My Billionaire Boss Paid Me to Be His Girlfriend

Dinner was served in a dining room that looked like the council chamber of a Renaissance duke.

A table of dark walnut stretched thirty feet beneath an arched ceiling painted with frescoes of mythological sea battles. Silver candelabras, heavy and blackened with age, cast flickering yellow light across twenty place settings, though only eight were occupied.

Marco Moretti sat directly across from me.

If Adrian was an ocean predator—a shark moving through deep water—Marco was a hyena. He was forty-two, wiry, with slicked-back black hair, a broken nose that had healed crooked, and sharp, restless brown eyes that never stayed in one place for more than two seconds. He wore an expensive Brioni suit, but he wore it like stolen armor.

Beside him sat two men with thick necks and tailored shirts that strained across heavy shoulders—Santino and Vinnie, the union delegates who controlled the longshoremen at the Bayonne piers.

Rosa sat at the head of the table, silent, watchful, cutting her veal with surgical precision.

"So, the little assistant from Queens," Marco said, leaning over his plate, using a piece of crusty bread to mop up his sauce. He hadn't stopped looking at me since the soup course. "Adrian, you always were a man for keeping expenses down. Why pay for a high-society bride when you can just promote from within?"

The two union men chuckled, low and guttural. Julian, sitting next to Alyssa, smirked behind his wine glass.

I felt Adrian’s thigh press firmly against mine beneath the table. His left hand, resting on the white linen next to my plate, didn't move, but the knuckles went white.

"Marco," Adrian said, his voice deadly calm. "Eat your dinner."

"I'm just making conversation, cousin," Marco sneered, his brown eyes flicking to the ring on my finger. "We're all family here, aren't we? Though, to be honest, some of the boys down at Local 1804 were a little surprised. They thought you were saving yourself for a merger with the Falcone family out in Jersey. Real connections. Real muscle."

"The Falcones are under three federal indictments, Marco," I spoke up, my voice cutting through the dining room like a cold knife.

The table went quiet.

Marco froze, his bread hovering an inch above his plate. Santino and Vinnie exchanged a quick, uneasy glance.

I picked up my wine glass, taking a delicate sip of the Barolo before setting it down with a soft click.

"Two counts of interstate wire fraud, and an active RICO investigation by the Eastern District of New York," I continued, looking directly into Marco's crooked eyes. "Their maritime logistics accounts have been frozen since last Thursday. If Moretti Logistics had merged with Falcone interests, our federal customs bonding would have been revoked within forty-eight hours, shutting down every crane from Red Hook to Newark."

I tilted my head, letting the candlelight catch the diamond on my finger.

"Adrian doesn't need to marry into federal indictments, Marco. He prefers assets that generate clean revenue. But I suppose if you don't read the SEC filings, that might be hard to follow."

Silence slammed down on the room like a granite slab.

Julian’s smirk vanished. Santino cleared his throat and looked down at his silverware.

Adrian slowly turned his head to look at me. The corner of his mouth was lifted in an expression of pure, unadulterated pride that made my chest swell with heat.

Then, from the head of the table, came a sound that made everyone freeze.

Rosa was laughing.

It was a dry, rasping chuckle that shook her shoulders. She set her fork down and tapped her crystal glass with her butter knife.

"The girl reads," Rosa said, her green eyes dancing with dark amusement. "San Antonio, what a miracle. An assistant who reads the filings instead of the gossip columns."

"Aunt Rosa—" Marco began, his face flushing a mottled red.

"Be quiet, Marco," Rosa commanded, the laughter instantly vanishing from her voice, replaced by cold steel. "You have been whining about the Jersey docks for six months. Adrian brought the revenue up twelve percent this quarter while you were busy losing seventy thousand dollars on the horses at Saratoga."

Marco looked as though he had been slapped with a wet fish. He glared at me, pure venom in his eyes, but he shut his mouth.

"Now," Rosa said, leaning back against her high-backed chair, her sharp gaze sweeping between Adrian and me. "Dinner is finished. The delegates can sleep in the carriage house. Adrian, take your woman out to the conservatory. She looks like she needs air, and you look like you are about to murder your cousin at my table."

***

The conservatory was a soaring glass cathedral filled with the smell of damp earth, night-blooming jasmine, and cold sea spray leaking through the iron frames. Outside, the rain had turned into a steady, misting gale that rattled the glass panes above our heads.

I leaned against a cast-iron railing overlooking a pool filled with pale water lilies, my breath pluming faintly in the cool air of the greenhouse.

"Federal indictments?" Adrian’s voice came from the shadows behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. He had taken off his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and was leaning against a stone pillar with a half-empty glass of scotch in his hand.

