Page 4 of The Mobster’s Maid

I’ve been humming without noticing I was doing it, the way I always do when I’m this deep into a bake. Cinnamon-orange scones today. My favorite. Which is why I’ve been up to my elbows in flour since well before dawn and why there is, almost certainly, a smear of it somewhere on my face I haven’t caught. My kitchen, my hour. My rhythm.

Only it isn’t just my kitchen anymore. The dough is nearly the right thickness when I hear his voice.

“Rosalie Palmer.”

The rolling pin clatters against the marble before my brain has finished registering the sound.

I spin, one hand flying to my chest, and a puff of flour goes up between us in a small cinnamon-scented cloud. My eyes catch on the shape in the doorway and go wide.

Then wider still, when my brain finishes processing exactly who the shape is.

Vincenzo Greco is standing in the doorway of what I’ve come to think of as my kitchen, and he is not what I was mentally prepared for.

Panty-melting alert. Every cell in my body has gone on it in about three seconds flat, and no one is more offended by this than I am.

He is taller than the magazines made him look. He is broader. Nothing in any of the society-page photos I’ve stared at over the last two years came close to capturing how much room he takes up in a doorway. His suit jacket is off. White shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. No tie. His forearms are inked with something dark I cannot make out from here, and apparently I am now the kind of woman who has an entire opinion about a man’s forearms.

His eyes are the worst of it. Mossy green. Deep, sharp, entirely alert. Not the pale washed-out gray the newspaper photos suggested. Nothing about him is washed out.

His hair is dark. His beard is close-trimmed, and I can already tell it would rasp against skin. His nose was broken once and never quite reset. And his mouth — I am not going to think about his mouth right now, with flour on my face.

There is something else I notice, too. Something that has nothing to do with the way he looks. He is holding still. Not the tense stillness of a man ready to move, not the coiled stillness of a man trying to intimidate — I’ve seen both, growing up in LA — and this is neither. He is holding still the way a person who has spent a lifetime being watched holds still. Controlled. Assessing. Every part of his body doing exactly what he has told it to do, no more.

Heat crawls up my throat and into my cheeks. I feel it happen. And I know he can see it.

“You’re home.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

“I live here.”

His voice is a low, graveled thing that lands somewhere at the base of my spine. It sounds like the shower gel I’ve been smelling in his ensuite for two years finally has a person to go with it — warm, male, dark. My whole body has been quietly waiting for that scent to have a mouth I could look at.

“That’s — yes. Yes, you do.”

You’re twenty-four years old, Ros. Speak in sentences.

He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t move. Except, his mouth does the smallest thing at the corner. Not enough to call a smile. Just enough for me to catch. And my chin lifts before I’ve decided to lift it. I am not going to apologize for the flour. I am not going to apologize for anything. I have been baking in this kitchen for over a year, and if the boss finally shows up for breakfast, well. He can have a scone.

He steps into the kitchen.

I don’t move back.

I don’t lower my eyes. I don’t tremble the way my brain is helpfully suggesting I might, given who this man is and what everyone in Los Angeles knows about the things he’s done. I stand exactly where I’ve been standing, in flour and morning sunlight, and hold his gaze like I have every right to.

Which, technically, I do.

I have a contract.

Two years of my life have gone into keeping this contract. Two years of scrubbing floors before dawn and dusting shelves nobody looks at and slipping in and out of this house on a schedule so precise the man who lives in it has, by all evidence, never once had to think about my existence. I have not put a foot wrong. I am not going to start now, over a batch of scones.

“I specified minimal service.” His voice hasn’t come off that low, graveled register. “No cooking.”

Sass surfaces before my brain has approved it. Something about his voice and the way he’s watching me makes me want to stand up to him. Also, I’m a little annoyed by how furtively he entered the house, as if he was trying to catch me doing something inappropriate in his house.

“You did. Baking isn’t cooking.”

His head tilts, fractional. Something behind those green eyes shifts. Amusement, possibly. Or the exact opposite.

“Explain the difference.”