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I hardly know what I order—I just repeat whatever she says, which makes her roll her eyes. Finally, the waiter leaves with a long look over his shoulder that nearly has him crashing into another table.
"Like I said. Cruel woman," I chastise her.
She sips her water. "Tell me about the Chicago drug network your family is involved in and how far the reach extends. I want to know what we're working with there."
I narrow my eyes at her as another plan for breaking down her carefully-crafted demeanor comes to me. "How about I tell you absolutely everything you want to know about the Giovanni family, anything you wonder about just how powerful we are…afterwe dance?"
Giulia presses her lips together as she straightens. "You're going to make all of this as painful as pulling out someone's teeth with fucking pliers, aren't you?"
My eyebrows go up of their own will. "Please tell me that's something you've done. I can't tell you how badly I want a clear mental picture of that."
"You're sick."
"You're hedging. And Don’t give me any of that'I don’t like dancing'shit. Come on. One dance and I'll be so laser-focused, you'll wish you could get this version of me back."
She gives me a bored once-over. "To be clear, I don’t wantanyversion of you in this equation, Giovanni. And I do like dancing—I'm just not going to dance with you. I want to eat."
"The food won't be out for a bit," I point out. "So either we can sit here and go on having this lovely back-and-forth banter—"
"It's not banter."
"—that gets usnowherewith establishing how we'll proceed withVitalen," I finish, dropping my voice at the last word. "Or you humor me, dance with me, and I'll be perfectly compliant."
Giulia's eyes narrow. "Perfectly? I don’t buy that."
"You don’t have to. I'm the one spending money on this date."
She grits her teeth, and I can't help smiling triumphantly. Shereallydoesn't like me calling this a date, and Ireallylike when I can break through this facade of hers.
"I pay for myself. Always. So don’t even fucking try," she warns.
I just wait, watching her and letting my smile grow with each ticking second as she glares back at me. Apparently, she finally gets the message and looks heavenward with an infinitesimal little sigh.
"Fine. We'll dance. But if your hands goanywherebeyond my waist, you'll never have to wear another condom for the rest of your life because I'll make sure you can't fucking have kids. Got it?"
Obviously, she has no idea how much I enjoy her words. But Giulia is right—I must be a little sick. Not in any extreme way, I'm just deviant, and I know it because hearing her bristling, seething threat of violencereallymakes me want to get beneath her skin more. Or maybe into her pants.
She stands and whirls, hips swaying as her long legs carry her to the dance floor, and I watch her ass the entire way with a smirk. I take it back—Idefinitelywant into her pants.
Giulia Russo will be the fucking death of me, but I'm not sure I could resist a challenge like her even if I tried.
As I move to the dance floor to meet her, the music shifts again to an upbeat swing tempo, and I veer quickly to the small deejay setup in one corner near the bar. The middle-aged guy working it casts me an uninterested look as I approach.
"Something slow," I tell him.
"Look, buddy, we cycle through a wide variety, and I stopped taking requests years ago. A slow dance comes on every fifteen minutes, so just wait like everyone else," he intones with no real care, poking another button with an animatronic boredness.
I slip a hundred to him with a growl. "I don’t have fifteen minutes, motherfucker. I have one dance.Make it slow.A waltz."
He obliges immediately, and I return to Giulia, who is examining her nails and pretending to find this all asinine. Or maybe she's not pretending—but it doesn't matter because I'm determined to change her mind and finally break her careful control.
Maybe I could even get her to laugh. I want to see that.
As soon as my hand wraps around her waist and I pull her close, tense energy blazes to life in the air around us, just as it did when I got close to her in that dark hallway days ago. I immediately want to press her close to me, and the desire is only worse when Giulia's eyes snap up to mine, and she lets out a surprised, "Oh."
But her startled, breathless expression ices over quickly as she lightly places her hand on my shoulder and turns her head away.
God. How can she ignore this chemistry? I'm rock hard, wanting to get closer to her, to run my fingers down her warm skin and taste her and press her against a wall and—
