PART 1: THE MAFIA BOSS HEARD HER SECRET CONFESSION

PART 1: THE SMILE SHE SHOULD NEVER HAVE MENTIONED

The Obsidian office was quiet that Thursday afternoon, and I used the rare peace to handle something personal.

I picked up my cell phone and called Ivy, my best friend and the only person in the world who knew exactly why I had kept Damon Cross at a safe distance for three long years.

She answered on the second ring, which meant she had been waiting.

I kept my voice low and angled myself toward the door out of reflex. “Ivy, I already said no.”

“But why?” she asked.

The exasperation in her voice was the kind that only forms after the same argument has happened a hundred times.

“Because he is my boss,” I said.

I turned toward my computer screen and shuffled papers that did not need shuffling.

“Because he is rich, powerful, and completely obsessed with control. Because he is arrogant.”

After a pause, I added, “And a player.”

“Riley,” Ivy said, the way people say obviously. “The man sends you flowers every week. He

has not looked at another woman in almost a year.”

I cut her off before she could gain momentum.

“You know perfectly well why this is never going to happen.”

I kept one eye on the office door. There was a weighted pause on her end, and I already knew what was coming. Ivy had an infuriating gift for reaching through a phone line and pulling apart every defense I had ever constructed, stitch by careful stitch.

“But you like him,” she practically sang.

I could picture her face, that smug delighted smile that made me want to hang up immediately.

“Admit it, Riley. You cannot go five minutes without saying his name.”

“That is not—”

I stopped. I pressed my pen flat against the desk and took a breath that was supposed to steady me.

It did not.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I find him attractive.”

The admission came

out reluctantly, like something dragged from a place where I had buried it. Heat crept up my neck just from saying it aloud.

“But that does not mean anything, Ivy. It does not change a single thing.”

“Attractive,” she said, like I had handed her a gift. “Riley Bennett, you have been in love with that man for—”

“I am not in love.”

I stood so fast my chair rolled back and hit the wall.

Pacing helped. Or at least it gave my nervous energy somewhere to go besides directly into my voice.

“He is just—okay, he is gorgeous. Infuriatingly, unfairly gorgeous. And he can be funny when he is not being a complete and total arrogant idiot. And he has that smile that—”

“That smile that what?” Ivy prompted, doing a devastating impression of my own voice.

I could have stopped there.

I should have stopped there.

Three years

of practice should have made stopping easy.

“That smile that just—”

Every muscle in my body locked at once.

The voice came from directly behind me.

“That smile that what?”

Deep, unhurried, and laced with an amusement so quiet it was almost worse than laughter.

My blood turned to ice.

The words evaporated in my throat.

Time became cruel. It slowed and stretched, turning the next two seconds into an entire cinematic sequence I had no way to escape.

No.

No, no, no.

I turned slowly, the way a person turns when she already knows exactly how bad it is and still hopes the universe might take pity.

It did not.

Damon Cross was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, that smile curving his mouth in a way that was catastrophically devastating. His dark eyes held mine with the steady, gleaming certainty of a man who had heard every word.

Every single one.

“Ivy,” I said into the phone, my voice barely holding itself together, “I will call you back.”

I hung up before she could respond. I did not need her making this worse. It was already spectacularly worse.

Damon pushed off the doorframe with unhurried ease, and my pulse spiked.

He walked toward me the way he did everything, as if the room arranged itself around him, as if gravity were a concept he had personally renegotiated.

Each step landed in the tense silence, and I gripped the edge of my desk hard enough to feel the wood grain pressing into my palms.

“No, no,” he said.

He stopped just inside the perimeter of my personal space, that maddening distance he always calculated to the millimeter.

“Go on. You were talking about my smile.”

The lie came out too fast, too thin, with no structural integrity.

“I was not talking about you.”

His eyes narrowed, not with offense, but with amusement.

He knew exactly what I had been saying.

We both did.

He tilted his head and took one more step, dismantling whatever margin I had been clinging to.

“No? Who else do you know who is gorgeous, funny, and has that smile?”

Heat flooded my face with the subtlety of a wildfire.

My brain cycled desperately through every possible response, something sharp, something dismissive, something with even a shred of credibility, and came up humiliatingly empty.

“Lots of people,” I said.

Even I winced at it.

Damon’s eyes gleamed with something dangerously close to victory. He took the last crucial step, backing me against the desk.

He never quite touched me, but his hands landed on the wooden surface on either side of me.

The world narrowed to the heat from his chest and the weight of his gaze.

“Liar,” he said softly.