Breaking the Billionaire's Rules(37)

“Thank you.” I turn and walk toward the Hillman building.

I don’t like this. I don’t like the boy’s alarm. I don’t like that they kissed. Is this man in the mafia? Is that what the kid was getting at? Mia wouldn’t have anything to do with somebody like that.

I go one block, two blocks, barreling past the dawdling pedestrians, ignoring the heads that swivel around in recognition.

I’m thinking about calling a friend on the force, a detective who’s done time on an organized crime unit, and asking him what he knows about gang members newly arrived from Rome, specifically anybody named Antonio.

The Hillman tower looms ahead.

I position myself to the side of the door, trying to collect my thoughts. I can’t be late to this luncheon, but this Antonio situation feels all wrong.

I go over what I know: Roman male prostitute who graduated to knife fighting. He murdered several people. Sharp dresser. Model-good looks.

And the way he looked at her, like a man in hell seeing an angel. And the way she gripped his back, the high drama.

I turn the thing over in my mind.

And then I just start laughing.

Mia’s out the door moments later, bumping her cart down the steps. I go up to help her.

“Max! What are you doing?”

I lift the cart onto the flat sidewalk. “I heard some disturbing news about Antonio,” I say.

“I don’t think Antonio is really any of your business,” she says.

“He’s extremely dangerous,” I say. “Did you know that he sold his body in the gutters back in Italy?”

She looks bewildered. “Huh?”

“Antonio would plunge a knife into a man’s heart as readily as he would slice a tomato. He’s killed before, you know. I’m thinking about alerting a friend on the force.”

She looks pale. “A cop?”

“He bathes in the blood of his enemies. Though on the upside, tomato-slicing skills like that would make him handy around the kitchen.”

Confusion fills her face.

I do my best not to smile, but I fail, and she sees it.

She slaps my chest. “Screw off. I can’t even with you.”

I go to her, knit our fingers together, right there on the sidewalk, with streams of people moving around us and the cart. She’s warm and breathy, a beautiful, trembling confection.

What am I doing? I need to be across town. “And that kiss. So fake.”

A defiant gleam in her eyes. “Who are you to say what’s fake?”

I lower my voice to a deep register. “I’m the man who’s going to kiss you for real.”

I can feel her shudder through our pressed-together palms.

I brush my lips lightly over hers, and then I kiss her.

She gasps into the kiss. She presses into me. Her pleasure is a drug—the more I get, the more I crave.

“You think you’re all that,” she whispers into the millimeter of space between our lips. “You think that was a real kiss?”

I cup her cheeks, cradling them. “I know it was a real kiss.” I swipe my thumb over her perfectly plump lips. “Try not to eat all of the cheesy puffs next time.”



* * *



I sip my latte, waiting for my pre-luncheon interview. Why did I kiss her like that? What was I thinking?

I’d vowed to stay away from her.

But god, the way her eyes shone—burnt-sugar brown. Maddening, impossible Mia Corelli.

A shadow falls over the table, and there he is, Tarquin Walters, intrepid tabloid reporter. “I understand you’ve been kissing Meow Squad cats out on the street,” he says, sitting down. “Leaving them stunned and breathless.”

Stunned and breathless? He watches my face a little too intently. Does he sense a story? The last thing I want is for Mia to wind up in the tabloids with me. She’d hate it.

“Kissing me is always a deeply religious experience for women.”

Tarquin gives me a jaded look and orders a coffee.

“Come on,” he says, “Level with me. A delivery girl now? Do tell.” Tarquin’s doing a feature on me. The goal of a feature profiler is always to get something juicy.

“Max Hilton with the lunch-cart girl? Why not go all the way? We could do Satanist Max Hilton, all animal sacrifices and strange tattoos. Or Max Hilton with an alien baby. Or maybe Max Hilton who sings weepy show tunes and still can’t get over that first love who rejected him.”

“Gimme something real. Some interiority.”

“Tarquin, the side boob has come back in style, and the Verona Club has Delmonico steak back on the menu. Let’s grab a window table and get day drunk.”

“You’re not doing that to me again,” he says.

I smile. “Fine. Questions. Anything.”

“Lana Sheffidy.”

“Lana’s one of my best friends,” I say. “I’d tell you if there was something going on. I promise you,” I say when he protests. “Though she’s threatening to design a men’s fanny pack line for Maximillion.” A joke.

“God, no,” he says. And then he turns serious. “You ran away from home at the age of eleven. What happened?”

I sip my coffee. “Doesn’t every kid run away from home?”

He checks his iPad. “It was right after your elderly nanny, Annette O’Grady, died in a crash on the Queens Expressway.”