Tension radiates off him in waves, and the thumb on my lower lip tugs down like he can envision me beneath him, gasping and clawing at his back, even while we stand in the middle of a ballroom with the upper crust of New York society all around us.

I feel his want.

I feel his need.

“Once,” he growls, his gaze hot on mine. “We’ve met once.”

“Did I like you?”

His laugh is low and dark. “You hated me on sight.”

I drag in a sharp breath at his honesty. “Is this revenge, then?”

“No,” comes his gravel-pitch answer. His touch leaves my chin to trace the slope of my neck before cupping the base of my head, his fingers sinking into the heavy weight of my updo. “It’s me making the biggest mistake of my fucking life, but I’ll be damned if I walk away from you now.”

Then he pulls me close and his lips crash down over mine.

Chapter Two

Reid

Laela Donna will be the fucking death of me.

Eighteen months ago, I stared into her whiskey-dark eyes and felt something foreign hammer to life in my chest. Possession. Recognition. Followed swiftly by the sting of regret. She’d taken one glance at my badge and recoiled, the soft expression on her beautiful face shattering as her spine stretched with iron and her mouth flattened in displeasure. And my heart—the damned thing that I could have sworn had died years ago—ached with bitter disappointment.

I put Guglielmo Donna in handcuffs five minutes later.

Forced him onto a plane at JFK an hour after that.

I’d felt her furious gaze like a rusty knife in the back as I climbed the rickety metal rungs behind her father, and there’d been no denying my swift rise of curiosity when her name appeared in my inbox a week later. The accusations laid out in her email were sharp enough to draw blood. I shouldn’t have responded. Not then, not ever. Eighteen months, and not a single day has passed that I’ve forgotten how the daughter of a notorious crime boss makes me wants to break all the rules.

And now I have.