Page 115 of Lady and the Hitman

Never been so brazen, so wildly out of character that I let a man devour me in broad daylight with people just a few hundred feet away. And yet, with Ronan, it didn’t feel like I was losing control. It felt like I was finally stepping into it.

I shifted in my seat. “You can’t say things like that.”

“I can say anything I want.”

“Ronan.”

He reached across the table and wrapped his fingers around my wrist. Not hard. Just firm enough that my pulse jumped beneath his touch.

“I want to take you somewhere,” he said.

“We just got here.”

He leaned in. “Then I’ll fuck you in the car.”

Heat shot through me like a spark.

“You’re not patient, are you?”

“I’ve been patient enough.”

I didn’t disagree.

Dinner blurred after that. The wine dulled the edges, but the tension between us only grew sharper. I barely tasted the dessert. Couldn’t have told you the name of the restaurant if you’d paid me.

But it wasn’t just desire that kept tugging my focus away from the table. It was the thoughts I couldn’t quite silence—of my dad. Of the look he might give me if he knew where I was, who I was with. I could practically hear the disappointment in his voice, the quiet way he’d say my name like it was a question. Like I was breaking his heart without even trying. I had to shove those thoughts down—forcefully—because if I let them surface, I’d ruin everything. I didn’t want to be the good daughter tonight. I wanted to be the woman Ronan looked at like she was his whole world.

By the time Ronan took my hand and led me back outside, the air felt different—heavier. Charged.

Savannah’s streets glowed with gaslight and moonlight and the kind of old-world decadence that made sin feel sacred.

He didn’t wait until we reached the car.

He pressed me into the brick of an alley just off the main street, one hand fisted in my hair, the other braced beside my head, and kissed me like he meant to erase every man who’d ever touched me before him.

I let him.

Because I was already his.

His mouth was a demand. The moment our lips met, I forgot how to stand. He kissed like he meant to ruin me—tongue sweeping past my lips with all the precision and dominance I’d come to crave. My back hit the brick wall, the coarse surface biting through silk, grounding me, holding me upright while the rest of me unraveled.

I should’ve cared that we were in public. That anyone could turn the corner and see me, Zara Hughes, being kissed within an inch of her sanity by a man who looked like he broke rules for a living. But I didn’t. Not when his teeth tugged at my bottom lip and dragged a sound from my throat I didn’t recognize.

His hand slid from my hair to my throat, not choking, just resting there—claiming. His fingers curved gently, just enough to feel the frantic beat of my pulse. His body pressed tighter, pinning me with the full weight of who he was—muscle and heat and barely leashed violence in a white button-down.

“You drive me insane,” he growled against my mouth. “You have no idea what you do to me.”

Oh, but I did. Because he was doing the same to me. Unraveling every part of me that had ever felt safe, every rule I’d written for myself.

His thigh slid between mine, forcing them apart with one deliberate press, and the friction sent a pulse of heat straight through my core. The hem of my dress rode up, exposing more than it hid.

“Ronan,” I whispered, my hands caught in his shirt, clutching at fabric like it could save me. I didn’t know if I was pulling him closer or trying to remind myself we were still in public. It didn’t matter.

He didn’t let me choose.

His hand slid down my side, over the swell of my hip, fingers hooking the hem of my dress and dragging it up. Slow. Purposeful. His knuckles brushed bare skin, and my breath caught hard enough to burn.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmured, lips ghosting along my ear. “Tell me you don’t want this.”