"I read your briefing folders before you sign them, Adrian," I said, a faint smile touching my lips. "Did you think I was just checking the margins?"

"I knew you were smart, Emily," he said, stepping out of the shadows, his movements fluid and quiet. "I didn't know you were an executioner."

"Marco was asking for it."

"He was." Adrian stopped two inches behind me. His presence was a wall of heat against the chill of the conservatory. He didn't touch me, but he was close enough that I could feel the rise and fall of his chest against my shoulder blades. "You dismantled him in front of his union muscle. He will never forgive you for that."

"I don't need his forgiveness."

"No," Adrian murmured, his voice dropping into that dark, velvety register that made my pulse stumble. "You don't. You have me."

I turned around to face him.

The movement brought me directly against him. My hands came up instinctively to rest against his chest, feeling the hard, steady rhythm of his heart through his white dress shirt.

The jasmine was heavy in the air—sweet, intoxicating, suffocating. The rain beat a rhythmic, frantic pattern against the glass dome above us.

"Adrian," I whispered, my voice trembling.

"You were brilliant tonight," he murmured. His green eyes were completely black in the dim light of the conservatory. He set his scotch glass on the iron railing behind me without looking, his gaze locked onto my lips. "Every time you open your mouth in front of them, you make me want to..."

"Want to what?"

He didn't answer with words.

His hands came up, cupping my jaw, his fingers sliding into my hair, tilting my head back.

"This isn't for the audience," I breathed, my eyes fluttering shut as his face dipped toward mine. "There's no one here."

"I know," Adrian whispered against my mouth.

And then he kissed me.

It wasn't the staged, polite kiss of a fake fiancé. It was the kiss of a starving man who had finally broken through the gates.

His mouth was hot, fierce, tasting of dark scotch and raw desire. He pulled me against him until there was no air left between our bodies, his arms locking around my waist like iron bands. A whimper caught in my throat, but it was swallowed by his mouth as his tongue parted my lips, claiming me with a possessive, devastating hunger that tore the breath from my lungs.

My hands clenched into his shirt, gripping the fabric, pulling him closer. I didn't want to push him away; I wanted to drown in him. The two years of professional distance, the late nights, the unspoken tension that had lived beneath every memo and calendar invite—it all ignited in a single, roaring blaze that consumed everything rational in my mind.

He groaned deep in his chest, backing me against the cold stone pillar, his body pressing into mine with an urgency that left no doubt about what he wanted. His hand slid down my neck, over the bare skin of my shoulder, his thumb pressing into the hollow of my throat where my pulse was racing out of control.

"Emily," he rasped against my lips, his breath hot and ragged. "Tell me to stop."

"Don't," I whispered against his skin. "Don't stop."

He buried his face in the crook of my neck, his lips trailing hot, burning kisses along my pulse point, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin below my ear. Every nerve ending in my body felt electrified, singing with a wild, terrifying pleasure.

And then, through the glass of the conservatory doors at the far end of the terrace, the beam of a heavy flashlight swept across the stone floor.

The spell shattered.

Adrian froze. His body tensed, the lover vanishing instantly, replaced by the apex predator. He spun smoothly, placing his broad frame between me and the light, his breathing still heavy and ragged.

A security guard stood outside the glass doors, illuminated by the halogen beam, holding an encrypted radio to his mouth.

He tapped on the glass twice.

Adrian stepped back from me. His hair was disheveled, his eyes dark, his chest heaving beneath his unbuttoned shirt. He looked at me—really looked at me, at my swollen lips, my flushed cheeks, my dark eyes wide with shock—and swallowed hard.

"Wait here," he said, his voice raw.

He walked toward the door, opened it, and spoke to the guard in low, clipped tones. I couldn't hear the words over the rain, but I saw the shift in Adrian’s posture.

The tension returned—not the tension of desire, but the cold, lethal tension of violence.

The guard handed Adrian a tablet. Adrian stared at the screen for five seconds, his jaw setting into concrete.

He closed the tablet, dismissed the guard with a flick of his hand, and walked back to where I stood in the shadows of the jasmine.

"What is it?" I asked, my voice still breathless from his mouth.

Adrian looked down at me, the warmth completely gone from his eyes, replaced by the gray chill of the Atlantic.

"The Newark terminal," he said quietly. "Someone just breached the security perimeter at Berth 14. They blew the fuel lines on two of our container cranes."

My stomach dropped. "Marco?"

"Marco or Julian," Adrian said, his fingers curling into fists. "They are testing the perimeter. They want to see if I am distracted."

He looked at me, his gaze sweeping over my mouth, and for a fraction of a second, the cold mask slipped, revealing the raw fire beneath.