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“Lucky me.” My eyes drop to his mouth before I can stop them. “It’s the best view in the room.”

I said it. I meant it. I’m not taking it back.

The silence stretches. I let it.

His fingers flatten on the table. Very carefully. Like he doesn’t trust his hands.

“Careful, dolcezza,” he says, and his voice has dropped half an octave. “I’m old enough to know what to do with a compliment like that.”

Heat goes up my throat. Down, too.

“How old is that?”

“Old enough to know exactly what I want.” His eyes drop to my mouth, and stay there long enough that I feel it like a thumb across my lower lip. Then back up. “And patient enough to take my time with it.”

Take my time. Three words, and my whole body hears them as a promise. Heat pools low and heavy, my pulse throbs somewhere it has no business throbbing in public. I don’t look away.

I should get up. I should get up right now.

I don’t move.

“You’re staring,” he says. “Tell me what you see.”

Caught. Again. Heat climbs my throat, and for one second the honest answer is a mouth I’d very much like to know better. I swallow it and give him the smart answer instead.

“You picked the one seat that sees the whole room,” I say. “You just like knowing you could be the worst thing to happen to any of them.”

His thumb stops on the rim of his glass. Just for a second.

There. Got him.

“They all learn it eventually,” he says. “You’re quicker than most. You already have.”

Quicker than most. It shouldn’t land the way it does. It’s barely a compliment, three words from a stranger in a mask, but warmth spreads through my chest and keeps going, slow and dangerous. Men have praised my body plenty. Nobody has ever praised my mind and made it sound like foreplay.

I like it. I’m not sure I like how much.

“A woman who hands back a thousand dollars doesn’t carry trays for men like these for fun.” He doesn’t ask. He waits. “So tell me why you’re here.”

Foster care taught me that whatever you hand a stranger, they keep. I keep my heart in my back pocket and my plans to myself.

So I have no idea why the truth climbs up my throat for him.

“A deposit,” I hear myself say. “A door with a lock nobody else has a key to.”

He goes very still. “Someone taught you to count locks.”

“Not after tonight,” I say.

He studies me like he’s reading the fine print of that sentence. Then he nods once, the way a man makes a note of something he plans to deal with later.

Then I feel it. A prickle at the back of my neck, the kind you get when someone is reading over your shoulder.

I turn.

Luca Santini.

The warmth the Big Bad put in me cools all at once. My jaw tightens.