King of Pride (Kings of Sin #2) by Ana Huang

If I weren’t terrified of inadvertently summoning the devil (thanks to my lola, who took great pains to instill the fear of God in her grandchildren), I’d make voodoo dolls of my worst exes.

Then again…I eyed my laptop.

I had something better than voodoo dolls. I had my words.

“You know what? Maybe…” I straightened, my fingers already moving before my brain had the chance to catch up. “I can incorporate Dante and Viv’s date in my book somehow.”

This was the part I loved about writing. The lightbulb moments that unraveled new sections of the story, bringing it closer to completion. Excitement, motion, progress.

It’d been a week since Gabriel’s call. I’d yet to hit my daily word counts, but I was getting closer. That morning, I wrote a whopping eighteen hundred words, and if I squeezed in a thousand or so more before movie night ended, I’d meet my target.

Sloane’s brows dipped in a frown. “Dumplings in an erotic thriller?”

“Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” My February deadline loomed ever closer, and I was willing to try anything at this point.

“Perhaps one of the characters can choke on one,” Vivian suggested, seemingly unfazed by my morbid take on her husband’s romantic gesture. “Or they can lace the dumplings with arsenic and feed them to an unsuspecting rival, then dissolve the body with sulfuric acid to hide the evidence.”

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.