Sloane and I gaped at her. Out of the three of us, Vivian was the least likely to hatch such diabolical ideas.
“Sorry.” Her cheeks pinked. “I’ve been watching a lot of crime shows with Dante. We’re trying to find a normal hobby for him that doesn’t involve work, sex, or beating people up.”
“I thought he outsourced that last part,” I half joked, tapping out an obligatory sentence about arsenic. Dante was the CEO of the Russo Group, a luxury goods conglomerate. He was also notorious for his questionable methods of dealing with people who pissed him off. Urban legend said his team beat a would-be burglar to the point where the man was still in a coma years later.
I’d be more concerned about the rumors if he didn’t love Vivian so much. One only had to look at him to know he’d rather throw himself off the Empire State Building than hurt her.
Vivian wrinkled her nose. “Funny, but I meant his boxing matches with Kai.”
My typing slowed at the mention of Kai’s name. “I didn’t know they boxed.”
He was so neat and proper all the time, but what happened when he stripped away the civility?
An unbidden image flashed through my mind of his torso, naked and gleaming with sweat. Of dark eyes and rough hands and muscles honed through hours in the ring. Glasses off, tie loosened, mouth crushed against mine with heady carnality.
My body sang with sudden heat. I shifted, thighs burning from both my laptop and the fantasies clawing their way through my brain.
“Every week,” Vivian confirmed. “Speaking of Dante, he’s picking me up soon for dinner at Monarch later. Do you guys want to join us? He’s friends with the owner, so we can easily update the reservation.”
“What?” I asked, too disoriented by the sharp left turn in my thoughts to catch up to the new topic.
“Monarch,” Vivian repeated. “Do you want to come? I know you’ve been dying to eat there.”
Right. Monarch (named after the butterfly, not the royals) was one of the most exclusive restaurants in New York. The wait-list for a table was months long—unless, of course, you were a Russo.
Sloane shook her head. “I have to pick up my new client tonight. He lands in a few hours.”
She ran a boutique public relations firm with a roster of high-powered clients, but she usually outsourced her errands. Whoever it was must be really important if she was picking them up herself, though she looked distinctly unhappy about the task.
I pushed my laptop off my thighs and lifted my hair off my neck. A welcome breeze swept over my skin, cooling my lust.
“Count me in,” I said. “I don’t have work tonight.”
I didn’t love playing third wheel, but I’d be an idiot to turn down a meal at Monarch. It’d been on my restaurant bucket list forever, and it would be a good distraction from my unsettling Kai fantasies.
I couldn’t wait to tell Romero—about dinner, not Kai. Besides engineering, my brother’s greatest joy in life was food, and he was going to die when— Wait. Romero.
“Oh my God, I totally forgot!” The adrenaline of remembering a forgotten task surged through me, erasing any lingering thoughts about a certain pesky billionaire. I reached forward and pulled my backpack onto my lap. “I promised Rom I’d give this to you guys to try.”
After some rummaging, I triumphantly fished out a high-tech, beautifully ribbed, bright pink dildo.
Two brand-new packaged toys sat at the bottom of my bag, but I liked to show off the goods first, so to speak.
Romero was a senior design engineer at Belladonna, a leading adult toy manufacturer, which was a fancy way of saying he made vibrators and dildos for a living. They relied on testers for early feedback, and somehow, he’d roped me into recruiting my friends for the task.
It wasn’t as weird as it sounded on paper. Romero was a total science geek; if you placed a naked supermodel and the newest design software in front of him, his priority would be mastering the software. To him, there was nothing sexual about the toys. They were simply products that needed perfecting before they hit the market.
That being said, I didn’t test out his designs. Even Romero agreed that would be too creepy, but my friends and acquaintances were fair game.
“No.” Sloane pressed her lips together. “I don’t need another dildo. I have a whole cabinet of those things, and they take up valuable space.”
Like her office, clothing, and pretty much everything else in her life, Sloane’s apartment was an exercise in stark minimalism. Besides the television and, well, us, the only sign of life in her white-on-white living room was the oblivious goldfish swimming in the corner. The previous tenant had left it behind, and Sloane had been threatening to flush the Fish (yes, that was its name) down the toilet for the past two years.
“But this is state of the art,” I argued, shaking the dildo. “You’re one of Romero’s most trusted reviewers!”
Unlike Vivian, who softened her feedback with encouraging words, Sloane specialized in scathing evaluations that dissected each product down to the bone. This was the same woman who wrote multipage critiques of every romantic comedy she watched; her capacity for preempting strangers’
hurt feelings hovered somewhere in the negative thirties. On the flip side, if she said she liked something, you knew she wasn’t bullshitting you.
After more cajoling, threatening, and bribing in the form of a promise to watch every new Hallmark rom-com with her, I convinced Sloane to continue her reign as Belladonna’s most feared and revered tester.
I was still coming down from the high of winning an argument with her when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it.” Vivian was in the bathroom and Sloane was busy scribbling in her notebook—based on how aggressively she was writing, the poor movie was getting eviscerated—so I scrambled off the couch and made my way to the front door.
Thick dark hair, broad shoulders, olive skin. A quick twist of the doorknob revealed Vivian’s husband, looking every inch the billionaire CEO in a midnight-black Hugo Boss shirt and pants.
“Hi!” I said brightly. “You’re early, but that’s okay because the movie just finished. You know, the male lead kind of reminds me of you. Super grumpy with daddy issues and a perpetual frown—until he finds the love of his life, of course.”
Actually, the male lead had been a cinnamon roll, but I liked to poke fun at Dante whenever possible. He was so serious all the time, though his disposition had improved dramatically since he married Vivian.
A flush crawled across his sculpted cheekbones and over the bridge of his nose. At first, I thought I’d annoyed him so much he was having a heart attack right there in the hallway, but then I noticed two things in rapid succession.
One, Dante’s gaze was fixed on my right hand, which still held the prototype toy from Belladonna.
Two, he wasn’t alone.