Leo would order for me, probably. And there would never be any question about the cost.
But we don’t pull up in front of a restaurant.
The driver guides the SUV into an alley behind a sprawling building. I get goose bumps. The urge to run tenses all the muscles in my legs. But Leo wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t take me to some random alley just to fuck with me.
“I had a separate team come ahead of us,” Leo mentions, scrolling through a screen on his phone. He taps at something there. “They cleared out the four blocks surrounding this building. There’s no one in the alley.”
“I wasn’t worried about it.”
Bullshit, his expression says. But he only waits for the driver to open the door and helps me step out.
We’re directly in front of a short flight of stairs leading to a wide doorway. There’s a panel set into the wall next to the frame. Leo punches in a code, something clicks in the door, and I’m gripped with the fear that I’m about to witness something worse than the revenge killing of three men in an alley. For all I know, the rest of Leo’s family could be waiting behind this door.
I’m wrong again. The only person waiting on the other side is a uniformed guard who is not at all surprised to see us. “Mr. Morelli.” He smiles like Leo is a friend. “You picked a good night. Last night we had visitors.”
“Visitors?” Leo’s skeptical. “Who the hell did you let in here? I should have you fired.”
The guard laughs, and I feel like I’m in some other universe. Some other plane of existence where Leo Morelli is not a universal monster. “Rich guy. Had too much money, like you, and a wife who cried.”
“Who cries at a library?”
I shake myself loose from the shock long enough to read a bronze sign on the wall. The New York Public Library. It’s well after hours.
A wondering smile lights up the guard’s face. It’s clear he saw something special. “This lady did, and then she laughed. Never seen anyone so excited to see all the books. And her man she came with—” He shakes his head. “Never seen anyone look at a woman quite like that.”
“Like what?” Leo and the guard both glance at me, and my cheeks flush. “How did he look at her?”
The guard looks thoughtful, but Leo’s watching me. “Like he’d have stopped his own heart if it would make her happy. He’d have gone that far. It wouldn’t have made her happy, though. She was like a little moon. Constantly near him. Constantly holding his hand. You should have seen how many people he sent to clear the building beforehand. Didn’t matter. That man didn’t let her out of his sight for a second.” A blink. “He had weird eyes, that guy. Never asked him about it. He wasn’t the chatty type. Not like you.”
Leo claps the guy on the shoulder. “You call me if he comes back.”
“Why? Does he sound like your type?”
“No. I want to tell him to fuck off out of my library.” A joke, from Leo to the guard.
“I’ll give you a call. But don’t let me get in your way.” He steps back to let us pass by. “You know where you’re going?”
“I think I will have you fired, just for that insult. This way, Haley.” He puts a big hand on the small of my back and warmth spreads out from my spine to the tips of my fingers.
It takes a minute before I can speak. We’re waiting at an elevator, both of us watching the numbers tick down. “You have tons of books in your house already.”
“Not this book.”
The elevator takes us to the third floor. Down the hall we enter a rotunda that reminds me of Leo’s house as much as anything. An arched ceiling. Intricate murals on the walls. Miles and miles of dark paneling. My heels feel mortifyingly loud in what’s basically a cathedral. We pass through another room with soaring windows, low desks, and catalogs, and then I feel stupid, because the rotunda wasn’t the cathedral.
The reading room is.
Leo takes me inside like he’s been here every day of his life. Maybe he has. A full-body shiver moves through me. It’s a massive room, with long tables and a ceiling that belongs inside a palace. Silence like this is rare in New York City. Rare in places where people crowd together. I desperately want to sit at one of those tables, surrounded by books and whispers, but standing here with Leo is its own out-of-body experience.
“You’ve never been here.” He’s watching me, I realize, and I look like I just got off the bus from the middle of nowhere America.
“There wasn’t a lot of time.” I always meant to go, and things came up. My dad would get on Caroline’s bad side again, or something would go wrong in his workshop, or Cash would need someone at financial aid meetings. A thousand reasons. And one that I’ll never mention, which is that I never felt worthy of visiting places like this in the city.
Leo sighs. “I should fuck you on one of these tables. The sounds would be magnificent.” He gazes up at the ceiling. “Let’s go.”
His words have me hot on the verge of squirming. “Go where?”
“I didn’t bring you here to bend you over a table in the reading room.”
I can’t breathe. For all the things we’ve done, and all the things he’s done to me, he still hasn’t taken me. My heart feels oversized. It’s squeezing out all the room in my lungs. This can’t be real, and I can’t want it this much, and I absolutely cannot be on a date with Leo Morelli.
“I think that’s allowed under the contract,” I murmur. I want to sound sophisticated, as if I wouldn’t mind either way. Instead it comes out breathy. Needy.
His hand is instantly around my neck, instantly making it that much harder to breathe, and I arch in his grip. Leo laughs, and he's right—every sound is amplified here, made magic. He leans down and presses a kiss to the side of my neck, above his fingers. "I would love to break open that pretty little pussy right now." His hand flexes, and it's with obvious effort that he traces his fingers down my neck and over my collarbone. "But there's something I want to show you first."
I feel like human champagne. Leo moves his hand to the back of my neck, which is somehow both hotter and more demeaning, and rubs a thumb up and down while he walks me down the long aisle to another room.
This one is dark too, except for one light on a table in the center of the room. The glow falls away into shadow but I can see the double-decker shelves with stairs, the polished wood, the books...
A dream. All this is a dream come true, including, impossibly, the man in his perfect suit, striding toward that table with its lamp. He turns to watch me walk toward him and I do it through the unreality of this moment. A midnight library. Leo, with dark heat in his eyes. And a book, waiting for me on the table.
I come to the edge of the light and look. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“This is a first edition.” I lean in closer, afraid to breathe. “Is this real?”
“No. I had a fake first edition of Jane Eyre manufactured and planted in the New York Public Library just to fuck with you.”
“You would do something like that.” Every inch of me thrums with tense excitement. The book seems real enough. I’ve seen photos of other rare copies like this, and it looks right. If it is, this book—this one single book—is worth more than sixty thousand dollars. It could pay for all my student loans. “You’re—”