Franco and Donnie loom at the back of the coffee shop. When I can’t think of a good enough excuse, my father manages to have some of his guys keep an eye on me at all times. It’s maddening, and it’s something I’ve never gotten used to.

Technically, Joe, who stands in line with me, is also one of my father’s men, but he has never felt like a watchdog to me. Joe is a friend. He’s on the thin and wiry side for a guy in the mafia, but my father doesn’t keep him around for his muscle. Joe has a good mind for business, and his ideas have made my father a great deal of money. He’s handsome in the way I picture a good salesman being, as odd as that sounds: you wouldn’t call him sexy, but he’s clean and pleasant to look at. He’s definitely nothing like Angelo…

I let my mind wander back to my date with him. It was three days ago now. Long enough for me to start agonizing over my subtle refusal to lock in a second date or to take things a step farther. I was acting out of fear more than anything else. Some part of me was scared of how quickly things developed. There was a very real connection between us, and it wasn’t just physical. I felt comfortable with him at my side, even in such a strange and unfamiliar place.

When he was massaging me after he slept with me—ucked me—I thought I could finally understand people who got married after only knowing someone for a week. I can only imagine how easily and quickly I would fall into Angelo’s charm if it wasn’t for my father. He’d never let me marry a man he didn’t approve of. The bait doesn’t get to choose which fish will bite. As far as he’s concerned, he’ll only toss me in the water when he knows exactly who is going to bite and when. I’m his.

But for the first time in my life, I feel like there’s someone to rival his strength, someone to contest his claim over me.

Everything about him and that night felt good. And that’s what scares me. Before Angelo, I had less to lose if my father got his way. I had school and my silly hobby of writing short stories, but there wasn’t much else.

“You good?” asks Joe. He has an oddly deep voice for his small frame.

“Yep. Perfect.” My response comes a little too quick and cheery.

Joe raises his eyebrows. “Wow. That bad? Are you going to make me pry, or will you just tell me what happened?”

I sigh. “You’re sure daddy didn’t put you up to this?”

“Come on, Ana.” Joe’s tone is dismissive, like I just made a good joke. He swipes his card, paying for both our coffees and then we head toward a table near the windows. “I just know you’ll keep whatever it is bottled up forever if I don’t force it out of you.”

“That’s not true. I always end up telling you what’s going on.”

“You do. After I pry.”

I give him a crooked, reluctant smile. “Okay, fine. I may have pretended to have a boyfriend to get daddy to stop pestering me about it. Except… Well, the guy I asked to play the part ended up being really into the idea.”

Joe chuckles. “You don’t say?” His voice drips with sarcasm, like I shouldn’t be shocked at all that someone would want to pretend to be my boyfriend.

“He talked me into a date and somewhere along the way things got confusing. I wasn’t sure we were still pretending, and then we definitely weren’t pretending.”

“So?” he asks when I don’t speak for a while. “Where’s the catch?”

“I wasn’t ready to make it official. I don’t think I fully realized that’s what was going on, but everything happened so fast. I just kind of froze up. I guess I pushed him away. Now it has been three days and he’s probably off with some new girl already.”

“Hm. Any chance I know the guy?”

I shrug. “His name is Angelo. He’s tall, ridiculously fit, and he’s got this blue eyes and a kind of wolfish sexy thin—” I clear my throat, feeling my cheeks burn when I notice the way Joe is trying to keep from grinning.

“A last name would probably help more than knowing he’s wolfishly sexy.”

“Last names never came up,” I admit.

Joe raises an eyebrow. “Ana. You dog.”

I laugh. “Oh please. Shut up.”

“Well, he’ll turn up sooner or later from the sounds of it. And if he doesn’t, we can just assume he was with the Lucianis. Afterall, you know the head of the Luciani’s is named Angelo, right?”

I cringe a little at that. I don’t know why at first, but maybe it’s because I saw some of the same tendencies in him I’d seen in my father’s men. The air of potential violence. The strong, deadly confidence. The way people wordlessly deferred to him and got out of his way, as if he was someone they respected and feared.

“Can you imagine?” I ask, trying to make my tone light even though I’m still cringing inside to think I might’ve let a guy from the Lucianis sleep with me. My father wouldn’t just disown me. He’d probably burn half the city down trying to get revenge.

Joe shakes his head. “With all the shit that has been going on between the families, no…” He lowers his voice, leaning in a little. “It’s bad, Ana. I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but you remember Harry, right?”

I nod. Harry was one of my father’s men. I’d met him at some point, maybe when I was younger, but I could only call up a cloudy image of his face. Dark eyes, glasses, hair graying at the temples, and thick laugh lines around his mouth.

“The Lucianis tried to kill him. He’s pretty banged up, but he’ll make it.”

“What?” I ask. “Why would they?” Tensions had always been high between the families, but it usually only boiled over into fist fights or shoving matches, as far as I knew. I heard stories of murders and worse things, but most of it was from when I was just a little girl. I’d started to think those days were long gone and never coming back.

