“What do you mean it’s not your fucking fault!”

Giovanni DeRose gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes in frustration. The tattoo bays at the back of Thorn Tattoo were partitioned off, walls tall enough to guarantee privacy for the client being inked, but offered no discretion with conversations. Antonio, Giovanni’s oldest brother, said it kept the staff honest. Giovanni thought he was full of shit. The staff talked whether management wanted them to or not. Dick measuring contests were a part of the industry, and if Antonio didn’t understand that, he knew shit about tattooing.

“You think you should see what’s going on?” Mal asked. Lifting his foot off the pedal, he looked up from his human canvas. The tattoo machine in his hand fell silent. Giovanni had been supervising his work on a full back piece, watching for consistency in Mal’s line work and checking his confidence. Mal had only been with the shop for a few months, and while Giovanni was of the opinion he was a good artist, even talent snapped under pressure. Nothing was more nerve-wracking than management lurking around a project.

“The dude sounds pissed, Mr. Suitman,” the canvas murmured. He lay flat on the table, arms crossed beneath his head.

“Dude, don’t mock the suits. Not if you ever want another tattoo here,” Mal warned. “The man is legendary for his tailored suits, just like his old man was.”

Giovanni ignored the comment. He’d started wearing suits when he was in high school and now they were as second nature to him as the ink he sported on his body.

“Who’s working the front today? Ben?”

Mal wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “Ben’s a pussy, Gio. He’s gonna have his ass owned if that fight gets physical. By the sounds of it, that’s a possibility.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, asswipe,” Ben shouted from the next booth. “I’m doing a walk-in septum piercing right now.”

“Then who the hell is looking after the front desk?” Giovanni demanded again. Before anyone had time to answer, he was already on his way toward the swinging saloon doors that divided the partitioned tattoo bay from the others. Not only was a fight dangerous, but in a tattoo shop, there were hundreds of ways it could turn disastrous. Used needles were a big deal. If someone wanted to fight, they were going to do it outside.

“Some newbie?” Ben called back. “I don’t know. The front was a ghost town when I came back to do this piercing. Figured I’d only be a few minutes. Just bad timing, I guess.”

Does no one in this place have any brains? Irritation throbbed in Giovanni’s temple as he clenched his fists and stormed out through the swinging doors, toward the front of the shop. Standing at the foot of the stairs leading to their basement location was a towering hulk of a man Giovanni vaguely recognized, and a drop-dead gorgeous woman he’d never seen before.

The half sleeve between the man’s right shoulder and his elbow was still healing, and Giovanni could tell by looking which artist had done it. Jaime’s use of bold outline and vibrant, contrasting color was unmistakable. Giovanni remembered being in the room with him for the consultation.

He also remembered that the client was an asshole, but Jaime’s silver tongue had straightened him out and set him on the right path. Thorn Tattoo was in the business of giving quality tattoos—the best on the Vegas strip as far as Giovanni was concerned—and sometimes that meant reining in client expectations. Some clients had ideas that wouldn’t translate no matter how much they wished otherwise. What separated a good artist from a mediocre one was the ability to spot those poor choices and reshape them into art.

If that dipshit client was irritated because he had a change of heart about his art, Giovanni was going to throw him out on his ass. Jaime was one of their finest artists, and if the guy thought he could get away with swindling them out of twelve hours of work, he deserved to be thrown out.

“Payment processing duplications happen at random and don’t only affect our business. No matter what businesses you shop at, you risk that error. We did not charge you twice. The error is with the processing company.”

Giovanni stopped in his tracks. The bombshell of a woman standing with the asshole client was talking back to him and defending the shop. Who the hell was she? Giovanni squinted, taking in her every detail. She was hot enough to be a shop babe, but she didn’t have the right aesthetic. The dark gray blazer she wore wasn’t cut up, patched, or otherwise modified. She kept it pinned at the front, and it hugged the generous curves of her hips and the tapering of her waist. Beneath she wore a simple black shirt with a scooped neckline and black pants. Giovanni didn’t spot a trace of ink across the creamy skin of her chest, nor any that dipped down onto the backs of her hands.

What the hell was going on?

