Be With Me

by Gabrielle Sands

I swallowed. Hard. “Your family is involved with the mob.” “No, Mia. My family is the mob.”

“I’m not a chew toy,” he said through gritted teeth. “Fucking behave.”

“You know, most men have to earn a woman moaning their name, and you definitely haven’t done that.”

“If I’d known you were the enemy, I would have enjoyed having you beneath me even more.”

While she wasn’t looking, I swiped her lip gloss off her desk and shoved it into my pocket. Why? Fuck if I knew. Probably because I was losing my goddamn mind.

“I want you to kiss me. And not just some fucking peck. I want you to kiss me and mean it.”

The second she said she’d lied to her friends for me, it was game over. Shock hit first—she’d kept her word when I’d done nothing to deserve it. And then came something else.

Mia Morales had infected my black heart with a virus that compelled me to do right by her. Fuck knows if I’d ever recover.

“Well, then,” Erik said lightly, “I’ll just have to see you unmasked some other time. Could I get your number?” “Not if you value your ability to breathe without a respirator.”

“I can’t fucking sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see you so vividly that I can practically taste you.” Romolo leaned in, brushing his lips against my temple. “I don’t know what the fuck you’ve done to me, Berry, but I need to get you out of my system. And I think you need to get me out of yours too.”

Good girls didn’t sleep with gangsters. But maybe I was tired of being good.

I had power, strength, and money that could buy almost anything. But it was useless when it came to solving the only problem I cared about. Keeping her.

“I love you like I’ve never loved anything in my goddamn life. It’s terrifying. It’s relentless. You’ve gotten under my skin and into my soul, and you didn’t even try. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being mine and became yours.”