I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend just for a few minutes. Please,” she says.

I look down at all five-foot nothing of her. Thick red hair in a loose ponytail. Smooth, porcelain skin. Lips thick as sin and flushes red like her cheeks. And those eyes… They’re a perfect blue to go with her hair, and the skin beneath them is tinged with red, like she’s been crying or she’s about to.

When I don’t respond right away, she shoots a nervous look over her shoulder toward a black Rolls-Royce idling outside. Nice car. Expensive car.

I let her request marinate for a few long, unhurried moments, enjoying the thought of it. I have rules, though. I don’t do relationships. Commitments are weaknesses. Chinks in the armor to be exploited by a cunning enemy. And yet…

I want to have her. I’m not sure how I can say, but I can tell there’s something profoundly different about her. Maybe it’s just the hideous dress she wears or the innocent defiance in her eyes. It might even be the car idling ominously outside. What I do know is that I’m already willing to bend my rules for her. Just for a little while, at least.

I look back at her and make my decision. It’s an easy one.

I slide my hand around her, letting it fall to her ass where I take a generous, greedy squeeze.

She gasps and melts into me, putting her small hands up against my chest to brace herself, and in that moment, I know I’m in trouble. Her hands feel small and warm against me. Delicate. It makes me want to wrap her in my arms and hold her to keep the world away from her, to protect her and never let go.

Stupid. So fucking stupid, Angelo. Just walk away. Don’t drag her into your world. Don’t poison her. Let her leave.

I should. But I’m too selfish to let her get away. I know I’d only spend the rest of my life wondering what she would’ve tasted like, wondering how sweet her moans would’ve sounded in my ear, how hot and wet her breath would be against my neck when she came for me again and again.

“Why pretend?” I ask, tilting her chin up to me with my forefinger. I take those sweet, plump lips in mine. She tastes as good as she looks, and when my tongue flicks into her mouth, hers swirls back against mine, hot and hungry.

I was only planning on a quick kiss, but fuck. I’d take a casual kiss with this girl over the best sex I’ve ever had. I pull her closer, not caring about the way people are gasping and making prim noises of disapproval around us.

When I finally pull back from the kiss, she’s so red-faced she looks sunburnt across her freckled cheeks and practically grasping for breath. “I didn’t get your name,” she whispers.

“Angelo,” I say. I nearly tell her then and there who I am and what I do. I almost tell her to get lost before she gets attached and winds up hurt. Angelo Luciani. Don of the Luciani crime family. The last thing men have seen before they died. The last thing you need in your sweet, innocent little life.

“Ana,” she says.

“I want to see you again. Come to my club tonight. Wear black. And you’d better not dare wear panties,” I add a little more quietly, even though our public kissing session seems to have cleared us a relatively open space in the coffee shop.

She stammers out something between a laugh and a croak. She calms herself with a visible effort and then looks up to meet my eyes before looking away again a split second later, as if deciding eye contact is a bad idea right now. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. I’m sorry. I know this was sudden.” She makes a half-hearted gesture to the car behind her. “They’re waiting on me though and I only needed—”

“Take this,” I say, stuffing my card in her hand.

She looks at the card and then back at me, chewing that plump lip of hers on one side before she stuffs the card in her bra and gives me a shy but playful twist of her lips.

“Don’t stand me up,” I say.

She opens her mouth to protest, but lowers her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t know if this—if I can—”

“You will, because if you don’t come tonight, I’m going to have to track you down. This is a big fucking city, and I’m going to expect a big fucking reward for my efforts if it comes to that.”

She gives me the first glimpse of her smile then. Sweet and shy and seductive all wrapped into a perfect, tight little package. Just like her.

Goddamn she’s going to be trouble for me.

She takes one step backwards toward the exit, pauses, and then reaches to shake my hand.

I take her hand and pull her in again, stealing one more kiss. She lingers in it, as unwilling as I am to break away, but finally whatever waits for her in that car seems to win out, and she leaves me standing there with a strange, sad look in her eyes like she doesn’t think we’ll ever meet again.

Bad news, Ana. If you think this is the end, you don’t know me well enough. I never let something I want get away. Never.

The music of the club thumps, heavy and hard, like a fist against my chest. It’s past the hours most decent people stay awake, past even the hours most indecent people stay awake, but that’s when the club comes alive. My club. Club Seven.

Seven floors, each caters to progressively more unique sexual needs and desires. For a Dom trying to break in a girl who’s new to BDSM, there’s not a better place you could ask for. Relying on shock and awe doesn’t work as well as most would think, and I’ve heard of many Doms scaring away their submissives after just a few minutes inside a true BDSM club. They think they’ll take a girl they met at Starbucks into a playroom and jump straight into whipping her with a riding crop. They don’t understand that everything good and bad is its own kind of drug. BDSM is no different, and that’s why my club is the perfect place for Doms to ease their submissives into the lifestyle.

I’m on the first floor now, which is essentially just a typical club with a dance floor, a great atmosphere, and a full bar.

My younger brother, Gino sits beside me. He’s inspecting his shot glass—rotating it in a slow circle and studying the reflected light it casts on the bar. “Fuck, man,” he says. “Enzo would know what to do.”

Enzo. Our older brother. When our father got a life sentence, Enzo would’ve inherited the Luciani family business, except he passed it on to me instead. Can’t blame a man for wanting to protect the ones he cares about though. He has a family now, after all.

“You saying I don’t?” I ask, voice dangerous.

Gino just shrugs. Almost any man in the city will shrink back from even a shadow of my anger, but not my brothers. “I’m saying we’ve known the Torretti are up to something for two days and we haven’t done shit.”

I wave off his concerns. “We’ll handle it. But I don’t want to talk business. Not tonight.”

He raises an eyebrow at me. “A girl?”

I nod. “I’m starting to think she’s going to make me go hunt her down, though.”

He chuckles. “Someone had the nerve to stand up Angelo Luciani? She’s screwed.”

“She has no idea.”