Italian mafia princesses don’t make house calls. Not with our history. Not to a rival family’s heir. Not dressed like a stripper without a birthday cake. The rain had darkened her slinky-tight dress from blood-red to wine. Water slid down the side of her neck and pooled in the depression at her throat. A throat I’d traced with my teeth so, so, so many times.

Her soaked skin threatened my resolve. But every time she stood at my door, I ended up gutted.

Water dripped onto the black marble of my entryway. We both ignored it.

“Baby girl, don’t you know it’s rude to drop by unannounced?” I braced my arms on the doorframe, not inviting her inside. Something must have popped loose in hell to bring her here.

She didn’t answer. But she took in my inked chest, St. Patrick medallion, and baggy sleep pants. I fought to keep my face neutral.

“Did you get a new tattoo?” Her voice reached into me, sleepy, low, seductive. Despite its softness, it shattered the foundations of indifference I’d only recently thought set. She eyed the exact spot where a newer tattoo covered the letters K-A-T. The letters a dumber, younger, Pierce thought spelled his future.

“No.” She’d seen the new one at least fifteen times since I erased her name from my life. Every time she asked about it since had to be to screw with me.

She traced the edges of ink on my bicep. I ignored the tingle inspired by her fingertips.

Once upon a time, I might have fallen into her trap. “What did you do with Rico and Sam?”

She raised a shoulder like she couldn’t give a shit. “I left your bodyguards outside with their knitting.”

Despite trying to play it cool, she still got to me. I refused to acknowledge the hard-on tenting my pants. Faced with five and a half feet of almost naked, soaking wet, woman affected me. No matter how much history lay dead between us.

Her gaze dipped low, and her lips curled seductively into an all too familiar I-want-something-and-I-deserve-it smile. “You want me. Let me in.”

“My wanting you has never been a secret. If you consider my hard-on a victory, you set sub-par standards.”

She cocked a hip and smiled. “What’s that saying about battles and wars? This is simply the battle, and you’re too arrogant to concede what your body already knows.”

“If you don’t leave now, I’ll have my boys carry you back to your car. If you knee them in the balls, they won’t be gentle.”

“Pierce, all I need is five minutes.” She squeezed some of the water from her brown hair over one shoulder. It dripped into her cleavage. Even the elements were on her side.

Eighteen-year-old Pierce wouldn’t have hesitated to give in. Thirty-year-old Pierce knew better.

“Baby Girl, that act won’t work anymore. A man only needs to be burned once to know he should stay the fuck away from the fire.”

Her mask fell away. I stared down into her eyes, waiting for whatever lie she’d spin. “Five minutes. Then I’ll leave.”

“Five minutes of my time costs a lot more than it used to.” I licked my lips and swept my gaze over every wet inch of her body. “How are you willing to pay?”

She didn’t blink. She slapped her manicured hand against my chest and shoved me through the doorway.

This woman wielded her beauty like a blade. The strategic slice of her cheekbones. The purposeful plunge of her cleavage. Hell, even the pout I watched her perfect punctured my internal organs.

The crew christened Kat, the shrew. And I’d fallen into her snare.

She backed me to the black couch in the middle of the living room. I held my hands up in fake surrender as she scrambled to straddle my lap. No grace or glamour in her now. More Mickey Mouse than Marilyn Monroe.

She shifted her weight on either knee and dragged her dress up around her hips. Letting her in was a bad idea. The willing woman on my lap posed more danger than I let myself believe. There were lines I wouldn’t be able to claw my way back across.

I rested my arms on the top of the couch and focused on staying still. “Baby, I like a woman on my lap, and if you came here to fuck, I’m game. But if you want something, spit it out.” The soft floral scent of her skin grated my composure with her every breath.

Her eyes flashed to mine, and I caught something there. For less than a second, she looked…vulnerable.

“I need your help.”

No preamble. No bargaining. Not even a threat.

