Page 34

At forty-seven, Mathias Greco looks less like the head of a criminal organization and more like an attorney who bills enough per hour to resent anyone wasting a single minute of it. He has on a dark suit despite the hour, over a crisp white shirt. No tie now, though I imagine he wore one earlier. Black hair touched with a few strands of silver at the temples and cut every two weeks by the same barber he has used since his twenties.

He’s never been ostentatious. Frank, in contrast, loved everything gold—gold watches, gold rings, gold cufflinks, gold necklaces.

Mathias wears a wedding band despite being divorced, and a watch so expensive that only someone who knows watches would recognize its cost.

He eyes the coffee. “You remembered.”

“Well, you demanded.”

“I requested,” he corrects, a faint smirk playing at his lips. He reaches across the desk and takes the cup I hand him. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Have a seat, Adrien.”

I take the chair opposite him. A folder lies neatly on his desk, though Mathias seems in no hurry to get to it. He takes another drink of coffee, then says, “You know they missed you on Saturday.”

I frown. “Who?”

“The boys at the club.”

I swear to God, if this is what he deemed to be so urgent that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow, I’ll throw my coffee on him.

“I was busy.”

“You’re always busy.”

“Then I’m not sure why my absence surprised anyone.”

Mathias observes me over the rim of his cup. “Apparently you’ve developed admirers. Nico asked Quillan when ‘Daddy Delmonte’ would be coming back.”

I stare at him. “He said Daddy Delmonte?”

“His words, not mine.”

“I’m going to kill Quillan.”

“Mm. That seems unfair. He didn’t start it.”

“He encouraged it.”

“That he probably did.”

I lean back in the chair with a sigh. What I do at the club is hardly a secret, but I prefer keeping that part of my life separate from this one, for obvious reasons. I’ve been a Daddy Dom for years, long enough to know exactly what I like and, more importantly, exactly what I don’t. I enjoy taking care of someone for a few hours, giving them rules to follow, praising them when they earn it, offering a lap to crawl into when they need one, and then watching them leave at the end of the night with no expectations attached.

Temporary works for me.

It always has.

“Anything else about my social life you’d like to discuss?” I ask, wishing I could go back to before the day I walked into the club and saw my fucking boss and his half-brother spit-roasting some poor boy.

Mathias’s mouth twitches. “Not particularly.”

“Good.”

He finally glances toward the folder between us. “So, how was Kenny?”

“Incompetent.”