Page 22 of Rent a Mob Boss

Sal doesn’t ask questions. He sees us, reads the situation with the professional instinct of a man who’s survived decades in this family by knowing when to disappear, and drives. The divider goes up without me pressing the button. I make a note to give him a raise.

In the back seat, I don’t touch her.

I want to. She’s sitting close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her skin, and every cell in my body is telling me to pull her into my lap and finish what I started against that wall. But if I start in this car, I won’t be able to stop, and she deserves more than the back seat. She deserves a bed and time, and someone who’s paying attention to every detail.

She reaches over and laces her fingers through mine. Her hand is trembling.

“Are you afraid?” I ask.

“Terrified,” she says, and then, before I can respond, “Don’t you dare take that as a reason to stop.”

Something in my chest unlocks. A door I sealed shut years ago when Sofia died, and I decided to bury the part of me that reached for another person, because reaching for another person only ever brings complications. Yet this girl managed to make me forget why I ever made that decision, and she has no idea what a feat that is.

“I’m not going to stop,” I tell her. “But I need you to tell me if something doesn’t feel right. At any point. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of it. You tell me, and I stop. Understood?”

“Understood,” she whispers like she’s trying to convince both of us she’s braver than she feels.

The gate opens. The driveway unfolds. The house is dark except for the lights I leave on for Lillie, and I remember, with a jolt, that my daughter is sleeping upstairs, and Ms. Beaumont is in the guest cottage, and there are guards at the perimeter, and none of that changes what’s about to happen.

My bedroom is at the far end of the hall. I’ve never brought anyone here. This room is mine alone and has been since I took ownership of this family. Sofia had her own room, her own life that ran parallel to mine and only intersected now and then. The sheets have only ever known me.

Until tonight.

I close the door behind us, and the sound it makes is final, and Quinn stands in the middle of my room. The moonlight from the window catches the fabric and her hair and her face, and I have wanted a lot of things in my life—power, safety, control, my daughter’s happiness—and none of it has felt like this. None of it has made my hands shake.

I cross to her. I take her face in my hands, the way I’ve imagined for months—my thumbs on her cheekbones, my fingers in her hair—and I kiss her slowly, carefully, the way I should have kissed her the first time, before the wall and the urgency took over. She melts into it. Her hands come up to my wrists, holding on.

“Turn around,” I murmur against her mouth.

She does. I find the zipper at the back of the green dress, and I pull it down, slowly, one vertebrae at a time. The fabric parts, and underneath it is skin I’ve been imagining since the first morning she walked into my house.

The dress falls. She catches it at her hips, an instinct, a hesitation, and I put my mouth against the back of her neck and say, “Let it go.”

She lets it go.

I’ve been with one woman in my life. Sofia was beautiful and practiced, and everything between us was choreographed—performed, like the marriage itself. I knew what to do; she knew what to do, and we did it. It was fine, and I never once felt like the ground was moving under me.

The ground is moving now.

I turn Quinn to face me, and I look at her, and she lets me, even though her hands are trembling, and her breath is coming fast. She lets me look, and that trust does something to me that I don’t have the language for. It tears me apart.

I guide her to the bed. I lay her down. Her hair fans across my pillow, blonde against dark sheets, and she looks up at me while I shed my jacket, my tie, the shirt, and I watch her eyes move over me the way mine moved over her in the boutique. Fair is fair.

What comes next is slow. Slower than my body wants. Every part of me is wound tight, months of wanting compressed into a single night, years of nothing before that. There’s a hunger in me I didn’t know could get this sharp, and it’s pulling at me, demanding, but I hold it back because this is her first time, and I will not be the man who rushes it.

I learn her. That’s the only word for it. I learn the sound she makes when I kiss her neck, and the different sound when I kiss lower, and the way her back arches when my hand finds the curve of her waist, and the way her fingers dig into my shoulders when I work my way down her body and spread her thighs wider so I can worship the swollen nub peeking out from between her plump lips.

She tenses when my breath hits her sensitive skin. “Relax,” I urge, and it comes out rough and raw. “Let me taste you. I need to feel you come on my tongue.”

“Oh, god…” Her eyes close, and her head falls back against the pillow like a wanton angel. “Dorian…”

I could live on the sound of her whispering my name. I could live on the sweet, musky taste of her. No other man has ever been here, has ever dipped his tongue into her pink folds and learned what makes her writhe. No other man has licked her from asshole to clit and back down again, memorizing every gasp, every twitch, every pulse that sends fresh nectar to coat my tongue and drive me wild with need.

I look up at her across the length of her body. Luscious tits rising and falling with every ragged breath. Head turning from side to side on the pillow while she claws at the sheets. Her hips start to move, and I go with it, letting her ride my face and take what she needs from me while my cock drips with my own need. Her first time. This has to be good for her.

Her hips shoot up off the mattress, and a sound comes out of her that makes my cock twitch and drip. “Oh, god!” she moans before shattering, drowning me in her juices while her pussy flutters, and her thighs squeeze my head before falling to either side.

“Oh, wow,” she whimpers, trembling and breathing hard. Her flushed face glows, and she smiles up at me once I’ve crawled up the length of her, settling between her legs.