Cian’s gaze slipped to his watch, the sweeping second hand rounding to twelve just as he looked. Two p.m., on the dot. He sincerely hoped the Rogue girl—Lila—would be on time. He needed to get to Banshee and talk to Connor as soon as feasible. There’d been a surprise liquor license inspection, and Connor had barely managed to keep the inspector from finding the product he’d apparently stashed in the DJ booth. Cian was beyond pissed. He had one rule for the MacFarlanes’ legitimate businesses, and that was that they stayed legit. No mixing the two ends of the family’s enterprises. It was just plain stupid and made it nearly impossible for them to launder the money that poured into the family coffers monthly.

But his younger brother always had a hard time following instructions and had apparently been using the club as a transfer point for their distributors in that part of the city. It was just the sort of foolish risk-taking that Cian had come to expect from Connor. The youngest of the four MacFarlane boys, Connor was an odd combination of reckless and organized. He played the role of the distribution manager in the family, supervising the men who put the product out on the streets, but then turning around and doing something like he had last summer—cheating on his longtime girlfriend with the sister of Alejandro Vasquez, a rival boss. Connor had not only lost a good woman, he’d brought the wrath of Vasquez down on them and created an ongoing headache for Cian.

Cian saw his guy stationed near the door to the coffee shop glance his way with a slight nod, and then knew to watch the brunette who’d just walked in. She was petite, her hair long, cascading from a high ponytail. Her facial features gave her away as mixed race, Asian and something else, and fit with her slight frame.

Her eyes were big and such a dark brown, they were almost black. Fine, arched brows sat like wings against her ivory skin, and Cian couldn’t help but think the whole effect was somewhat like cookies-and-cream ice cream. She wore skintight jeans and a plain white T-shirt with a V-neck. Her arms were adorned with a stack of silver bracelets as well as a variety of tattoos, all in black ink. But in the midst of the almost severe nature of her appearance was one slash of color—bright, shiny, and utterly beguiling. Lila from Rogue wore apricot lipstick on her full, decadent mouth, and as she walked up to his table while he stood to greet her, all he could think was how much he wanted to lick that shit off and see if it tasted even half as amazing as it looked.

“Mr. MacFarlane?” she asked as he looked down at her.

“In the flesh,” he murmured, putting out his hand. She stiffly shook with him, and he marveled at how tiny the bones of her hand were. He could crush them in a heartbeat. It made him feel strangely powerful and also concerned at the same time. How did a woman like this keep from being bruised by the mere weight and size of most other people?

“You Googled my picture, I assume?” he asked, watching her.

Her gaze snapped to his. “I’m a professional computer security specialist,” she huffed. “You don’t think I’d go to meet a new associate without finding out what he looked like, do you?”

“Of course not,” he answered, gesturing for her to sit down as he did the same. “Which is why my man sitting in the corner by the door has your entire dossier on his phone right now.”

She nodded as if to say “touché” and sat across from him.

“Can I have Danny get you anything?” he asked, fascinated by the precise and compact way she sat, taking up very little space, blending into her surroundings so well, except for those lips.

She turned and peered at Danny for a moment. “So he fetches coffee too?”

Cian didn’t take the bait even though he fought the urge to smirk. “He does what most employees do—whatever their boss asks them to.”

She gave him a look that spoke volumes. “My guess is his boss is somewhat like mine, meaning Danny gets asked to do a hell of a lot more than the average employee.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Be that as it may, he’ll get you a latte if you’d like.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Cian watched her for a moment. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him, but he wanted her to take his offer of a cup of coffee. The fact was he chose coffee shops for meetings like this for more than one reason. They were out in the open, making it next to impossible for anyone to threaten him. Conversely, they made him appear less intimidating to those he was meeting with. There were times he wanted to be scary, but there were plenty of times he didn’t. With a girl named Lila who worked on computers all day, he didn’t need to be the big, scary mob boss.

And finally, meeting in a coffee shop made Cian feel a little more normal. He liked to at least pretend he was an average businessman. Meeting someone at one of the family’s many rental properties, which were generally filled with their mules and dealers, or one of their bars, which were filled with the regulars you’d find at any liquor establishment, only furthered the image he secretly loathed—that of a criminal.

He tried not to let it show that her rejection of a cup of coffee was the cause of his existential angst. He needed to get his head examined, for fuck’s sake. It’s coffee, he reminded himself, and you are a criminal whether she drinks it or not.

“So, I assume your boss has gotten you up to speed with the plans thus far,” he said, turning away from his errant thoughts and on to the business at hand.

