IN LOVE WITH MY MAFIA s*x MATE

CHAPTER ONE I was not supposed to be at that bar. I was supposed to be home, staring at a hospital bill I couldn't pay, eating whatever sad thing existed in my refrigerator and pretending my life wasn't falling apart at every single step. Instead I was here…bar centrale. Friday night. Florence glittering outside the open doors like it had no idea…or no care…that ordinary people were drowning inside it. I had told myself one drink. I was on my third. The bar was full of beautiful people moving through golden light like they belonged there. I sat at the far end of the counter and watched them all and felt pleasantly invisible. Right up until the moment I didn't. I felt him before I saw him…the way you feel a shift in temperature. A change in the air. The particular weight of attention that belongs to someone who doesn't look at things casually. I turned my head. He was standing at the other end of the bar. And every coherent thought I had evaporated…tall and dark. A jaw that belonged on something carved rather than born. Black shirt, sleeves rolled, holding his glass with the ease of a man who had never once been uncomfortable in any room he had ever entered…dark hair and darker eyes. Those eyes were on me. Directly. Completely. With an intensity that should have made me look away immediately. I did not look away. He held my gaze across the length of that bar for a moment that lasted considerably longer than was accidental. Then slowly…deliberately…he picked up his glass and walked toward me. I watched him come. Told myself to look away. Did not look away. He stopped beside me. Close enough that I caught him…something dark and warm and expensive. He set his glass down. Looked at me with those impossible eyes. "You've been sitting alone for forty minutes," he said. Low. Quiet. An accented Italian that did something unfair to the air around it. "I'm aware," I said. "And you're not waiting for anyone." "Also aware." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something more dangerous. "Then you won't mind if I join you." It wasn't a question. I should have minded. "Sit down," I said instead. We did not exchange names. We talked about Florence instead about beauty and loneliness and the strange feeling of being surrounded by people who all seemed to belong somewhere you didn't. He listened the way people rarely did…fully, completely, like I was the most interesting thing in the room. Which was extraordinary. Because he was clearly the most interesting thing in every room he had ever been in. "You're not from here," he said. "Rome." I turned my glass. "You?" "Here." A pause. "Though sometimes it feels like nowhere." I looked at him sideways. "That's surprisingly honest." "You'd prefer dishonesty?" "I'd prefer to know what to do honestly." I met his eyes. "It's less common than you'd think." He looked at me for a long moment. Then…quietly, like something decided…"Come with me." I looked at him. At those dark eyes and that jaw and the way he held himself like the world had arranged itself around him. "I don't know your name," I said. "No," he agreed. "I don't do this." "Neither do I." His eyes didn't move from mine. "And yet." His hotel was three streets away. The room was high and dark and the windows looked out over Florence glittering below like scattered gold. He turned on one lamp. Turned to look at me across the room. And I crossed it. What happened next I will not pretend I remember with perfect clarity. But I remember how he grabbed my neck to kiss me while lying on the bed…I remember his hands…certain and unhurried, moving like a man who had decided exactly what he wanted and saw no reason to rush. I remember the warmth of his mouth at my neck, my collarbone, moving lower with a patience and all of sudden i felt a shock down there which made my body vibrate….the way he pulled back and looked at me in the lamplight…really looked, the kind that went through skin…before he closed the distance again and made every thought I had left dissolve completely. I remember thinking I had never felt this simultaneously seen and undone in my entire life. I remember the dark afterward. His breathing slowing beside me. The particular quiet of a room that had just witnessed something that couldn't be taken back. Then I looked at the ceiling. And remembered who I was. A girl with a sick mother. A dead father. A debt she couldn't pay. No business tangling herself up with a dangerous beautiful stranger in a city that ate ordinary people without blinking. I sat up quietly. Found my clothes in the dark. Dressed without a sound. Looked at him one last time…sprawled in the lamplight, dark and still and devastating…and felt something pull in my chest I had no name for and no intention of examining. I left. Walked into Florence at two in the morning and breathed cool night air and told myself firmly…One night. It meant nothing. I would never see him again. I was wrong about all three. He woke at three. Reached across the bed. Found nothing but cold sheets and the ghost of her. He sat up slowly in the dark. Something moved through him…unfamiliar, unwelcome, impossible to name for a man who had long since decided hepdidn't feel things he couldn't control. He reached for his phone. One call. One number. "Find her." His voice was quiet and final.