My hand stings, but I barely notice the pain over the buzzing sound inside my head. The fury that flooded my brain the moment I saw Nelo on her made me feel like a different man. I’m not some low-level soldier salivating for a fist fight to show everyone how tough I am. I deal with my problems with a lethal combination of ruthlessness, strategy, and stealth.
But there was nothing strategic about punching Nelo—the guy Sal sent to spy on me—right in the fucking face.
I lost control.
All because of Ale.
My gaze lands on her head of silky black hair, and a shiver runs up my spine. So it begins. I fucking knew I’d regret keeping her around me.
She turns to me, her lips parted in shock.
I cast one look at Nelo on the ground, gesture to Ras that he needs to sort this shit out, and take her arm to drag her out of the restaurant.
“Are you out of your mind?” Ale demands once we manage to push through the crowd of observers. “Who asked you to get involved?”
“Everything that happens on my properties is my business,” I grind out.
“You’re clinically insane. Punching a customer. Get ready for a slew of scathing reviews.”
“He’s not a customer. He’s my cousin.”
She throws up a hand. “Another one? As if that makes it any better.”
We’re in the parking lot. Where the hell is my driver? He needs to take her home and out of my sight. This woman is messing with my head, and I don’t have time for this shit with everything else that’s going on.
“Oh my God.” She starts squirming out of my grip. “Astrid and Vilde are still there. We need to go back.”
“We are not going back.”
“Damn it, De Rossi! I can’t leave them. You may have started a brawl.”
I let out a frustrated groan and jerk my phone out of the pocket of my slacks. “I’ll tell Ras to make sure they get home safe, all right? Happy?”
“Happy? Happy? No, I’m not happy.”
I release her arm and send a text to Ras. She’s overreacting. There’s not going to be a brawl. I knocked Nelo out cold, and I saw who he came in with—just a couple of low-level dealers, his new friends on the island. If he was with his brother, it may have been an entirely different thing.
“Why did you intervene?”
“Nelo is a shithead. You don’t want to get involved with him.”
She laughs in disbelief. “I don’t need you to police who I get involved with.”
Doesn’t she? Does she even know what was likely to happen if I allowed Nelo to take her into that bathroom? It’s like she got a few drinks in her and suddenly lost all sense of self-preservation.
“You want to know why I got involved?” I growl. “I thought you were maybe being pressured into doing something you didn’t want to. I saw how he grabbed you, how he moved you around. You didn’t look very interested to me.”
She grows still, and suddenly, I can’t bring myself to meet her eyes.
Cazzo. I should punch myself in the mouth. Did I really just admit to her I was trying my hand at being a knight in shining armor? I don’t know what the ever-loving-fuck I’m doing when I’m around this woman.
“You don’t know me,” she finally says, her voice so low I barely pick up on it.
“No, I don’t,” I snap. “Maybe Nelo knows you better. Maybe he was right when he called you a—” I slam my mouth shut.
“Called me a what? A slut?”
I grind my jaw in response. No one is allowed to call her that. No one.
She sighs. “There are far worse things to be than a slut, De Rossi. You didn’t need to take such offense on my behalf.”
My driver appears from behind the restaurant.
“I’m sorry, señor, I was grabbing a bite to eat in the kitchen.”
I jerk my head in Ale’s direction. “Take her home. I need to go back there.” This conversation is done. I need to go clean up my mess, down a strong drink, and figure out what I’m going to do about this woman.
Either I make her mine or completely erase her from my mind.
When I walk back into the restaurant, I see that Nelo’s gone, and the customers have dispersed. The staff are cleaning up for the night, and no one dares to look at me.
Ras comes to my side. “We comped everyone’s meals. One guy got it on camera, but I made him delete it in front of me. This isn’t going to get out.”
Maybe it won’t make it to the news, but Nelo will complain to Sal. Sal might start asking questions about Ale. Questions I can’t answer.
“I want him and his brother off my island.”
“After tonight, that’s unlikely to happen. Let’s get out of here. The staff will close the place down.”
We get into Ras’s car, and he starts driving in the direction of my house. When I don’t say anything, he sniffs and gives me a sideways glance. “Care to offer an explanation?”
“There’s nothing to explain.”
He cracks his neck. “My job is to mitigate risk. I can’t do my job if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on between you and that girl.”
“I already told you I hired her.”
“Last time we talked, you said that was highly unlikely to happen.”
“I didn’t expect her to get through the week, but she did.” I begrudgingly have to admit I was wrong about her. She had a tough week—I told Inez she had to go hard on her—but Ale took everything in stride. Even the most disgusting tasks weren’t beneath her. “There was no reason for me not to give her the job.”
“Is a bodyguard part of her benefits package?”
I run my hand over my face. “No.”
“Then what the fuck was that?”
“Nelo was asking for it.” He was, but that doesn’t mean I had to deal with it in public. If I had kept my cool, I could have used his behavior as an excuse to kick him off Ibiza. Now, I’ll have to call Sal with a convincing lie about what happened. If he thinks I have a woman, he’ll use it against me. I’ll have to tell him Nelo was harassing a customer, and I couldn’t allow that to happen on my property.
“This isn’t like you,” Ras says. “You’ve always kept your temper on a tight leash.”