She sat up straighter, reaching down to the slouchy leather bag she’d carried in and removing a tablet. She touched the screen, bringing it to life, and pulled out a stylus. “He told me the plan was to ship the bath oils via United States postal.” She looked up at him, skepticism everywhere in her expression, “I can’t help but question the wisdom of that.”

He smiled slowly, watching the way a strand of hair that had fallen from her ponytail moved alongside her face as she talked. Her hair was shiny and thick like silk yarn, and when he looked closer, he saw that among the dark mass, there were stripes of red and purple. Subtle, but there, another chink in her armor of black and white.

“You wouldn’t be the first one to question our shipping choice, but I’m confident it will work,” he said, leaning back casually, one arm slung over the rigid back of the empty chair next to him. He noticed her track his movement, and he wondered what she thought of him. Cian generally dressed in expensive but not flashy clothes. He avoided the clichéd mobster-in-a-suit look, as well as anything that spoke of flash, trash, or, as Connor would put it, “something one of the Sopranos would wear.”

Today he was wearing a knit collared shirt, flat-front black pants, and a pair of lace-up boots that his cousin Maggie swore were the height of fashion. He didn’t really care, so long as they were comfortable, and they were. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and while his left forearm sported a TAG Heuer watch, his right was covered in a depiction of the Battle of Clontarf.

“I take it you don’t agree,” he said, one eyebrow raised.

Lila’s gaze shot back up to his, those beautiful, plush lips rolling together for a moment as she considered her response. Watching the movement made certain body parts spring to life in a very inopportune fashion.

“I think it’s a serious risk. One package breaks open and those bath oils will be all over the place,” she said. “Then postal inspectors get involved…” She let her sentence trail off at that point as she leaned forward slightly.

“These are bath salts actually,” he said, reaching for his cup of coffee. “It’s oil and salt all mixed together. Sloppy stuff in a very thick glass container.”

“Expensive to ship,” she interjected.

“Trust me,” he murmured. “We’ve run the numbers. The profit is substantial.”

“And if the container gets broken?”

“If it did, the salts would get everywhere.”

She looked at him, eyebrows raised as if to say, And?

He smiled, sipped his coffee, and finally leaned forward, his voice low and rough. “The items you’re worried about will be vacuum sealed and attached to the bottom of the glass container. If it gets broken, that will look like part of the packaging. It’s not going to be obvious,” he assured her. She didn’t look convinced.

“And dogs?” she asked quietly.

“They’ll always be a risk, but the oils and vacuum sealing should minimize it. If a package were to get broken open while a dog was right there, maybe, but beyond that, I don’t see anything to worry about.”

“How much money are we talking here?” she asked, writing something on her tablet.

“One hundred fifty a package, with costs of about fifty per package. That’s a hundred in profit. Multiply that by a few thousand orders a month, and you begin to see why this is a good idea.”

She sighed. “Okay, then. I guess we need to discuss the logistics.”

He nodded, taking one last look of longing at those lips. Yes, logistics. He was here for that. Not apricot lips or cups of coffee. Because at the end of the day, all the coffee shops in the world couldn’t change the fact that Cian MacFarlane was a mobster, and he would be for life.

* * *

Lila watched the man in front of her as he described what safeguards they’d need in place to protect their internet drug trade from the prying eyes of the feds. He wasn’t a tech guy, so he didn’t know how to do it, only what needed to be done. Her job was the how. She was simply a tool in his arsenal.

Lila had been ten years old when she’d realized she was also simply a tool in her father’s arsenal. She had a knack for numbers—and odds and fast calculations—and once he’d realized what she could do, he became her biggest fan, taking her to the track, making her sit next to him while he played online blackjack, trying to find unique ways to use her abilities to give him an advantage. And Lila had been so desperate for his approval and his love that she’d learned how to hack, breaking into online gambling sites to cheat the system so her gambling-addicted father could finally win more often than he lost.

She pushed away her inclination to compare her current situation to her childhood. They weren’t alike at all, she reminded herself. After all, her father had never paid her a dime for everything she did for him—not in cash, and sure as hell not in love.

She refocused on the man in front of her. She had to admit she’d expected Cian to be a lot more threatening. She’d dealt with criminals her entire life—hell, if she was being brutally honest, she was a criminal—but they were gamblers, addicts, tech nerds, hackers, former hackers, wannabe hackers. The people she normally dealt with got revenge by draining someone’s bank account, not hanging them from a hook in a meat locker and letting them bleed to death.