He shrugs. “Trying to make a statement. Trying to provoke us. Who fucking knows. Your father wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but you should be extra careful for a while. There have been moves on both sides, and, well...” He trails off, looking worried. “Just be careful.”

Joe leaves to go meet with my father and some of his top men half an hour later. I wait until Donnie and Franco aren’t actively glaring at me to get up and walk out of the coffee shop. They’ll catch up eventually—they always do, but I enjoy making their job harder. It’s one of many small acts of rebellion that keep me sane.

When I step outside, I notice an expensive looking car parked on the curb. The door opens upwards instead of out, like some kind of sleek metal bird raising one of its wings. Angelo steps out of the car, looking too tall to have fit inside once he straightens and comes toward me. As usual, he manages to draw the attention of everyone outside.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says. He’s wearing a casual kind of suit with a crisp white shirt and a navy blue jacket that makes his eyes seem to almost glow blue.

“I’ve been waiting,” I say. The words slip out of me before I have a chance to stop them. That sounded way too desperate.

He doesn’t laugh at me though or make a face. He only reaches out for my cheek and pulls me into his chest. I fall into the hug with frightening ease, letting his warmth and strength blanket me like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“That’s a nice car,” I mutter into his chest.

He chuckles. The sound rumbles through me, straight through his chest, like boulders rubbing together. “Want a ride?”

I glance toward the coffee shop again and see Donnie and Franco just now standing up to look for me. “Please.”

He walks me to the passenger door of his car, which has attracted the attention of a small group of men and their camera phones. People snap a few confused shots of Angelo helping me into the car, the looks on their faces saying they aren’t quite sure what is going on but they still want pictures of it, probably just so they can post it to their Instagrams later to prove they live more exciting lives than all their friends.

Angelo gets behind the wheel, revs the engine, and pulls away.

“So I guess you do pretty well for yourself with the club?” I ask.

He makes a more or less kind of movement with his head, but doesn’t seem like he’s going to elaborate.

“Is that the only club you own?” I ask. I hate how much I sound like a pest, even to myself, but my mind is still stuck on my conversation with Joe and the possibility that Angelo could be part of the Lucianis.

“I’m involved in a lot of things,” he says.

Cryptic.

I nod. He clearly doesn’t want to go into more detail, so I decide to wait for a better time to press him for more. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me,” I say. I want to cringe. Could you stop babbling for two seconds, Ana? Maybe even try to make it sound like you weren’t playing some juvenile game of hard to get?

The frustrating part is that I’m not trying to make any sort of game out of this. My problem is that I can’t quite push through the mental hurdle of my father’s disappointment.

“No,” he says with a touch of something I can’t quite place in his voice. Sadness? Regret? “No… I don’t think I’ll be forgetting about you, little pet.”

I smile to myself. If any other guy tried to plaster me with a pet name, especially as quickly as Angelo did, it’d irritate me. With Angelo, it only makes me feel warm, fuzzy, and oddly comfortable. “So how’d you find me?”

“Wasn’t easy,” he says. “I had to get a couple favors. Bribe some people. Make a few threats.”

“What?” I choke. “Seriously?”

A slow smile forms on his lips. “No. I just looked you up online. Saw where you live and checked the closest coffee shop. Got you on the first try. Your address is on all your social media, you know. I didn’t dig past your address though. Don’t worry. Any creep could find you, though. Even a sexual deviant,” he adds with an amused twist of his mouth.

I grin. “Yeah, you’ve made that much clear.” My mouth dries a second later when I realize he might have dug deeply enough to figure out who my father is. I calm myself by remembering what my father explained to me years ago: officially, my middle name was my last name and he’d used all of his considerable influence to make any sort of official documents that linked me to the Torrettis nearly impossible to find. It was, of course, all to keep me safe.

“Speaking of which, I thought I’d take you somewhere normal for our second date.”

“Second date?” I ask.

“You did get in my car. If I remember correctly, you actually begged to get in. From where I’m sitting, that’s consent enough.”

“If that’s your definition of consent, I’d better be careful.”

“I gave you a safe word for a reason.”

The memory sends a quick, cold chill through me. “Right.”

“Who were those guys in the coffee shop, anyway?”

“Guys?” I ask, genuinely confused at first.

“The two beefcakes. They were watching you while you had coffee and then they came running after you when you left.”

He means Franco and Donnie. My chest tightens. I can’t exactly say I’m the daughter of a mobster and that my daddy likes to have muscle watching me whenever he can.

I shrug as innocently as I can. “I’m not sure who they could’ve been.”

Angelo turns to give me a serious glare, the kind that makes me want to crawl inside my own skin and hide from the intensity of it. “Don’t lie to me, Ana.”

“Okay,” I say quickly, mentally scrambling for some kind of plausible explanation to dig myself out of the lie. “My father is pretty powerful. He’s super overprotective, and that’s why those guys were tailing me. They’re bodyguards.”

“Some bodyguards,” he says quietly, almost to himself. “Letting you get in a car with a guy like me.”

“A guy like you?” I ask.

