Page 7 of Mafia Billionaire's Surprise Baby

They might even just be custom-tailored. Black leather.

They hug her ass and thighs, and I suppress a shiver, thinking of the muscle she’s got beneath.

Gia’s sexy as hell. There’s no point in denying it. She knows it. I know it.

The game we play where we both pretend like we don’t is maddening.

“Elio promoted you to Nico’s position,” she says flatly.

I nod. “He did.”

“You’re here to escort me to the meeting with the Russians.”

Her tone isn’t flat now, but laced with something that feels a little deeper than anger. “I’m here to make sure they don’t shoot you or kidnap you.”

“You can stop bullets now? No wonder Elio promoted you if you can do magic.”

“You know what I mean, Gia,” I say with a warning. “You didn’t take any of the security from the house in Rome. You didn’t call on anyone from Italy. You showed up here, in a completely different city. What’s the plan? You’re just going to waltz in there with a smile and a song, and get the Russians to ally with us against the Irish?”

She whistles. “You got me, Sal. Excellent detective work,” she winks. Gia polishes off the rest of the vodka, shutting her eyes slightly against the burn.

“I know you helped out the Russian girl in Belarus,” I say softly.

“What do you mean, ‘helped?’”

“You saved her,” I concede.

She did do that.

But at what cost?

Gia pre-Belarus was… an experience. She was smart. Sexy. She used both to her advantage, working over Elio’s enemies so that they’d give her the kind of information he could build an empire on.

Gia post-Belarus?

Everything that she was before, she is now, but with an edge. She’s dangerous. Hard, dysregulated in a way that she had never been before.

The Gia I pulled out of that burning warehouse in the middle of the countryside hadn’t been the Gia who had gone in.

If only I had just been there ten minutes earlier. If I had known about the plot around Anastasia just a day earlier. I could have helped her then. I could have kept them from finding out, kept them from the warehouse.

I could have kept Gia from emerging from the flames as… this.

Her eyes glint. “I did save her. So, they owe me.”

Technically, she’s right. The Russians owe her a favor for rescuing Anastasia Novikov, the daughter of their boss.

But they also owed Elio that same favor.

And whatever the Irish had on them… it outweighed the favor of saving her life.

So that, more than anything, made them dangerous as hell.

“You need backup in case they decide they don’t want you after all.”

She snorts. “And Elio sent you as the backup.”

I don’t respond to her jab. “Yes. He did.”

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