I opened my mouth to start the usual routine of her lying and me chipping the details free one by one. Then she leaned in to whisper in my ear. “I want you to marry me.”

My heart stopped. My lungs contracted. Six oh-so-tiny words ricocheted through me like ejected brass shells.

“No. Not you. Not me. Not ever.”

She cupped my neck in her hands. “Pierce…”

I picked her up by her perfectly formed ass, stood, and dropped her on the couch. The length of the room didn’t seem like enough space to separate my anger from her fragile body. “Get the hell out.”

I turned by back and headed toward the door. Her feet hit the floor with the click of her heels. “I’m not joking. Marry me.”

My ribcage sucked tight to my heart like cling wrap. Breathing became difficult and shallow. “I’m not joking either,” I said. My words butted into each other too fast and too many and too cold.

I can’t look at her.

We’d done this before, except I’d been the boy on his knees. The boy bearing the bruises from his father’s fists. The boy sacrificing his family legacy, holding a ring. She’d been the one standing and laughing and ripping apart the friendship we’d spent five years building.

I can’t look at her.

The sound of her shifting on the couch decimates the distance I need from her. “Baby…please.”

Each echoing word pierces my heart, splintering any mercy I have left. Each too fast pump rushes a fresh load of fury into my blood.

I can’t look at her.

All I felt was anger. Complete anger.

And then her small hand settled on my shoulder. My rage beat through me so strong, I feared I might strike out. But I didn’t. As if kept in line by years of pain at this woman’s will.

She was the same girl I loved once. The same girl I’d hated too. She was the same girl who gave me her virginity and took my own. And she was the same girl I’d never be able to leave.

A sheen of tears pooled in her eyes, but nothing fell. No, crying in front of the enemy wouldn’t do for a Marino. The founders of the five families would rise from their graves to reclaim their family recipes. “I told you, I need help. You’re the only one who can—”

“What? Stand the sight of you? Pretend for five minutes not to hate you? Well, great job, you just shoved me away. I think I actually hate you.”

She took a stumbling step backward. “I shouldn’t have come here. I…”

She wobbled on her four inch heels looking around, searching for something. I didn’t know what. She didn’t bring anything but her toxic good looks, generations of family feuding, and massive ego with her.

But her gaze leapt to mine again for a second, and my grated, jaded, over-tested resolve cracked and crumbled.

She got me.

She fucking knew it, and I fucking knew it. Hell, the damned body guards outside who were likely laying bets knew it. I grabbed her upper arms with a little shake. “What do you want from me? What do you want.” The second more a prayer than a demand.

No God could save me now.

“I told you. I need you to marry me.”

The anger and hate fizzled out of me, along with the fight. “I’m not like you. Marriage means something to me. So does family.”

She slid her hands along my waist to wrap them behind my back. “Family means something to me too. You know I hated my father, but I would do anything for Bianca. Why else would I be here? You know this isn’t my usual…style” She looked around and shrugged, like she still didn’t know what to say for herself.

“What does Bianca have to do with you getting married?”

Now she wouldn’t meet my eyes, focusing instead on the medal around my neck my father gifted me at my first communion. Maybe she wasn’t here to con me?

No. That’s how she always lured me in. Long legs, bare skin, red lips.

“Can we sit?” she asked.

I led her back to the couch and sat with distance between us. Touching her wouldn’t help me keep my head straight. We’d always been that way, at least since we were nothing more than two teenagers discovering each other for the first time. Together, we consumed and blackened and destroyed all the decency in either of us. Leaving nothing but wanting, needing, aching flesh behind.

“As you know, my father died…” she began.

When the biggest crime boss in the city bites it, all the little underlings show their respect. “I was at the funeral.”

She nodded a bullshit agreement. “Of course.”

No. She didn’t get off that easy. “You kissed me on the cheek after the wake like I was some distant cousin flown in from Cedar Rapids.”

