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Chapter One
Jo
New Prescott family business policy:get laid more often.
I try to conduct myself as business as usual, but I don’t miss the surprised glance in the rearview mirror of my driver, Mo Dinan, as I handle phone calls from the back of the limo. She’s totally picking up on my energy, which is amped to the max. I feel pretty damned fantastic, in fact, humming on all cylinders, and it’s affecting everything down to the sound of my voice.
For once, my mood has nothing to do with business, either, though the information hack I’m currently coordinating is some of my finest work. It’s only going to affect the accounts of the bank owners who denied our family a loan when we were starting out—none of the bank’s customers, just the fat cats at the top who didn’t believe in us. Too bad for them.
But as awesome as that hack is, I’m mostly jacked over how absolutely well-used my body feels nearly ten hours after having sex with my gorgeous Irish prohibition-era Zorro, or whatever his real name is—his green eyes dancing beneath his mask, his shock of black hair stuffed beneath his snap brim cap, his eyes bracketed with laugh lines, and his lush, sensual mouth made for sin. That is what sex is supposed to be. An all-consuming, take-no-prisoners war where both sides win in the end. It’s a fairy tale rewritten as a porn flick, and I was All. In.
I terminate the third call and check my watch, then start tapping on my phone again.
“I wouldn’t,” Mo says from the front of the car, her thick Boston accent rough and comforting—and completely at odds with the sleek interior of the limo. “We’re almost there, and y’need to focus.”
She’s right, and I know it. “Fair enough.”
I flop back against the luxurious leather seat, taking a long slug from the one of the half-dozen bottles of water I always stock in the car. If I’m not drinking water or coffee, I’m drinking whiskey, and ten a.m. is a little early for me to let my hair down.
Though honestly, if my Irish hunk from last night was lounging beside me in this limo, I’d pour an entire damned bottle over him just to lick the burning liquid off his skin.
Heat rushes through me, making me squirm. Honestly, there’s no reason for me to be reacting like this. It’s not like Zorro was my first…not by a long shot. But there was something about the guy’s cocky grin, his sharply focused eyes, that made me feel truly seen. I’ve done some really bad things in my time, but the way he acted made me think he could go toe to toe with me all the way.
I sure as hell would like to go toe to toe with him again. Naked and sweaty and curved into each other’s bodies and—
“We’re here,” Mo says from the front of the car. I blink, looking around. We’re easily a full block out from O’Reilly’s offices in downtown Boston, and she damned well knows it. I found her after learning she’d driven the getaway car in one of the more notorious jewelry heists in the city—Maureen Dinan is intimately familiar with every inch of this city.
I squint at her. “You want me to walk in there? In three-inch heels?”
“I’ve seen you take out a bunch of frat boy punks in those three-inch heels, and yeah, I want you to walk. You got sex comin’ out of your skin, and while that’s probably not a bad thing, goin’ into that pit of vipers like you are, I figure your own head isn’t in the game the way it should be. You gotta focus.”
“Right.” I smooth back my long hair and go over what I know about Quinn O’Reilly. A tall, fair-skinned man with tousled ginger brown hair and perfect features—straight nose, chiseled jawbone, angular cheekbones. All of it weathered to perfection, and his mouth…
I grin to myself. I never knew I had a thing about mouths, but the guy last night had a similar one to Quinn’s from the pictures I’ve seen—mobile, soft, quick to laughter. The upper half of his face had been obscured by a mask, so I hadn’t really gotten a sense of whether he was attractive or not, but his mouth…
Focus.
I shift my glance back to Mo. “What’s their security like?”
Her eyes drop to the monitor set into the dashboard. “Standard. You’ll be checked for weapons at the entry, but there are three plainclothes guards at the door, all of them with twitchy trigger fingers, and we haven’t been tailed. O’Reilly’s notorious for his sniper sweeps—no blood’ll be spilled on his doorstep, and besides…” she fixes me with a disapproving glance. “No one knows you’re Joe Prescott.”
“No one does,” I nod. It’s time to change that, though. In his first move as head of the family, Quinn O’Reilly had all but sent engraved invitations to every second-tier family in the northeast, suggesting they form better relationships with the Alliance. We’re each supposed to meet with the Alliance one on one, and my appointment is this morning. We all want a seat at the table, so we all jumped—but I smell a rat. He’s got a reason for setting up these meetings, and the reason probably isn’t good. Either one of the second-tier families has pissed off the Alliance—again—or they’re going to ask one of us to do something no idiot in their right mind would do in exchange for that much coveted seat. It’s hard to say which, but I’m not about to send in some random stand-in for family business this delicate just because I wasn’t born with a dick between my legs. I’ve been hiding in the shadows too long.
“All right, you’ve talked me into it. You’ll be close?”
“I’ll be watching and ready. You walk out of there like a proper lady, I’ll drive up nice and clean. You need to make a break for it, we can do it that way, too.”
I reach up and squeeze her shoulder. “Thanks, Mo. You’re the best.”
The unexpected move earns me another startled glance from my driver. “You need to get laid more often,” she says dryly.
I laugh and swing out of the car, hoofing it up the block to O’Reilly’s office and soaking in the sunshine. By the time I’m ushered up the whisper-quiet elevators to the penthouse suite, I’ve got my shoulders squared, my eyes sharp and my brain on overdrive. I’m shown into the conference room, announced only as “Prescott,” and the random collection of enforcers in the room glance up at me, their gazes at first mildly curious, then openly intrigued. They don’t know me, but I know them, and I instantly figure out I’m not the only second-tier family member here. Interesting. What is Quinn O’Reilly up to?
Still, I have the upper hand. Joe Prescott always sends proxies to every meeting, though not usually a woman, so I’m fresh meat to these knuckle draggers—and I will be to the family members in this conference room as well. The enforcers all eye me with undisguised sexual interest—sexual, not intellectual. No one ever gives me credit for my mind, which has always served me well.
I grin. This is going to be so much fun.
Then the door opens and two thugs stand to either side, making way for Quinn O’Reilly. It’s my first in-person meeting with him, so I lift my chin confidently and as he walks through the door.
