstairs, my daughter is sleeping and dreaming about her pony. Somewhere past the east wall, there could be a car watching.

As I enter my house, nodding to the guards posted at the entrance, I think about Saturday. About how I’m going to control myself when I have her with me in that dress, when I have to pretend we’re in a relationship.

It’s not going to feel like pretending. That’s the only thing I know with absolute certainty as I step into my quiet hall, where the only sound is the echo of my footsteps and not the soft laughter of the girl I wish I had brought home with me.

7

QUINN

Oh, dear God.

He’s wearing a tux.

Dorian Moretti is standing in my hallway in a black tuxedo. My brain, which has been running emergency drills all day about how to behave like a normal human tonight, immediately shuts down. It just… quits. Like an overheated laptop. I can practically hear the little powering-down chime inside my skull.

The tux fits him like it was stitched directly onto his body by someone who understood the assignment on a spiritual level. His hair is pushed back from his forehead, gleaming in the overhead light. There’s a watch on his wrist that catches the light, and he smells like something I want to press my face into and never leave.

I spent forty-five minutes on my hair and another twenty on makeup, and I’m in heels I haven’t worn in two, maybe three years. He’s looking at me the way he looked at me in the boutique. This time, there’s no Adriana lurking around the edges of my awareness. It’s just us and the hallway.

“You look very beautiful,” he tells me.

My mouth opens, and the half-dozen different compliments I came up with—because I knew I would need them, because hello, the man is perfection—all bubble to the surface, ready to be used. What comes out is, “You look delicious.”

Guess what? That was not one of the compliments I came up with.

“I mean, vicious,” I blurt out. Oh, god, that’s not any better. “No, not that either. I meant handsome. You look handsome. That’s the word I was looking for. Handsome.”

The corners of his mouth twitch. “Delicious,” he repeats.

“We’re not going to talk about that.”

“We might need to talk about it later.”

“We are never going to talk about it, because it didn’t happen. Now let’s go before I get in trouble for missing pictures.” I am never going to survive this. I’m going to burst into flames, which would be sad because the dress would go with me, and it’s a very pretty dress.

He offers me his arm, and I take it, because my knees are all watery and loose, and I need the structural support. We walk out to the car where Sal is waiting, and I climb into the back seat in an emerald dress that costs more than a semester at school. I’m sitting next to my boss, who I just called delicious, on our way to a party where I have to pretend he’s my boyfriend.

This night’s going to be great. I can feel it.

The Whitmore is exactly as terrible as I remembered it.

It’s the kind of venue my parents and their friends love. Marble floors and vaulted ceilings, that kind of thing. “I knew there would be an ice sculpture,” I whisper as we pass it. I think it’s supposed to be two swans, but one of them has started to melt, so it looks more like a swan and a large, depressed duck.

The second we walk through the doors, I feel it. The eyes. Not all at once—it’s more of a ripple, the way attention moves through a room when someone unexpected walks in. And Dorian is definitely unexpected. He’s taller than most of the men in here, for one thing. Broader. He carries himself with the kind of quiet authority that makes people step sideways without knowing why. His hand is on the small of my back, and it’s warm and steady and enormous, and I’m vibrating like a tuning fork.

“This isn’t going to work,” I whisper out of the corner of my mouth.

“It’s already working,” he murmurs, low, close to my ear. “Smile.”

I smile. It probably looks unhinged.

Mom finds us first, because she has a sixth sense for new information and moves toward it like a shark moves toward blood. She’s in a navy dress with her hair pinned up, and she’s holding a glass of white wine. Her eyes go from me to Dorian and back to me with the speed and precision of a spectator at a tennis match.