Chapter 1 - The Midnight Incident
By the time Penny Hayes realized she had just poked the most dangerous man in Boston twice in the chest, the entire nightclub had gone so quiet she could hear an ice cube crack inside somebody’s glass.
She stared up at him.
He stared down at her.
Three hundred pounds of armed bodyguards stood around them looking as if they were trying to decide whether killing a waitress on a Friday night counted as overtime.
Penny blinked.
Then, because three shots of tequila had murdered the last surviving piece of good judgment in her body, she poked him a third time.
“I said stay out of the broken glass.”
Nobody moved.
The tall man in the midnight suit slowly lowered his eyes to her finger.
Penny’s stomach dropped.
Oh.
Oh, no.
She knew who he was now.
Matteo Vale.
People in Boston didn’t usually say his name loudly. They said it behind locked office doors. In police parking lots. In back booths where nobody brought phones. He controlled nightclubs, construction companies, trucking routes, private security firms, and, according to every rumor Penny had ever overheard while carrying cocktails, several businesses that did not appear on tax forms.
And she had just spilled sixteen-year-old whiskey down the front of his suit.
Then blamed him for it.
It was 1:08 a.m. on Penny’s twenty-sixth birthday.
This was not how she had expected the evening to go.
Ten hours earlier, she had reported for her shift at the Velvet Room, an underground cocktail club tucked beneath a renovated brick building near Boston Harbor. Her manager, Gordon Pike, had refused her request for the night off.
“Friday pays your rent,” he had said.
“My birthday pays nothing?”
“Birthdays are for people with savings.”
That had earned him a stare Penny usually reserved for insects trapped under glasses. But she needed the job. Her mother had been living in a long-term neurological care facility for almost two years after a devastating stroke. Insurance covered part of it. Penny covered enough of the rest to keep herself permanently one late bill away from disaster.
So she worked.
She worked with aching feet. She worked when customers snapped their fingers at her. She worked when rich men stared at her body as though surprised a woman her size had been allowed through the front door.
Penny was five foot five, soft everywhere, and done apologizing for it. Her thighs were thick. Her hips were wide. Her stomach had never once been flat, even during the year she tried surviving on protein shakes and spite. She had spent years wishing herself smaller. At twenty-six, she was mostly tired of the effort.
Around midnight, Jimmy behind the bar had handed her tequila. One shot became two. Two became three because Jimmy whispered, “Nobody should turn twenty-six sober while carrying drinks for hedge-fund sociopaths.”
By one o’clock, Penny was warm, exhausted and operating on the reckless confidence of a woman whose shoes had been hurting for nine straight hours.
Then Matteo Vale walked in.
Conversation died first. Even the pianist seemed to play more quietly. Matteo was forty, maybe forty-one. Tall enough that Penny had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. Broad shoulders. Black hair brushed away from a hard, controlled face. He wore a dark tailored suit without a single unnecessary detail.
Four men surrounded him. Penny stepped backward to give them room.
That was when a nervous-looking customer in a gray suit slammed into her shoulder. Her tray tipped. Three crystal glasses fell. Whiskey drenched Matteo’s jacket. The glasses exploded on the floor.
Penny should have apologized. Instead she looked at the man in gray disappearing behind Matteo’s entourage, looked at her ruined tray, looked at the expensive shoes approaching the broken glass, and snapped.
“Are you kidding me?”
Matteo’s scarred right-hand man, Leo Mercer, shifted one hand toward his jacket. Matteo lifted one finger. Leo stopped.
Penny planted her hands on her hips. “You have the entire aisle.”
Matteo said nothing.
“You and your steroid-powered boy band come through here like a presidential motorcade, that guy shoves me, and now I’m the one cleaning three hundred dollars’ worth of whiskey out of the floorboards.”
Several customers stared into their drinks. Penny stepped closer. Her tequila-soaked courage carried her the final few inches.
She poked Matteo’s chest. “You.” Another poke. “Stay.” Another. “Here.”
Something changed in his expression. Not anger. That would have been easier. Interest. A dangerous, almost amused flicker appeared behind his dark eyes.
“You are touching me,” he said quietly.
Penny finally understood that this might be an important observation. She slowly lowered her hand. “Technically, I was giving directions.”
Behind Matteo, Leo made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh or a medical emergency.
Then Penny saw the gray-suited man again. He was reaching beneath his jacket.
Her drunken brain did not immediately understand. Matteo’s did.
He turned. The pistol came out.
Everything happened at once. Someone screamed. Leo lunged. Matteo grabbed Penny around the waist just as the first shot cracked through the room.
A mirror shattered behind them. People dropped beneath tables. Penny screamed as Matteo pulled her against him.
“Down!”
Another shot. Then another. Matteo’s men moved between booths while customers crawled toward the kitchen.
Penny barely processed any of it. One second her shoes were touching the floor. The next Matteo bent, caught her behind the knees, changed his mind in the middle of the movement, and hauled her over his shoulder.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“Keeping you alive.”
“PUT ME DOWN!”
“When people stop shooting.”
“That is not a normal sentence!”
He ran. Penny bounced against his shoulder, gripping the back of his jacket while chaos exploded behind them. He carried her through the kitchen, past two terrified line cooks, and through a steel service door.
Cold November air hit her face. A black SUV waited in the alley. Matteo opened the rear door and set Penny inside considerably more carefully than she expected.
She immediately scrambled toward the opposite side. “You cannot kidnap me.”
Matteo climbed in beside her. The SUV accelerated. “I just saved your life.”
“You can save somebody without putting them in a vehicle!”
“Not tonight.”
Penny reached for her purse. Gone. “My phone.”
Leo, sitting in the front passenger seat with blood running from a shallow cut along his cheek, held up her purse. “You dropped it.”
“Give it back.”
He looked at Matteo.
Penny’s jaw dropped. “Oh, absolutely not. Do not look at your boss for permission to give me my own purse.”
Leo actually smiled.
Matteo said, “Give it to her.”
Penny snatched it. No signal. She looked at the reinforced windows. “Of course.”
Matteo calmly removed his ruined jacket. “You should be thanking me.”
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“You carried me through a restaurant like a sack of potatoes.”
“A restaurant?” Matteo leaned back against the leather seat, his dark eyes fixed on her. “That was a war zone, sweetheart. And you were standing in the crossfire.”