So, Lila had come to the Starbucks in Wicker Park—one of the newest, trendiest Starbucks in the city, teeming with hipsters and people who worked on laptops in coffee shops all day—expecting Cian MacFarlane to be…well…scary. And he was, but not in the way she’d expected. No, Cian MacFarlane felt mostly like a threat to her libido.

He was tall, dark, and hot, and she was disgusted with herself for being distracted by it—really for even noticing it. Thou shalt not lust after mob bosses. If that wasn’t in the Bible somewhere, it should be. Right along with thou shalt not take a job with an insane genius no matter how many zeroes are in the salary.

She sighed as Cian drew with his finger on the table, explaining that all customers would need to pay through a third-party vendor to put further distance between the money and the MacFarlane family.

“You could use cryptocurrency,” she said, interrupting him. He looked at her with blue eyes like cut glass.

“Bitcoins?” he asked.

“Yes, but a different brand. They’re untraceable. Easy for the customers to buy, and Rogue’s system is already set up for them.”

“But they’re hard to convert.” He looked at her again, and his gaze made her heart take a small skip.

“They are,” she admitted. “But there are ways.”

“Ways for six or seven figures? Month after month?”

She moved her head from side to side. “What about a certain percentage in crypto? Ten or twenty percent? We can adjust as necessary. I’d set up the whole system to monitor itself and adjust every forty-eight hours. So, if the percentage of crypto purchases fell below our benchmark, it would increase the number of crypto-only product listings. If it was higher than we designated, it would add other pay methods to more listings. Make sense?”

He nodded. “Perfect. Then we’d just need to convert the crypto each month?”

She liked that he was facile, quick to understand, and sparing in his questions.

“You might want to have it ongoing. Do smaller amounts every week or even every day. It won’t raise any red flags, and the income will be relatively consistent for that portion of the sales.”

He leaned back in his chair, crossing those nicely muscular arms across his broad chest. She couldn’t help but glance at the tattoos running up his right arm. Some sort of battle scene, it was chaos, all dark lines with bright splashes of color.

“It’s the Battle of Clontarf,” he said, smirking at her.

She snapped her gaze to his. “I wasn’t—I mean—”

“It was done by an old friend of mine. He owns a shop on Washington.” He looked down at his arm and used the opposite hand to point. “This is Cian mac Máelmuaid,” he said, sounding incredibly Irish as he pointed to the central figure who wore armor and a metal helmet while brandishing a large sword with two hands. “He and his father-in-law, the High King of Ireland, won the battle, freeing Ireland from the Vikings, but they perished in it as well.”

“That’s very sad,” she said, feeling oddly disturbed by the idea.

His voice was deeper and quieter as he answered. “Sometimes you have to lose something that matters in order to win something even greater.”

“So you were named for him?” she asked, reaching across the table before she’d even realized it to touch the warrior’s face on his forearm.

He made a small hiss as her skin touched his, and she moved to pull away, but he was faster, grabbing her fingers with his own, tracing over the lines of ink as he spoke softly.

“I was born on April twenty-third, the same day as the Battle of Clontarf. My mother saw that as a sign. Luckily, she chose Cian as the warrior to name me after and not Murchad or Toirdelbach.”

He chuckled, and she couldn’t help but join him. But as their gazes met, the laughter died out and all that was left was his hand on hers as they both touched his arm. Heat sizzled in his eyes, and warning sirens screamed in her head.

She snatched her hand away as if she’d been burned. Leaning back, her heart racing like a rabbit caught in a snare, Lila clicked off her tablet and hurriedly grabbed her bag off the floor, swinging it over her shoulder in one rushed motion.

“I think I understand all the security protocol we’ll need for this project,” she said, her voice tight, words clipped. “I’ll have Xavier get in touch as soon as I have it ready.”

He watched her warily, as if she were a wounded animal, prepared to strike should anyone get too close.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but no words came out. She was so disturbed by the feeling of his skin on hers, it had rendered her speechless, like some sort of high school girl when the quarterback speaks to her in the hallway. Finally, she simply muttered, “Okay, then…” and turned to go.

“Lila from Rogue,” he said, not loudly, but commanding all the same. She managed a quarter turn, looking at him over her shoulder, her breath frozen in her lungs. “Next time, you’ll take a cup of coffee.”

It wasn’t a question and not quite an order. Simply a statement of fact, a reminder that she could run, but she couldn’t hide. From him. From his family. From whatever the hell had just happened. All Lila could do was walk away, something inside her flaring with the realization she’d finally crossed a line she couldn’t come back from.