Because that’s what I’ve had to do to survive and to keep those I care for safe. As far back as I can remember, I’ve been in the crosshairs of the Casalese don. I don’t know how many wrong moves I have until he decides to pull the trigger.
When I don’t say anything, he turns to me. “Is that girl going to be more than just an employee?”
Who is Ale Romero? Ever since I shook her hand in my office, I’ve had that question on my mind. I don’t know anything about her. I could ask Ras to look into it, but that will only feed into my growing obsession.
I need to maintain my tentative peace with Sal until I have what I need to make a real move against him. That means what happened tonight cannot happen again.
“No,” I say. But something tells me it won’t be long before my conviction is tested again.
On Monday, I’m in my office signing a batch of contracts when a knock comes.
“Come in,” I call out, lifting my gaze off the papers.
It’s her.
Cazzo. What is she doing here? I told Inez not to send her back to my office again. All weekend, I forced myself not to think about her. Every time she popped into my head unbidden, I did one hundred pushups. My arms are fucking killing me.
All that effort, for fucking nothing. The sun streams through the window, leaving a long patch of light on the ground, and she steps right into it. Madonna. She looks unreal. That hair. What I would do to twist it like a rope around my fist while I bury myself inside of her.
She brushes something off her uniform and sends me a guarded look.
I lower my pen. “What is it?”
“I wanted to apologize for what happened on Friday. You were right. I was drunk.”
I lean back in my chair. “I didn’t expect an apology.”
“I can admit when I’m wrong.”
Can she? Interesting. With the attitude she likes to give me, I would have expected her to be the type that doubles down. “It’s a rare quality.”
“I wasn’t behaving like myself that night,” she says. “And you’re my boss now. I’d like to put it behind us.”
My lips twitch with amusement. She wants me to know she’s not planning on getting herself into another mess like that again. Good. She learned her lesson. “You surprise me, Romero. I thought it would take far longer for you to get used to calling me boss.”
Instead of jumping into our usual bickering, she clears her throat. “You said on Friday we’d talk about my contract today.”
“Yes. Ras prepared it.” I open a drawer and pull out a few sheets of paper held together by a paper clip while she slides into the chair across from me. “Take a look.”
She flips through it without reading it. Then she meets my gaze. “There’s a small problem.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“I don’t have my passport.”
My body grows tense. Was she getting trafficked? It’s the first suspicion that crosses my mind and it turns my mood sour. “Why’s that?”
“I got robbed when I first got here. They took most of my money and my passport,” she says.
Not an unusual occurrence in Ibiza, but I don’t buy it. She’s not telling me the full truth. If she ran away from traffickers, she won’t be safe here. I need to find out who took her and make sure they won’t find her again.
“You said you’re Canadian.”
“That’s right.”
“Unless you have a work visa, you don’t have the right to work in Spain even with a passport.”
“People do it all the time.”
“Illegally.”
“I’m not sure,” she says.
“I am.” I can feel her panic as she deflates before my eyes.
“Is there something you can do? I really need this job.”
I lean forward and clasp my hands on top of the desk. She shifts under my gaze, more uncomfortable than I’ve ever seen her. “I want you to be honest with me,” I say.
“I’m not lying. I was robbed.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“What trouble? Of course not.”
More lies.
“Why are you here, Romero?”
“Why does anyone come to Ibiza?”
“I don’t care about anyone. I’m asking about you.”
When she just stares at me with scared wide eyes, I decide to be direct. “Did someone bring you here by force?”
Her brows furrow. “No. Why would you ask that?”
“Sometimes girls are brought here against their will.”
She purses her lips and gives her head a shake. “No one brought me. I chose to come here.”
The words ring true this time. I relax a bit. No need for a manhunt after all.
“But why Spain? Why Ibiza? Canada can’t be that bad. Friendly people.”
“Cold as hell.”
Her deadpan response draws a chuckle out of me, and some of the tension in the room eases.
She sighs. “You want honesty?”
“Yes.”
“I ran away from my family. They weren’t good to me. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between us. An ocean, ideally. So I came here. There’s not much else to be said.”
What did her family do to her? I study her carefully. “You’re afraid of something.”
“No.” Her answer comes too quickly.
“Who are you afraid of?” I press.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. I get paranoid sometimes, that’s all.”
“If you tell me who, I’ll make sure they don’t step foot on this island.”
My offer shocks her, but she only considers it for a moment before she shakes her head.
“Thank you,” she says. “But that won’t be necessary. There’s no way for them to know I’m here.”
I’m tempted to argue. For someone with resources, there are many ways to track a person down. If I ask Ras to look into her, I could probably find out who her family is in a day or two. But I won’t ask him, and it’s for a good reason. With everything that’s going on in my life, Ale Romero can’t be my priority.
Still, I can’t kick her to the curb when she’s hiding from someone. It’s untenable.
I hand her my pen. “Sign the papers.”
She nearly rips it out of my hand. “Thank you.”
“Not a word about this to anyone,” I say once she slides the contract back to me.
“Of course. Thank you again. I mean it.”
Our fingers brush when I take the pen back. Since when do I even notice shit like that?
She leaves, and I rake my fingers through my hair. There’s something about Ale that pulls me to her. Something I don’t understand.
But it’s something that I must learn how to control.
