Page 25 of Rent a Mob Boss

“I think Poptart should sleep outside,” I manage, holding my sheet in place while trying to get a hand on her to make her stop jumping before she falls off the bed. All we need is a concussion or worse to complete this morning’s bingo card.

“But he gets lonely!”

From somewhere down the hall, I hear Dorian’s voice, low and tight, talking to Ms. Beaumont about the pony and the elevator and the poop and, from what I can gather, the need for some kind of locking mechanism on the elevator a five-year-old cannot defeat. Ms. Beaumont’s voice is calm and unflappable because I’m starting to believe the woman has seen everything that can possibly happen in this house and nothing surprises her anymore.

Lillie takes one last, epic bounce before flopping on the bed with her head on the pillow next to where mine was. She kicks her feet in the air. “Your hair is messy.”

I touch a hand to it. Sex hair. I have it. “I know.”

“It looks pretty like that, though.”

“Thank you.”

“Daddy’s hair was messy, too. He looked grumpy.”

“Well, honey. He did just step in poop.”

“Poptart says he’s sorry.” She looks at the pony, who does not look the least bit sorry. “I told her sorry for you,” she whispers to the horse.

I love this kid so much it physically hurts.

Ms. Beaumont arrives with the efficiency of a woman who’s been managing disasters in this household for longer than I’ve been alive. She takes one look at the room and simply nods. “I’ll have this sorted in fifteen minutes,” she says. “Lillie, come with me. Poptart is going back outside.”

“But—”

“Now, please.”

Lillie goes, but not before throwing her arms around my neck and squeezing hard enough to relocate several of my vertebrae. “Bye, Quinn. Tell Daddy not to be grumpy.”

And then it’s just me, alone in Dorian’s bedroom, wrapped in his sheet, with the distinct smell of horse manure lingering in the air. Last night I was in an emerald dress being kissed against a wall. This morning, I smell like a barn.

I find one of his T-shirts in a drawer—dark, soft, enormous on me—and a pair of his sweatpants that I have to roll at the waist three times. I pull my hair back with a band from my clutch and brush my teeth with my finger and the fancy toothpaste in his guest bathroom since he’s showering in his. When I look in the mirror, I see a girl wearing a man’s clothes after spending the night. That’s exactly what I am. I don’t know how to feel about it. Happy? Terrified? Something in between that doesn’t have a name yet?

I find him in the hallway, freshly showered and in a clean shirt, smelling like soap instead of horse. He looks at me in his clothes, and something moves across his face—something warm, maybe possessive—before he shuts it down.

“I should probably go,” I murmur, because I don’t know what the protocol is. What do you do the morning after you sleep with your boss? Is there a handbook? There should be a handbook.

“No.” He says it simply. “Stay. Have breakfast.”

“Are you sure? Because I can⁠—”

“Quinn.” He steps closer. His hand comes up and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is so gentle, so ordinary, so much like something a boyfriend would do instead of a boss, that my throat closes. “Stay.”

“Okay,” I whisper.

Breakfast is almost normal.

Almost, because Lillie is narrating the entire Poptart adventure to anyone who will listen. “And then he got in the elevator, and he pressed the button with his nose, Daddy!”

Dorian is alternating between cutting her toast into triangles and pinching the bridge of his nose. I’m sitting across from them in a T-shirt that reaches my knees, once again eating the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had. It feels so much like the dream I was having before the horse showed up that I’m afraid to look at it directly, in case it disappears.

But something else catches my attention.

Through the kitchen window, I count four men on the east lawn. I’ve been coming here for months. I know the routine. There are usually two. Sometimes Paul and Buttercup on the east side in the mornings. Today there are four, and none of them is Paul, and they’re not walking. They’re standing, positioned, like they’re covering sight lines.

There’s another one by the gate. I can see him from here. And when I came down the stairs, there was a man in the front hall I’ve never seen before. He was wearing an earpiece, and he nodded at me the way Marco nods at me, but he wasn’t Marco. There was something in the way he nodded that felt less like good morning and more like noted.

“There are a lot of people outside today,” I mention, keeping my voice light. Casual. Like it’s no big deal.