Page 16 of Mafia Boss' Surprise Baby

“That’s not it at all. Idowant this job. That’s part of the problem. I know it’s wrong to work here, to cover up the illegal transactions no matter how much good you do with charity on the side. It’s against everything I was trained to do. In fact, I had to learn more about forensic accounting so I could protect you from audits which exist to hold people accountable. I knew that when you offered me this and I wanted it anyway. This is new for me. I’ve always been a rule follower, Mickey. I work hard to get what I want. When I crashed and burned in LA I think it broke something fundamental in me. I can’t get ahead in life just be being a good girl. I’m not guaranteed happiness. I know how to set a goal and work for it. This is my first time wanting the wrong things.”

“Like what?”

“This job, for one thing,” I hedge.

“And two?”

“To learn when to keep my mouth shut,” I say ruefully. “I don’t love the idea of getting caught and not being able to work in my chosen field ever again, facing charges, all that.”

“I think ‘not getting arrested’ is a reasonable thing to want. If you’re half as good as Sal says you are, we don’t have anything to worry about. You’re looking over the receipts and the accounts payable. Making sure no one gets creative in an obvious way or that they don’t keep it accurate.

“I think you want to be independent, and that’s you, but part of being independent is owning up to your choices. And that starts with you being honest with your brother about what you want. I can tell him about the job or you can,” he says it as open-mindedly as a nearly all powerful mafia don can say anything I guess. He waits for me to answer.

“I’ll tell him,” I grumble. I don’t want to, but I also don’t want to lose what feels like a high stakes game of chicken to a literal crime boss.

“What will you tell him?” he asks.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe it doesn’t,” he says. Then he shrugs off his coat and rolls up his sleeves like he’s about to really dig into something serious. I sit across the small table and watch his deft fingers unbutton his cuffs and fold the fabric up. He has meaty forearms, a light tan, and he has ink. I nearly swear when I see it. Heat suffuses my face.

“Did you have ink in high school? Rory got in major trouble for getting a tattoo one time when I was a kid. Did you guys do that together?”

“We don’t have matching tattoos. It’s not that kind of friendship,” he says wryly. “I got my first one after I was in lockup at sixteen.”

“You were in jail? How did I not know this?”

“Probably like you said, you were a kid. I got picked up for stealing a car. I wasn’t stealing it, just borrowing it for the evening—” he cracks a self-effacing grin.

“Did the owner know you were borrowing it?”

“He figured it out and that’s how I got picked up by the cops. My dad’s rule was if you’re dumb enough to get caught you can rot in the cage for twenty-four hours.”

“That’s harsh. My dad would’ve bailed me out and then beat my ass for stealing.”

“Would he? Even though he was a fence?”

“Yeah. Hypocrisy was not something he worried about,” I say with an eyeroll.

“My dad wasn’t a hypocrite. He knew what we were and what we did and made no apology for it. Unless I was stupid, and then he let me have it. When I was in a holding cell at county jail, there were a couple other guys there. Drunk driving, vagrancy, drugs. The dude who was picked up for vagrancy showed me some of his ink that he did himself. He was a fuckin’ pro. Coolest shit I ever saw. I asked if he'd do one for me after we got out, and I’d pay him cash.”

“What did you get for your first one? I mean, assuming you have more than one,” I can’t resist asking. I’m wrapped up in his story, his excitement at retelling it, the way his language lapses into the slang of our youth.

“This was my first one,” he says.

He unbuttons his shirt. Transfixed, I can’t look away from his fingers undoing his buttons one by one, agonizingly slow. It’s torture of the best kind. He’s really going to take his shirt off, right here in this room. Alone. With me. The obvious fact of this breaks my brain.

I feel like alarm sirens should go off, that police lights should spin red and blue across the walls of the room. Because if ever there were an emergency, this is it.

Forget professionalism. Forget my dignity.

I am going to lose my damn mind.

“Right here,” he says.

His shirt is unbuttoned to the waist. He pulls it open on the left side like he’s starting a seated yet steamy striptease one half of his muscled chest at a time. I was already glutted on eye candy from seeing him roll his sleeves up and checking out those beefy forearms. Now this. The cut lines of his pectorals, his abs.

Greedy, I want to slide out of my chair and peel both halves of his shirt open, kiss that exposed skin so smooth and bronze with a thick line of dark hair down the center running straight to his belt and below.

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