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“Olivia is your daughter?” He should have been running in the other direction by now. The very last thing he needed as he prepared to seize control of the bratva was to get involved with this woman and her ex-husband.
A cop no less.
Her face lit up and she nodded. “Everything is for her.”
“I take it a restraining order is out of the question?” He should go. He had the meeting with Lev Rostov, a meeting that would set in motion the coup against his father.
But he couldn’t tear himself away from this small, soft woman and her melodic voice.
She huffed a laugh. “Yeah. I mean, I could get one. But it would just make things worse, and the department…”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. Roman wasn’t a cop hater. They were just people with a job to do, like everyone else. There were good ones and bad ones. Those who followed the letter of the law and those who broke it under cover of their authority.
But one thing was unequivocally true: it was a brotherhood. They protected each other, sometimes even when they shouldn’t.
He heard the hopelessness in her voice and hated it. He wanted to tell her there were things that could be done — ways to make the asshole fall into line.
Ways to make him disappear.
But that would be inappropriate, and while Roman didn’t usually give two fucks about inappropriate, he’d learned that it was something other people cared about so he had to pretend to care about it too.
Sometimes anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he said, hating how impotent it sounded, hating that he couldn’t order one of his men to stuff her ex in a car and drop him in the river with a cement block around his ankle. “Are you okay to go back to work?”
He wanted to sweep her off her feet, take her away from this place forever.
She nodded. “I only have a couple more hours. Thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.” Her gaze cut to the door leading to the front of the coffee shop. “I should get back.”
“Of course,” he said.
She hesitated. “You can come through the front if you’d rather…”
“It’s okay,” he said. “My… friend is out back.”
Max wasn’t just a friend. He was Roman’s only friend, his driver, his bodyguard, the only person in the world he fully trusted in a world where trust was rare.
But he couldn’t say any of that to Ruby.
She nodded and edged toward the door. “Thanks again.” She grinned, displaying the adorable gap between her two front teeth, and his heart melted into a puddle inside his chest. “Your next overpriced coffee and stale pastry is on me.”
She pushed through the swinging door, leaving him standing alone in the dark supply room, feeling the world tilt under his feet.
4
ROMAN
“Is that going to blow back on us?”
Roman turned away from the window and looked at Max. His eyes were on the road as he navigated the Jag through afternoon traffic in the city, but Roman knew his friend’s mind was working, turning over everything that had happened in the alley.
“I don’t know,” Roman said, because it was the truth. He hadn’t been thinking about business when he’d intervened between Ruby and her ex — an ex who just happened to be a cop. He’d been acting on the primal instinct to protect her. “I don’t think so.”
He hated the way it sounded. He wasn’t in the habit of second-guessing his decisions. Many of them carried risks — the impending meeting with Lev being at the top of the list — but they were calculated risks.
What he’d done in the alley hadn’t been calculated. It had been reckless.
He was all too aware of the dangers of his temper. It had gotten him in far more trouble with his father over the years than had been necessary, and he had the scars to prove it.
