Page 16 of Rent a Mob Boss

Every drop of blood in my entire body goes directly to my face. I can actually feel it happening. “Fine!” It comes out an octave too high. “Fine. Just—the zipper got stuck. On the dress. I was fighting with the zipper.”

He goes silent for approximately six thousand years before asking, “Do you need help?”

“Nope. No, got it. All good. I’m coming.” Oh my god, kill me now. “I mean, I’m coming out now. Out of the fitting room.”

I yank my clothes on with the speed of someone defusing a bomb, and I check the mirror. I look like a tomato with hair, but I can’t stay in here all night. After three deep breaths, I count to five, then open the curtain with a smile I hope reads as relaxed and normal, but probably reads more like recently electrocuted.

He’s standing right there. Closer than I expected. He’s not wearing his jacket anymore—it’s in front of him, draped over his arm. “The zipper,” he murmurs.

“I got it. Fine. Everything’s great.”

He gives me a single nod. I would give every dollar I have to know what is happening behind that face. “We’ll take the green,” he tells Adriana. His voice is perfectly level, but he won’t stop looking at me.

I really, really wish he would stop looking at me.

But if he did, I would be devastated.

6

DORIAN

I’m a grown man.

A grown man who runs an operation spanning three boroughs and two states. I have sat across from federal prosecutors and not blinked. I’ve made decisions that altered the trajectory of men’s lives while finishing a glass of scotch. I have never, not once, lost control of a situation I walked into prepared for.

I am currently sitting in an armchair in a women’s boutique with my suit jacket folded across my lap because I have an erection that won’t go away, and the twenty-year-old nanny I brought here to buy a dress just made a sound behind a curtain that I’m going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my natural life.

It started with the green dress. Honestly, it started before the green dress. It started with the navy one, the way the fabric sat on her shoulders, the bare strip of collarbone. She walked out, and I told her no, because the color was wrong—that was true. I also said no because if I’d said yes, we would’ve left, and I wasn’t ready to stop looking at her. I can admit that to myself.

The black one was worse. She moved in it. The skirt did something when she turned, and I watched her turn, and something in me tightened and didn’t let go. Something low down in my core. Something dangerous.

Then came the green.

She walked out in the green, and I had to put my glass down because I needed both hands to grip the chair. That is not something I’ve ever needed to do before in response to a woman in a dress. It fit her the way I would fit her if I were a dress: close, deliberate, aware of every line underneath it. The neckline sat just low enough. The fabric moved with her like water. She stood there looking at me, waiting for my verdict, and what I wanted to say was not something that belonged in a boutique with an audience.

I said, “That one.” My voice sounded like it had been dragged through gravel. I saw her notice it, too.

And then she went back behind the curtain to change while I sat in this chair and thought about baseball statistics and cold water and the time Tristan accidentally shot a hole in his own radiator. None of it worked, because my body had already made a decision my brain was not invited to.

Then the sound. Small. Barely there. A caught breath, a tiny, stifled thing most people would’ve missed. I am not most people, and I was listening. Not deliberately or consciously, but the way I listen to everything. My whole system is wired to catalog sounds and assign them threat levels. The sound coming from behind that curtain was not distress, nor was it a zipper, and it was not a woman struggling with a dress.

I know damn well what I heard.

My whole body went tight in the chair. Everything I had been managing for the past half hour—like the disciplined, controlled man I’m supposed to be—surged forward all at once and settled directly in my lap. Suddenly, my jacket had a job to do, so I removed it and held it in front of myself in hopes of providing cover.

Her face is roughly the color of a sunset when she comes out. She’s dressed in her jeans and her T-shirt. Her hair is slightly wilder than it was when she went in. She will not look at me. She’s looking at the floor, at the racks, at Adriana, at the champagne she abandoned on the table. In other words, she’s looking at every single thing in this building except me.

It should help. A girl refusing to meet my eyes should break whatever’s happening to my body.

It does not help. The blush goes all the way down her neck and disappears under the collar of her shirt, and I find myself following it, wondering how far it goes. The jacket stays exactly where it is. It’s more a matter of self-preservation at this point.

She looks like she wants the marble floor to open and swallow her. Something about it sends a surge of sudden, ferocious tenderness for her all through me. I have no right to feel it. I know I don’t.

Especially since underneath that tenderness, there’s something much less gentle. Something much more animal.

“We’ll take the green,” I tell Adriana. It’s a real achievement, the way I’m able to keep my voice level.

Adriana has been pretending to organize a rack of scarves for the past ten minutes with the quiet professionalism of a woman who has seen everything. She boxes the dress quickly, efficiently, and manages to do it without looking at either of us.