Page 12 of Hot-Blooded Killer

Especially if he wants me as much as I want him, a tiny voice in my head whispers, and I shove it down.

I have the driver take us up and down the Strip a couple of times, giving us a chance to down a bottle of Dom.

I need the drink to calm my nerves, though I certainly don’t tell my friends that.

As far as they’re concerned, I’m in high spirits, celebrating a midterm exam I’ve just aced.

And while that’s certainly true, it isn’t the whole story.

Soon enough, Gino pulls up in front of the club entrance, and we all pile out of the back of the limo, our bodyguards keeping close to their charges.

As I steel myself for an evening of playacting, I glance at my friends and notice Adele’s bodyguard touching her elbow lightly. My friend leans into him, almost imperceptibly.

Oh, shit. Whatever is going on with those two, I want no part of it. There’s no way in hell her father would approve.

It isn’t entirely unheard of, of course. Plenty of Mafia princesses engage in dalliances with their guards. Hell, even I had once or twice.

But that never ends well—at least not for the bodyguard. At best, this guy will end up shipped off to another branch of the family. At worst, he’ll find himself on the wrong end of one of Adele’s father’s hired guns.

Pretending not to notice anything, I shake my hair out behind me, letting the long blonde locks, now tamed into fat, bouncy curls, slide down my back.

With a wave at Antonio, the doorman, I lead the six of us into the club.

Unlike most of the Beneventi family’s businesses, this one is a dance club—not a strip club, not a casino, not even a front for a brothel, which are technically illegal in Las Vegas city limits.

This is the club Pop had started for me when I was a teenager. At my request.

A heavy beat drums beneath my feet as I move into the strobing lights flashing through the room.

I time my arrival so I’m technically late, hoping Lorenzo would have already arrived, well before me. I don’t want to get caught looking for someone to show up—better if he sees me and approaches.

Of course, I haven’t told him any of that.

And despite my best-laid plans, I have to stop myself from peering around into the darkened corners of the nightclub searching for him.

“Let’s dance,” Sarah half-shouts, pitching her voice high enough so we can hear her above the music.

The three of us move out onto the dance floor, and I let the music take over my body, moving to the heavy beat.

When I was a child, I told Pop I wanted to be a cabaret dancer when I grew up. He laughed so hard he nearly spit out the whiskey he’d been drinking, but I had been deathly serious. At the age of five, I’d fallen in love with their glittering, sequined costumes, and all I had known about them was that they were beautiful and that they danced.

And dancing is still the one thing I’m best at.

Pop had taken it as his cue to enroll me in ballet and tap, then later I had taken jazz and modern dance classes.

But ultimately, I hadn’t had the body to be a professional dancer.

I’d been right as a child—cabaret dancing was all I’d been cut out for.

That was off-limits as the daughter of a Mafia Don, so I channeled my passion for dancing into nights out at the clubs as an adult.

And Pop built this one just for me.

It might be his name on all the ownership papers, but everyone who works for him knows it’s really mine.

So this is where I feel most at home.

Right here on this dance floor.

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