Chapter 1

Sienna POV

Luca Hawthorne had me pinned to the bed, his hands locked on my hips, forcing my legs apart. His grip was hard enough to bruise, and my treacherous body kept lifting to meet him anyway, again and again.

"Luc--oh God--" My voice had already gone raw. The man above me might as well have been deaf; there was only the slick sound of him driving into me, filling the quiet room.

He bent over me, laughing low. "You're squeezing me that tight--you trying to break me off?" His mouth closed over my nipple and sucked hard, and pleasure shot through me like an electric current. My fingers bit into his shoulders. My legs were too weak to hold themselves up, so I hooked them around his waist and let him move me.

Two hours. He hadn't slowed once.

I had begun to regret taking this contract.

Luca Hawthorne's file read: twenty-eight years old, eldest grandson of the Hawthorne family, one of the men who actually held the reins of the Hawthorne underworld.

I had spent two full months building myself into an ordinary girl who worked in a casino. Clumsy. Naive. Harmless.

I spilled a drink down his suit, walked into his arms at the end of a corridor on purpose, looked up at him with eyes that knew nothing at all. After the tenth date, he finally brought me back to the Hawthorne Residence.

Nobody had thought to mention that the man was a goddamn machine.

His dark hair had come loose, a few strands falling across his forehead, and his shirt had gone missing somewhere along the way, leaving the heavy muscle of his chest and shoulders bare to the air. I let myself look for two seconds, then made myself stop.

I had not come here tonight to admire him. I had come to finish a job. Every muscle in my body was starting to ache, and this job was turning out to be considerably more trouble than I had planned for.

Luca lowered his head. "Tired?"

I blinked up at him and put on the shy, innocent look I had rehearsed. "A little."

He studied me for a few seconds, then reached out and brushed the hair back from my cheek. "That isn't what you were saying five minutes ago."

The man was harder to handle than his file had suggested. I bit my lip and looked away, and the next second he drove into me hard enough that I wanted to plant my heel and break his ribs. What came out of me instead was a thin, shy sound.

"Luc--please, gentler..."

The night was long and disordered. By the time it finished, the sky had begun to lighten.

Luca held me from behind, his arm heavy across my waist, his breathing even and deep, while the first grey-blue light slipped through the gap in the curtains and lay across him. I turned my head slowly. We were close enough that I could trace every line of his shoulder--the wide back, the hard flat stomach, the black tattoo that ran along his shoulder blade. The body his expensive suits kept hidden all day was laid bare now, inches from me.

Even asleep and silent, he was impossible to ignore.

He wasn't going to wake for a while. I had put a little something in the wine he drank that evening. A Don of twenty-eight--still young enough, in the end. Even the most careful man has a moment he doesn't cover.

I had no time to keep thinking about it. I lifted his arm gently and moved it off my waist. Every muscle in me ached from what we had just done, as though my body belonged to someone else. I swallowed the discomfort and slipped out of bed barefoot, my soles meeting thick carpet without a sound.

I had already memorized the security arrangements here. After midnight someone passed along the second-floor corridor every few minutes. There was no fixed guard at the master bedroom door, and the cameras couldn't see the desk. As long as Luca kept sleeping, I had plenty of time.

A silver laptop sat on the nightstand. Luca Hawthorne's private machine, holding what I had come for.

I plugged in the drive my client's people had given me. A string of code scrolled across the screen, then a progress bar began to fill, one steady notch after another. My eyes stayed fixed to the display, but my attention kept sliding back to the sleeping man behind me. He rolled over. His arm dropped into the place where I had been lying. I held my breath until his breathing went slow and even again.

Back to the bar. Sixty percent. Eighty.

Every jump pulled my nerves tighter.

One hundred.

Money moved out of the Hawthorne family's secret accounts on instructions my client had set days ago--one hundred and twenty million dollars into an offshore account, gone in a second. I stared at the confirmation line on the screen and let out a long breath.

Job done.

I pulled the drive, shut the laptop down, and put it back exactly where it had been. The whole thing had taken under a minute, and my back was slick with sweat. I turned to leave, then stopped on the first step and dressed quickly and silently in the dim light leaking in from the corridor sensor.

At the door, I looked back once.

Luca was still asleep. The dawn had grown brighter since I had last looked, lying across his bare shoulders and arms so that every line of muscle looked harder, sharper.

Strong. Dangerous.

If it weren't for the job... maybe I really would have wanted to know this man properly.

The thought was gone almost immediately. As a Blackwood operative, I had only ever set myself one rule: don't get attached.

I put on my sunglasses and walked out into the corridor. The elevator doors closed, leaving the dangerous man and the whole night behind me.

Or so I thought, at the time.