Page 13 of The Mobster’s Maid

Then his hand slides out of me. Slow. Careful. He wipes his fingers on his own thigh, on the outside of his dark trousers, and I watch — from where my cheek is against the wood — his other hand catch the waistband of my leggings and pull them back up over my hips.

He does not take me the way every line of his body is telling me he wants to take me.

He straightens me. Turns me. Sits me on the edge of the polished wood so my feet don’t have to hold my weight, because they can’t. Cups my face in both hands. Looks at me for a full second like he is memorizing something.

Then he kisses me, his mouth soft at the corners in a way nothing else about him is.

“I’m not fucking you until you decide.”

Right against my mouth.

“That is the meanest thing anyone has ever done to me.”

The corner of his mouth pulls.

“Decide, Rosalie.”

He kisses me one more time. Very softly. Then he steps back and stalks out of the study.

The polished wood is cool against my palms. My legs are still shaky. My leggings are pulled up but the front of them is wet through. I press one hand flat over my mouth and try to hear my own breathing over my heart.

He made sure, in the most patient, filthy, precise way he could, that when I decide I already know exactly what I’m choosing.

5

Rosalie

The kitchen smells of yeast and rain.

I am kneading bread because it is either bread or something my hands cannot be trusted with, and I have decided the kitchen counter deserves the bread.

Once again, I didn’t sleep well.

On top of replaying the moments when he kissed me and had his hands in my hair, I had the memory of the mahogany writing desk, the ghost of his hand between my thighs, and the actual — physical — small bruise along the top of my hips where the front edge of the desk pressed into me while he was —

I press my knuckles into the dough and lean my weight into them.

Do not think about it while you are elbow-deep in flour.

Rain is falling outside. Rare, in LA, in August. I have one of the kitchen windows cracked so I can hear it. The sound of it steadies me the way rain always has, because we didn’t get much growing up and every time it fell Dad used to say listen, baby girl, the sky’s remembering its manners. Something about that memory in this kitchen at three in the morning when it’s dark outside, with my hands in dough and my body still achy from my boss, closes my throat up.

I have never come like that in my life.

I’ve read about the scene I experienced. In books. The polished wood, the palm smoothing over the marked skin, the two fingers curled just so.

I did not believe it happened to real people.

It happened to me. Over a two-hundred-year-old writing desk. With a mobster’s palm on my nape. And if he had not stopped when he did, I would have let him do absolutely anything.

I am in trouble. Real trouble.

I punch down the dough. Turn it. Fold it into itself. Punch it down again. The yeast is warm and alive under my hands and it doesn’t judge me.

I should call Elsie.

I don’t.

My cousin is hiding from Zidaru on a mountain in Arizona with a man she is falling for, and the last thing she needs is me on the other end of a phone at one in the morning saying by the way I let my mobster boss spank me over a desk and it turns out I liked it more than any of the books said I would.