Page 5

“Cooking is food. Baking is joy.”

His head tilts a fraction further.

“Why joy?” Quieter this time. Almost careful.

For a wild half-second I nearly tell him the truth. Nearly say because it’s the only way I’ve ever known how to say I care about someone when I don’t have any other words. Nearly tell him about my nonna’s kitchen in Michigan and the way my whole childhood smelled of sugar and butter and the certainty of being loved.

I don’t say any of that. He’s a mobster. This is his kitchen. I have known him for four minutes.

I shrug and reach for the cinnamon.

“You want a scone?”

He pauses too long before he answers.

“Yes.”

Mother of God.

I plate one, then a second, then a third, arranging them on the little wooden board I picked up at a farmer’s market three months ago because it looked cheerful and I liked it. My hands are the only part of me working right now. They have known what to do since I was seven years old, standing on a stool beside my mom at the counter in our old house in Burbank, folding butter into flour with small careful fingers. Muscle memory does not care that a mafia boss is watching me plate scones in his kitchen.

My hands are steady. Everything else is a mess.

I have read, according to the very careful tally on the top shelf of my Kindle, approximately eleven thousand pages of mafia dark romance in the last four years. I have an intimate imaginary relationship with a fictional Sicilian crime lord called Massimo and he does not have a single thing on the man now leaning against the kitchen island watching me put a scone on a plate.

Vincenzo Greco makes Massimo look like a boy scout.

I have, on multiple occasions, touched myself in the dark of my bed in the annex above the garage, thinking about the man who is currently accepting a scone from my hand and lifting it to that hard, unsmiling mouth. Which was fine when he was a photo in a magazine and a scent in an ensuite and never once in a room I was in.

It is not fine now.

I am going to combust.

I take a slow breath in through my nose. Focus on the counter. Focus on the scones.

Do not tell him about Andrei Zidaru.

I have to actively remind myself, because something about the stillness this man carries is making me want to spill every secret I have ever kept. That’s dangerous. Zidaru is my problem. He is not Vincenzo Greco’s problem, and if Vincenzo decides the maid in his house is more trouble than she’s worth, he can dismiss me before the scones have cooled. I would have nowhere else to hide.

My lookout got word to me only last month that Zidaru’s men are still asking around my cousin Elsie’s old café for her whereabouts. The Los Angeles most cruel crime lord, suspected of women and child trafficking, has been on the hunt for my cousin for two years and he hasn’t forgotten her. He is the reason my cousin and I were forced to abandon the apartment we shared.

Elsie wanted me to run with her to Blossom Ford but I decided to stay in LA and keep an eye on Zidaru as best I could. That’s why I took the live-in job in Vincenzo Greco’s luxurious house.

I cannot lose this house.

He doesn’t touch the scones. He leans one hip against the island, arms folding across his chest, and closes some of the distance between us without moving his feet. Just — attention. Aimed.

He watches me finish plating in that same held-still way, and I can feel him tracking every small movement of my hands the way a man might track the flight of a bird he wasn’t sure was going to bolt.

Close enough now that I can smell the espresso on his breath.

“How long have you been here?”

“Two years next month.”

“How long have you been leaving me things?”

My heart races. My pulse jumps in my throat, and I think he can see it.