“A compliment,” I murmur, allowing a small grin to touch my lips as I spin us in a slow circle, “be still my dead, un-beating heart.”

Her laughter is a spark of sunshine that draws countless gazes. In a world like hers, where loyalty is everything and power is king, I’m not surprised that her peers keep their distance. In a last-ditch effort to shorten his sentence for money laundering, extortion, and murder, Guglielmo Donna turned in the men that once called him famiglia. He spat on their loyalty. He tore the power straight from their hands and forced them to their knees.

Laela and her sister don’t deserve the hate thrown their way, but it would be naïve of them to think that life will eventually return to what it once was. They won’t be hailed as the Darlings of Manhattan ever again.

“Alabama.”

At the unexpected comment, I raise a brow.

“You sound like you might be from Alabama,” she clarifies. “Or maybe Mississippi?”

Louisiana, actually. New Orleans.

Since the admission might jar her memory, and I’m not ready to go back to being the devil in her nightmares, I sweep my palm up her back and let it rest between her shoulder blades. “You tryin’ to tell me that we Southerners all sound the same?”

Her grin is just a little bit wicked. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve only had one promise to defile me in a crowded room, so my experience telling you all apart is rather . . . limited.”

Delight licks down my spine.

It’s dangerous, the way that I want this woman. She won me over with her sharp tongue and no-bullshit attitude. Email after email, month after month, I grew to anticipate her every parry and advance. I fought fire with fire, crossing boundaries that would see me jobless in a heartbeat, and all because I can’t resist the opportunity to stoke her temper and see her come undone.

Wrong or right, I want to watch her fall apart in my arms.

All of this goes against every rule in the goddamn book. I shouldn’t have come to Bishop’s Landing. It’s not my place and she’s not my responsibility—hell, she’s not mine. And I sure as shit shouldn’t tease her into a seduction when she doesn’t realize who I am.

Sinner.

Bastard.

She’ll hurl every curse known to mankind at me as soon as the light goes off for her, and I’ll endure each one because they’ll be well-deserved. Thirty-six years of doing the right thing, first as a beat cop for the New Orleans Police Department and then as a field agent with the FBI, and I can feel all morality crumbling to dust at my feet.

I slow to a stop.

Laela’s hands never leave my shoulders.