The woman swept a lock of her brown hair behind her ear before she continued. Not a strand of it was out of place, and Giovanni marveled at how its gentle waves framed her face. Whatever she did to keep it so big and beautiful was worth the effort. It drew his eye straight to her full lips, pursed momentarily in aggravation. When she spoke, he watched them move, mesmerized. “All you need to do is call the number on the back of your card and speak with a representative. They will deal with the refund and issue the money back to your account.”

“This isn’t some ‘payment processing duplication,’ little girl,” the man sneered. “I called you fuckwads yesterday about the double charge, and whatever asshole answered the phone told me he was reversing the charge as we spoke. So imagine my surprise when I woke up today to find my card got hit again by your shit show of a shop. You think I’m going to stand by while you scam artists drain me for every penny I’m worth? Then you have the audacity to send out a little girl to try to talk me down? For fuck’s sake, at least send out one with her tits hanging out! You think I’m going to get distracted by your business attire?”

White-hot anger seared Giovanni from the inside out. The world around him melted away, leaving only the man in his field of vision. Giovanni had no idea who the woman was, or why she was rattling off policies, but he wasn’t going to stand by and let some asswipe lay into her. He was the one in charge of Thorn Tattoo, and he was going to be the one who put an end to the fight.

“What the hell’s the problem here?” Giovanni asked through gritted teeth. Muscles corded, focus narrowed, angry like he’d never been before, he was going to put a stop to things immediately.

“Who are you?” the man asked. He jutted his jaw forward, expression ugly and confrontational. “I’m not dealing with another one of you unqualified nitwits. I need to speak with a manager.”

“Then it’s a good fucking thing you’re looking at him.” Giovanni shoved his way in front of the woman, standing between her and the client. He held his chin high and kept his eyes narrowed. “So what the hell is the problem? You come screaming into my shop, disrupting my clients, because of what? Because of some issue with your payment processor? How is that her fault?”

“It’s her fault because she’s part of the scam.” Spittle flew from the man’s lips. Giovanni didn’t back down. “She’s just as responsible for this as any of you are. All of you, scheming. How many other clients have you ripped off like this? Tripling their charges? Even the fucking tip was tripled. I can’t fucking believe it.”

There was no talking the guy down. Giovanni took a step forward, but the man did not back up. Behind him, he heard the faint click of a high heel. The young woman was following him. He wanted to turn around and growl at her to stay put, but he knew that if he took his attention away from the hulk of a man on the steps that he’d open himself up for attack. Giovanni had been in enough fights to know when he was facing down a threat, and the man spelled trouble.

Nothing got assholes riled up like money.

“You need to get the hell out of my shop and call your credit card company. Get them to reverse the charges. Whomever you spoke to on the phone is an idiot, and I’ll be confronting them about their choices personally. File the dispute and the company will refund you and take it up with us. Then your money is back in your pocket and our heads are on the line.”

The man glowered. He took a single step back, then doubled down and opened his mouth to fire back. There was no way in hell Giovanni was going to let him. This was his shop for as long as he was working management, and he wasn’t going to have his clients disrupted by a dispute that wasn’t even the shop’s problem.

“Or if you want, you can call them from the phone at the front desk. Someone who comes in here crying about money like you probably can’t afford a cellphone anyway, right? No big deal. We’ll give you all the free phone calls to the credit card company you want. Why don’t you step on down, champ. Or if you want some privacy, I can give you some quarters for a pay phone. You won’t even have to pay me back.”

Giovanni dug into his pocket and held out a handful of change. His mind sizzled with rage, and he knew that the guy he was facing down wasn’t any cooler.

The insults worked. The man spat at him, but the lob was poorly aimed, landing on the shop floor.

The man seethed, “So fucking full of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Least I can aim,” Giovanni shot back. “Now, get the fuck out and don’t come back. I swear, if you come in here and cause any trouble again, I’ll drag your ass out.”

There were no more words exchanged between them. The man spun on his heels and stomped up the stairs. The front door opened, and the bell above it jingled. Then it slammed shut making the glass panes shudder and the door creak in complaint. Giovanni put the change back in his pocket, dusting his hands on the sides of his pants, and then turned to face the woman standing behind him.

She scowled at him.

“Really?” she asked.

“What do you mean, really?” Giovanni crossed his arms over his chest and lifted his chin. Anger still corkscrewed beneath his skin making it difficult to pull himself together. Something about seeing her, redirected his rage and funneled it into something wilder and far more primal.

She looked really fucking hot when she was angry.