Her soft smile slipped. “I…”

“I made friends with a bottle of Jack when I got home.”

She blinked and glanced away. “It was my father’s funeral.”

“A father you hated. Don’t play me. You’re five minutes are stretching here.”

Her jaw clenched, and her nostrils flared. Annoyed but unwilling to press me further in my mood. “Daddy died and left everything to Bianca and me. But, we can’t touch a penny until we’re married. I have to marry first. And when I do, I can protect Bianca. It’s all spelled out in excruciatingly, legal detail in my father’s will.”

“So you just woke up and decided I’d be the best choice for a husband?”

She nodded, but it didn’t sell. Things began slipping around my head, rolling and rearranging. I stood up in an effort to force them to settle. “You came here to ask me a favor. One that I could never reverse. You knew that a long time ago. I wasn’t good enough for you then. What makes me worthy now?”

I didn’t dare hope some part of her wanted the same things as me. Someone to love, someone to ignite beside, someone who understood the life I lead. The laughter of her rejection all those years ago still caused a burn in my chest.

“Why me?” We both knew we’d kill each other before the honeymoon. “You always have a line of pretty boys waiting to take you out. Why did you come to me?”

One of her puppets could easily be manipulated into marriage and then shipped away at her convenience. No. Just marrying couldn’t be simple enough to fix her problem. “What’s the catch?”

The look she arranged on her features appeared to be shame. At least most of the way there. “Daddy stipulated the marriage has to be from one of the families, any of the old lines, not just the five, and it has to be officiated at a church.”

I threw myself down on the couch beside her and doubled over, hoping to find the answer written in the hardwood. I was the only member of the old families with the status she needed.

A vision of Kat in a white dress, my head battling tulle to capture a garter in my teeth, flashed in my head. “No.” How could I even be considering this? “No,” I said louder and sat up. “We’d murder each other before we got to the honeymoon, and divorce will never be an option for me.”

Her face shifted from soft and sweet to cold as steel. She twisted onto my lap again, pulling her dress up as she moved. What she couldn’t talk her way into, threaten her way into, or seduce her way into, she’d steal by siege.

A mafia princess on the hunt for her crown.

She pressed down onto my lap, and my body noticed her bare ass before my brain caught up. Damn her. No panties.

The fire lit through me, as it always did when we fell apart in each other’s arms, equal parts madness and fear. “Baby Girl, you don’t want to start something you don’t intend to finish.”

She rocked forward, and my cock pressed up and met her body through my damp pajama pants.

“Who says I don’t want to finish this?” she asked. Her cold fingers angled my chin and she licked her lips. As her mouth descended toward mine, the part of my memory fractured and shattered by how many times we’d played this game before, spoke up. “No.”

She blinked back. My declaration threw her off. “No?”

“What you want from me is big. Life altering. More than I’m currently willing to give anyone, least of all you.” I ground out the last word so she could hear the hatred she’d mortared brick by brick through ten years of shame and heartache and betrayal. “If you want this from me, you’re going to have to show me you can be nice. Be fucking polite.”

I jammed my fingers into her wet mess of curls and yanked tight. Her eyes shuttered for a second, but I fought for control. Keep your shit together, St. James.

She jutted her chin up like a queen peering down at her subject. She slid off my knees onto her own against the hardwood, my fingers still tangled. I swallowed hard, the control I’d been so confident in a moment ago feeling tenuous, like too soft yarn in my hands. In ten years, she’d never, not once, bent her knees for me.

I grit my teeth and let her hair go. She tugged loose the lace on my pants. Every muscle in my body seized up, and I couldn’t stop the warm slide of heat pouting through my limbs.

“Is this the kind of wife you want, Pierce? One who gets on her knees for you?”

A seduction and a challenge.

I wrapped my arms behind the couch and lifted my chin the same way she did. “A proposal should be delivered on your knees.”

She latched her nails over the waistband of my pants and shot me a canary crunch smile.