Page 6 of Tainted Love

He steps closer and his cologne brushes my nose again. “How about this?” he whispers. “What if I told you that I won’t fuck you tonight?”

“Then, what’s the point of all of this?”

“I won’t lay a finger on you, Ms. Vaughn,” he says. “Not unless you touch me first.”

I raise an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“All I have to do is spend the evening with you?”

“That’s right.”

“No sex?”

“Not even first base.”

“And you wipe out my father’s debt?”

“I’ll transfer your father’s debt. He’ll be indebted to me, but you will have played your part.”

I stare at him, taking in the subtle features of his face. Little dimples on his chin. Thin, barely noticeable lines at the edges of his eyes. A thick shadow of dark hair beneath his shaved cheeks.

“I don’t have to sleep with you?” I ask.

“As long as you keep your hands to yourself. If you touch me at all, your body is forfeit.”

I laugh. What a fucking joke.

“Deal.”

He extends his hand and I regard it with crooked eyes. “This doesn’t count,” he says, his lips curling. “It’s just a courtesy.”

I eye his fingers, thick and rock solid, before reaching out and shaking his hand again. He takes mine in his grip and squeezes hard to counter the one I gave him before. I steal my hand back before I let it linger too long in his but I can’t manage to do the same with our eyes. Even he stares at me. Unblinking and amused. As if he knows something I don’t.

Finally, he glides around me and opens the door.

“After you, Ms. Vaughn.”

Chapter 2

Dante

I never back down from a challenge.

Especially not one as interesting as Lucy Vaughn.

“So, what do you do, Mr. Hart?”

“Dante,” I correct with a grin. “Why do you ask if you already know?”

She shifts in the passenger’s seat with her arms crossed and her eyes boring into me. “Professional curiosity,” she says.

“What professional curiosity does a ballerina have for a two-bit gangster?”

“You said you weren’t in my father’s office tonight to collect money,” she points out. “You must have been there for some other reason, why?”

“I was sent there to kill him.”

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