Page 26 of Rent a Mob Boss

Dorian doesn’t look up from his plate. “Mm.”

“More than usual.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

It’s not what he says. It’s how he says it. Flat. Final. The voice he uses when he’s decided something isn’t my business. The fact that he’s using it now—the morning after he had me in his bed and told me to stay—sends a small, cold prickle down the back of my neck.

“Okay,” I reply with a smile, and I eat my eggs.

But I’m watching.

There’s something he’s not telling me. I’ve felt it for a long time. The phone calls he takes in the other room. The way Tristan appears and his whole face changes. The guards and the cameras. The wall that I’ve been explaining away with words like finance and investment and important people need security.

I’ve been very good at explaining things away. I’m starting to wonder if that’s all I’ve been doing. Just explaining. Telling myself a version of the story that lets me stay in this kitchen, eating these eggs, wearing this man’s clothes, and feeling like I belong in a life I haven’t actually been invited into.

Keep your guard up, I tell myself. It feels strange, thinking it here in this sunny kitchen, with Lillie’s laughter, and the man who held me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.

But I think it anyway.

10

DORIAN

There’s pink eyeshadow on my left eyelid and a clip-on bow in my hair. I’m sitting in a chair designed for someone who weighs less than fifty pounds.

I’ve never been happier in my life.

Lillie is standing in front of me with a makeup palette and a brush that sheds more than it applies. She is concentrating with the intensity of a surgeon. Her tongue pokes out from the side of her mouth. Her little brow is furrowed. She dabs the brush into a shade that can only be described as violent pink and brings it toward my face with the confidence of someone who has done this many times before and has never once cared about the result. “Close your eyes, Daddy.”

I close my eyes and feel the brush drag across my eyelid, depositing what I can only assume is a thick, uneven streak of glitter. Something falls into my eyelashes. I don’t flinch, because flinching during makeover time is a violation of the rules. That, and I’ve been in this position before. If I’m not careful, the glitter will go in my eye, and nobody needs that.

Ask me how I know.

“Now the other one,” my daughter announces.

Quinn is sitting in the tiny chair beside me. She already has both eyes done—blue on one, green on the other. She’s wearing a red line of lipstick that extends approximately half an inch past her actual lips. There’s a yellow bow clipped to the side of her hair. She is, without question, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she warns when she catches me looking.

“I’m not laughing.”

“Your mouth is doing that twitchy thing it does.”

“My mouth doesn’t do a twitchy thing.”

“It absolutely does. Lillie, tell your daddy he has a twitchy thing going on with his mouth.”

“Daddy has a mouth thing,” Lillie confirms without looking up from her work.

Quinn is wearing my T-shirt and a pair of my sweatpants. Her hair is still pulled back from this morning. She hasn’t left, and I haven’t asked her to. At some point in the afternoon—while she was coloring with Lillie at the kitchen table, or helping her give Poptart a bath with the hose, or sitting on the back terrace with her feet up while Lillie played in the grass—she became part of the day. Not the nanny. Not a guest. She’s just here.

I’ve been thinking about this for hours. Thinking about last night, too. The green dress on the floor of my bedroom. Her voice in the dark. The way she held onto me like I was the only solid thing in the room. I’ve been thinking about it the way I think about everything I want to keep: strategically, with the full understanding that wanting a thing and being able to protect it are two different problems.

I’ve had her now. That complicates things further. Before, she was a possibility I could walk away from. Painful, but survivable. Something I could shut down and board up, the way I’ve shut down every personal want that threatened to interfere with the work. I’ve done it before.

I don’t think I can do it with her. I knew that last night, the moment she fell asleep against my chest. The door I thought I’d sealed shut isn’t just open. It’s off its hinges. There’s no closing it again. She’s in.

Which means I have an enormous problem.