I should feel like a thief, like I’m stealing this moment that doesn’t belong to me. Instead it’s too damn easy to pretend it’s rightfully mine.

“Grasshopper, what do you say, boys versus girls. Huh, Greyson?”

Soon Melanie’s walking around sticking out her neck, puckering her lips, and leaning forward and pecking in the air. She’s sexy, and fun, and silly, and what she’s doing somehow shoots like a gallon of blood straight to my dick.

So apparently this game includes cards. We picked a category. The dad went for animals. And she’s acting like some weird animal.

“The team who guesses the most wins,” her dad tells me, slapping my arm. “Don’t worry, our little grasshopper never guesses correctly—a crane!” he suddenly yells out.

“Yes!” she cries.

“You go first, or should I?” her dad asks me next.

“By all means, sir. I’m not dying to make a fool of myself just yet.” He laughs and pulls a card out and I see it’s a bear.

He spreads his arms out and walks around. “Gorilla!” Melanie cries. He grins at me and lifts his arms up in the air, higher.

“Stallion!” Mrs. Meyers cries.

Mr. Meyers spares me a glance and lifts his eyebrows up to his hairline in a way that says, See? These women are clueless.

He continues acting until I’m chuckling, watching them, until it’s my turn. I sneak a glance out the window and make sure I’m not visible—if Derek sees this, it’s the end of Zero. No more respect for Zero.

I pull out a card and get dog. I start snarling and do the first thing I can think of, grab a pillow and chew on the corner.

“Wolf!” her mother cries.

I clamp it between my teeth and shake it from side to side.

“Oh dear,” her mother says.

Melanie is laughing her ass off, and I feel like a dickwad. Hell, I want her to guess, but f**k this, I’m not gonna whine like some dog.

I drop the pillow and give up, and she’s clutching her stomach, laughing, and so hot as she comes over and takes the pillow away, playfully running her fingers through my hair. I can see the family dynamic now so clearly.

“My grandma used to say,” she tells me, with one last ruffle of my hair, “those who play together, stay together.”

She’s been protected all her life. Happy. Playing an innocent, fun game. She shines. They all shine. They’re ridiculous and stupid and I have never in my life wanted to be ridiculous and stupid. I kill, blackmail, and con the ridiculous and stupid.

“The one who can do the best trick gets the last brownie!”

“Now, son,” her dad tells me after that announcement, “any trick you can do, now’s the time to do it. Those brownies are killer, I tell you.”

“You go first, Dad!” Melanie cries.

Mr. Meyers begins to do a Russian dance, hut noises included. Her mother makes a realistic gorilla. Melanie looks at me, then she cups her mouth and starts a donkey call. Finally, they all look at me.

Fuck. Seriously?

This is so f**king stupid.

But . . .

It’s the way she is looking at me, curious, happy. It brings me back to where she is. And it makes me study the dining room to see what the f**k I can do. I spot a vase with daisies on the table. They’re hot pink—so princess.

Grabbing a steak knife and backing up several paces, I fling it across the room, past them. And pin the center of the daisy to the far wall.

Silence.

“Holy guacamole!” her dad cries.

“That’s an incredible trick!” her mom cries.

Melanie brings me the brownie as I unpin the daisy, and as she hands over the sweet, I hand her the flower.

“That’s an interesting trick,” she says, surveying me and smelling the flower. “They teach you that at security school?”

“They teach you donkey speak in Decorating 101?” I want to make her flush, and it works. She laughs.

My effect on her is like a drug and it shoots straight to my head, dizzying me.

“That was one cool trick,” I hear the father whisper to the mother, but I’m consumed by my f**king filthy-mouthed princess standing close, panting and excited, playful and warm and full of promises of the things I’ve never had in my life.

I offer her some of my brownie, and she bites into it. I start to brush her hair behind her forehead, and when I look up, her parents are watching us with these huge smiles on their faces, like they’re thrilled their grasshopper has finally found a guy “friend.”

And I see, right here and now, that this is what the Underground took from me.

SIXTEEN

DEBTS

Melanie

We f**ked before he left town.

Straight from my parents’, he followed me to my apartment, up the elevator, to my door. I stood there, starting to say goodbye. He slammed my mouth to his, scooped me up, and took it from there to the bedroom.

He threw me to the bed and ripped my clothes off, then his. My body trembled and my breaths shuddered out of me as he dropped over me.

He held me down, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my hip, and f**ked me hard. I screamed and twisted, raking my hands down his back.

“Look at me.”

I tried, moaning.

He slid his hand up my back, under the fall of my hair and held me by the skull, tipping my face up. “Say you love it,” he commanded. “Say you f**king love it.”

“I love it,” I moaned.

His mouth crashed down on me and he gave me the kiss of a lifetime, the f**k of a lifetime. When he peeled our mouths free he slowed his pace and said again, huskier, “Look at me,” filling me to the hilt with hot, pulsing live flesh.

I looked and he looked back at me, greedy, strong, driving over and over inside me. Not holding back. Every move telling me he needed this as bad as me.

My cl**ax took me over like a storm. With every shudder that passed through me, another, deeper one ran through him until we were both panting and undone. I clasped my thighs and arms tighter around him, holding his hard, heavy body to mine, keeping him a little longer inside me.

I didn’t want to let go. My face was wet again from my orgasm but all of a sudden I felt like crying an ocean.

I’m afraid of what he makes me feel, and of the reality of my circumstances.

