Page 1 of The Boss
Chapter 1
LEIF SEVERINdidn’t care about peace. He cared about control—the kind you took, kept, and broke men for when they tried to take it back.
The chandeliered ballroom at The Alabaster Club was old-money, neutral ground in downtown Dallas. Tonight it wore the Dante crest and had all the trappings—string quartet, Baccarat flutes bright with champagne, athousand-watt smile from every enemy—and none of the truth.
Truth was quieter, colder. It lived in the pause before a man reached for a weapon and the sigh a woman made when she stopped pretending she didn’t want to be fucked.
He stood on the mezzanine for a minute longer than he meant to, looking down on the swirl of silk and tuxedos. The alliance had demanded a spectacle. Dantes and Severins, shoulder to shoulder, spotlit and camera-ready. Cade Dante’s ring flashed on his sister, Elise’s hand when they moved through the crowd together. Zane and Jazz drew a current of laughter behind them. Titus watched everything the way a hawk watched a field, his wife tucked close in his arms.
Leif stayed in the shadows and absorbed the room like a ledger, columns of power and weakness, IOUs and grudges.His suit was cut mercilessly, charcoal that almost ate the light, midnight lapels, ashirt crisp enough to cut. Solid gold cufflinks glinted at his wrists while the Severin-black watch on his left hand marked time like a blade across a throat. He felt only the steady thrum of his pulse—no omens, no signs—just control running like ice in his veins. Nothing in him was docile.
He told himself he was here for optics, to prove the Severin heir could stand in Dante light without flinching. He told himself it was duty. Then she stepped into his line of sight, and every careful story he’d written for the night went up in smoke.
She didn’t fit.
That was the first thing. The second was that she didn’t try to. She stood a little removed from the thickest tangle of socialites, close enough to be part of the constellation and far enough to refuse its gravity. Emerald silk clung to her like a sin she refused to confess. Her hair fell in endlessly dark, glossy waves past bare shoulders to the middle of her back. The line of her throat was crafted, asculptor’s dream. When she turned her head, light slid along her cheekbone as if it recognized its rightful place. She sipped wine as though it were water and scanned the room like a wolf learning a new forest.
Heat uncoiled under hisskin.
It wasn’t lust at first. Lust was loud and easy. This was quiet, tightening something low in his spine, narrowing his focus until the music and chatter smeared into the edges of his awareness. He moved before he chose to, the crowd parting because it always did, because men who wanted to live learned to read weather and Leif Severin wasn’t just bad weather. He was a tornado.
She sensed him when he was three steps away. Her gaze lifted, hazel laced with gold, sharp enough to cut a man exactly where it hurt and soft enough to let him thank her for it. Their eyes caught and held. The room fellback.
“Enjoying the show?” he asked. His voice wore velvet with unapologetic steel cutting beneath.
“That depends.” Her mouth curved in a way that made thinking an elective. “Are you the show?”
“Depends who you ask.” He let his eyes travel. The dress hugged a waist made for a man’s hands, fell over hips like a promise. “I am tonight.”
She laughed, low, husky, clean as a blade. It slid under his ribs and found a pulse there. “Confident.”
“Accurate.”A beat. “Leif Severin,” he offered, taking herhand.
“Mary,” she returned after the softest hesitation, atiny tilt of the chin. “Just Mary.”
A simple name. Unremarkable. And blatantly dishonest. Acover a smart woman would choose when she wanted to pass invisible through rooms that devoured the beautiful and unprotected. He didn’t call her on the lie. He pocketed the truth and reached for the only thing he wanted right now: herhand.
“Dance with me, Just Mary.” Not a question.
She placed her fingers in his palm, skin sleek, cool from the stem of her glass. The string quartet turned something sweet and old into heat, and Leif drew her into it. Her body settled to his like she’d been built to fit there, one hand on his shoulder, the other in his, eyes defiant and amused and cautious all atonce. Her perfume slipped around him, jasmine threaded with something warmer, skin and spice.
“Who are you when you’re not watching rooms like a general, Mr. Severin?” she asked as he maneuvered them through the crowd. Her voice wore polish. Intelligence sharpenedit.
“The man the room watches back.” He angled his head, letting his mouth almost brush her ear. “And you?”
“Someone who knows better.”
He smiled for real this time. “Than to dance with me?”
Her mouth tilted into a wry curve. “Than to think it ends there.”
He turned them under the chandelier. Light shattered across crystal, then touched her throat, sat on her lips, and he had to fight not to taste them. She moved the way he liked women to move when they knew exactly what they were doing with a man like him, unafraid, precise, maybe a little wary. It wasn’t wariness toward him. It was the kind she held for the world, for whatever had taught her to be cautious.
“Tell me what you want,” he murmured. He could make anything happen in thirty minutes. He wanted to hear her say something he could deliver.
Her gaze flicked to his mouth and back, and then over his shoulder. Color bled a shade from her face. He felt the flutter at her wrist where his palm held hers. “I want to stop pretending I’m here for the string quartet,” she said, voice a shade too even, already angling them off the dance floor.
“Then let’s stop.”