“You know,” he says. “Sexual deviant. Bad influence. I could go on…”

“What?” I ask, voice dripping with sarcasm. “You’re making me think it was a bad idea to get in this car with you.”

“Horrible idea.”

“So you want to prove you’re normal, huh? Should I start worrying that your definition of normal is some kind of BDSM club on a submarine?”

He grins. “Who told you about Club Sub?”

I snort out a very un-ladylike laugh. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Kind of,” he admits. “There are some strange clubs out there, but I’ve never heard of a submarine. Maybe I need to make that happen.”

“Something tells me that wouldn’t be a great idea. So?” I ask again. “Where are we going?”

“To see a movie.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Is it a porn?”

He smiles. “A normal movie. Something romantic.”

“A porn?”

He glares at me, but his expression is still slightly amused. “I’m beginning to think you want our second date to be something dirty and devious.”

I shrug as innocently as I can. “Nope. Normal is fine.” I hope I sound convincing. He’s not entirely wrong. I have hardly been able to put our first night together from my mind. His touch. His scent. His passion. I wrapped the memory around me like a kind of comforting cocoon, but every day and hour that passed since has made me lose that warm glow. Made our time together a little more distant.

“You’re a bad liar. I like that about you. It means you can’t hide anything from me, little pet.”

I stare out the window, a guilty smile on my lips. “I’m not dirty,” I say. “I just…” I feel like I’m made of liquid fire whenever you’re near me, like my skin and your skin is made to be pressed together, like the only thing that matters is the friction between us, not the millions of reasons we shouldn’t be together. “I don’t know,” I sigh, not wanting to say what’s really on my mind for fear that I’ll sound crazy or make him start asking questions about my family.

He cocks his head at me, but doesn’t say anything. He only looks thoughtful, like he’s trying to puzzle out what I’m saying by not saying, but he isn’t going to press me to explain myself.

“Thank you,” I say suddenly.

He glances at me, eyebrows raised as if to say, for what?

“Sorry,” I laugh. “Just ignore me.”

“Afraid I’m not going to be able to do that. You have a little bit of a distracting effect on me.”

“It’s probably my tendency to make a fool of myself. Hard to look away from that, I’d bet. Like a car crash waiting to happen.”

“No. I think it has more to do with me wanting to fuck you.”

He hasn’t made any secret of his attraction to me, and he definitely wasn’t hiding it at the club the other night, but his directness still hits me like a punch in the stomach, sending a warm rush of heat to my lower stomach and my cheeks. “There’s that,” I say very quietly.

We pull up to the theater a few minutes later. It’s an old-fashioned building with an elaborate marquee out front. The display reads. “Private Engagement: Ana and Angelo”. I give him a look when I see that, but he only flashes the faintest of smiles.

“You know how dirty private engagement sounds, right?”

His smile spreads now. “Yes. But I didn’t realize how dirty your mind was when I planned this. I still thought you were just some innocent little thing that had wandered into my life by mistake.”

I try to look offended. “I’ll have you know, I’m perfectly innocent.”

“Okay,” he says, but the tone in his voice says he’s not convinced.

“Seriously!” I say. I actually start to feel a little irritated that he doesn’t believe me as he pulls the car into a parking space out front. “What happened the other night was not my usual self.”

“So you were a virgin?” he asks.

“That’s a little personal.”

He leans in, eyes hard and intense, lips so close I can feel the breath puff from his mouth with each word. “My cock in your pussy was personal. That was just a question.”

I clear my throat, unable to deny a certain kind of logic to his point. “I wasn’t a virgin.”

He nods. “But you haven’t been with many guys before.” It’s not even a question. He states it like it’s a fact.

“Should I be offended that you’re so sure? Was I that bad?”

“You were perfect. A lot of women think they know what men want. They try too hard. They’re fake. They moan too loud and they run their hands over their bodies because they think it’s sexy. You were just you. Every sound and movement was pure and true. It was the sexiest goddamn thing I’ve ever experienced. Why do you think I hunted you down today?”

I catch myself chewing my lip and force myself to stop. I read once that the first sign someone is sexually aroused is that they’ll touch or stimulate their lips. Something tells me a guy like Angelo can read my lip chewing as clearly as a neon sign that says “horny.” “You were okay,” I say, not knowing where I’m digging up the nerve to tease him from, but enjoying it all the same.

He actually growls. Not a full on bear in the woods growl, but something low and oddly sexy while being terrifying at the same time. I barely hear it, but I can see the fire in his eyes that tells me I didn’t imagine it.

“I had planned a normal, nice evening, but if you want to provoke me…”

“So all I need to do is tease you to get a spanking?”

His hand grips the steering wheel tighter, like he’s barely controlling himself. “If you want a spanking, all you need to do is ask, little pet.”

My cheeks burn red. It was a joke. With most guys, that much would be obvious, but there’s something about Angelo that makes me think he is serious. Spankings, risky, wild public sex… I think all of it is on the table with him. My habit of turning my discomfort into a quick joke just might get me into a very deep kind of trouble with him. I had better be more careful. Or maybe I shouldn’t.

This date is going to be interesting.