I’m afraid that I will owe all this money and have had no buyers for my Mustang, and when my time runs out three days after my birthday, a dozen angry mobsters will come knock on my door and nobody will be able to help me. Nobody will be able to stop them. Not even him.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what to do. But nobody makes me feel as emotionally vulnerable and as physically safe as he does when he holds me.

The fact that he came to brunch, unexpectedly, told me more than all his warnings have. He exhaled in my neck and rolled us to a more comfortable position, where he kept me to his side, and I felt strange emotions swamp me.

Don’t be needy, I told myself, but I felt like an imposter. I still heard myself whisper, “Everything my parents said . . . don’t believe it. They just think I’m perfect, but I fake it.”

I eased away from him and clutched the sheet around me.

He sat up in bed. “I know about faking it.”

“My life came at a very high price and it’s just hard to live up to it.”

Instantly he reached out and set a hand on my shoulder, tracing a circle on my skin with his thumb. “My life has come at a high price too. Every day of it.” He brushed one lone tendril of hair back from my face, our eyes locking. “So many days trying to find some f**ked-up meaning in it.”

The revelation left me breathless, and I waited and waited and waited for more, saw there was more in his eyes, but he got up and grabbed his clothes.

“I’m glad to be wanted here, Melanie,” he said, shooting me one of his many winning smiles.

When he started getting dressed, I turned away to the window and clutched my arms around my stomach, trying to ease the ache there. Ugh. Hate that he’s leaving again. Hate that this could be goodbye.

I wanted to ask if I’d see him again, but before I could, he spoke from the door.

“Stay safe, princess.”

I forced myself to answer, “Bye, Greyson.”

How can I know so little about someone and yet need him so much?

He hasn’t called, but this Monday morning I got another kind of call, and with it, an offer for my Mustang.

I ask Pandora as we settle in the office, “So what do you think, is it a good offer?”

Her answer is to ask me why I am selling my car.

Fuck. I try to think of anything but the truth, that it needs to go and I probably need to sell everything but the shirt on my back, and even then the math may not add up, but I just can’t tell her. “It’s impractical.”

“Dude, you live for the impractical.”

“It got flooded! It squeaks now.”

“Which is cute considering you squeak too.”

“Urgh, you’re impossible.”

“Melanie . . . stop buying shit and you wouldn’t need to sell your car. See this shirt? I do something that’s called washing it three times a week. I only need a couple of these and that’s it. See these boots? They’re my signature. I don’t need another pair of shoes.”

“This is not a shopping problem, it’s a different kind of problem.”

“What, like an addiction?” Her brow wrinkles with concern.

“I want to sell it, that’s all,” I mumble.

“Want to sell, or need ?” Perceptive dark eyes suddenly probe into me in silence. “I have an idea. Sell the necklace your boyfriend gave you.”

“Pfft! Don’t think so!” I wave that off with one hand, then I become somber. “I want to sell my car, and I need your advice. Is that a good offer, Pan?”

“I’m a f**king decorator like you, I don’t know shit about cars. Ask your dad. Hell, ask your precious boyfriend.”

“You know what? I will! I will ask him right f**king now! He will be delighted to hear from me.” I pull my phone out. “He even came to brunch.”

“Wow, you dragged him off to your parents’. Really,” Pandora says, then she clucks at me in warning.

“Oh, bug off, Maleficent!” I angrily cry, slapping her with a client’s newly upholstered pillow I was checking for quality.

I’m not going to tell her shit anymore.

I won’t even explain to her the complexities of two single people doing . . . what are we doing?

We’re having sex, that’s what we’re doing.

But I don’t want it to be just sex.

I don’t know how many secrets Greyson keeps, but he has a secret room, and he refuses to talk on the phone near me, both of which are odd. Still, I have a secret of my own, so it’s not exactly fair to feel this way. I would love to tell him, and only him, about mine. Yet at the same time I pray he’s the last man to ever know.

How to relate to a guy you’re dating or sleeping with or whatever, a guy whose respect and admiration you want, that you asked—that you begged—a group of mobsters for more time because you owe them more money than you thought you had? How to tell him that they lifted your skirt and told you they’d give you an extension—of their dicks—if you didn’t pay on time.

I want to puke remembering the night in the alley. I could never tell this to anyone out loud.

I check my text messages. He was the last who’d texted me. Eons ago when he visited my apartment, and I asked who was coming to visit, and he’d said Me.

I tell myself I don’t want to go through all the guessing games again. If he wants me, he wants me. Right?

But my cardinal texting rule niggles at me. Nowadays relationships are so much more equal.

I slowly inhale and text him, Will you be in town this weekend?

And to my surprise, he answers right away.

Yes.

My heart starts thundering. I text back, Any plans?

I planned to look up my princess.

Gahhhh. I love that too much.

She wants to cook you dinner. Will you come?

I will. And so will you.

I grin in delight. Sexy cad.

8 pm Friday?

I could not be happier when I tell Pandora, exaggerating, “He’s coming into town this weekend just to see me.”

“Yoohoo for you.” She sounds bored.

♥ ♥ ♥

DURING THE WEEK, I bury myself in work and in getting some of my personal belongings shipped off to an eBay store so I can liquidate, and fast. My closet suddenly seems huge since I only kept one pair of sneakers, one pair of pumps, one pair of sandals, one pair of Uggs, and one pair of rain boots. I also went down to only three pairs of slacks, two pairs of jeans, a small assortment of tops, and the most basic dresses. My accessories were the most difficult to part with. But I kept the most colorful ones to ensure I could continue wearing three colors daily, even if the splashes of color mostly come from my accessories.