“That,” the woman waved at the stairs, “is what you consider management?”

“I got him to shut up and leave, didn’t I?” Giovanni hitched an eyebrow and leaned toward her, looking to intimidate. She had curves in all the right places, but she wasn’t a physically imposing woman. Her tiny frame was matched by her height, and she wore gorgeous strapped heels to compensate. If he wanted to, he figured he could lift her with one arm. “What did you think you were going to do to him? Flash him a cute smile, bat your eyelashes and ask him to kindly reconsider smashing in all of our glass display cases?”

“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I would have talked him out of his anger like any proficient manager and then worked through his issue alongside him. If you yell your problems away, Thorn Tattoo is going to sink. You need to get your act together, or this business isn’t going to be a business for much longer. Reputation and talent are a shop’s most important draws, and if word gets around that you’re doing this to clients….”

“Then what?” Giovanni drew back. It looked like she wasn’t going to be intimidated, and he had to respect her for that. She didn’t look like a shop babe, and she definitely didn’t sound like one, but there was a steely quality to her personality that let her stand on her own. She was resilient. “Then we get a reputation as a shop that doesn’t take shit.”

“You get a reputation as a shop that’s hostile toward customers,” she replied. “If customers hear that, then they’ll go elsewhere. Thorn Tattoo isn’t the only tattoo parlor on the strip, you know. There are tons of fantastic artists in the area with more arriving all the time. If our reputation is tarnished, we’ve lost that edge and our business is going to go elsewhere.”

We? Our? The more she talked, the more it sounded like she was part of the team. Giovanni had no clue who she was, and as the manager, he was the one who hired. He knew for a fact he’d remember a stunning face like hers; especially with a mouth like she had.

“And who are you to boss me around like that?” he asked. “I didn’t hire you.”

“I would hope not.” She lifted her chin, her full lips set. They were shaded a dark pink that flattered her features and made that wild thing inside of him even wilder. They were the kind of lips Giovanni wanted to kiss until his jaw was sore. “My name is Riley Byrne. Antonio DeRose hired me to work as co-manager of the shop alongside someone named Giovanni. Am I to take it that man is you?”

No, he fucking didn’t. Giovanni’s head shot toward the back office as if Antonio would magically appear there, smirking at him. His brother was the stiff, no-nonsense businessman whose head was focused on numbers. What the hell was he doing bringing in a chick who looked like an ink virgin, who had no visible piercings apart from her lobes, and who likely couldn’t tell a tattoo machine from a power supply?

“Antonio told me I’d be starting today,” she said. “He said you’d be made aware. I take it you haven’t checked your emails?”

Giovanni wasn’t going to take treatment like this. He’d been begging Antonio for the funds to hire new artists for months now. They’d stretched the budget to bring on Mal, cutting corners with the funds already available so they could have an extra set of hands on deck, and now Antonio was hiring management who had no business in the tattoo bays.

It boiled his blood.

He stormed past Riley toward the back office. The click of Riley’s heels followed him at a short distance.

Giovanni didn’t take orders from anyone, and he wasn’t about to let some fresh face tell him how to run the shop. Antonio was going to answer for this. There was no way Riley was going to last if Giovanni had something to say about it. Whatever salary she was being paid could fund another artist to bring in more revenue.

“You need to stop,” Riley said coldly. She grabbed his arm as he walked, and the urge to snap her in half flashed through Giovanni and almost overwhelmed him. It stopped when her hand tightened and she yanked him around so they were face to face.

He was surprised. Riley was tiny and feminine, but she was strong.

“The two of us are going to be working together now,” she said, keeping her words low and even. “I’m here to help you, and just like you have boundaries, so do I. Before you go into that office to call Antonio to bitch about me, you need to know them. First, don’t ever think you can storm away from hard conversations. We’re adults and we need to respect each other and listen to what the other has to say, especially because the success of this shop is depending on us. Second—” her eyes flashed, and Giovanni’s cock pulsed in response. He wanted to pin her to the wall and kiss her senseless, make her his. “—and this is the most important thing… in the future, I am more than capable of taking care of myself. I’d appreciate it if you never got between me and a client again.”

Stepping in front of him, she led the way to the office, her heels clicking angrily as her hips swayed in time to her steps. Giovanni swiped at his face as he watched her walk. Oh, he could definitely get used to that view.