The Mafia Enforcer's Temptation - Paperback

I spent twelve years plotting his murder. Marrying him wasn't part of the plan.
Torin Murphy pulled me from the flames that consumed my family when I was only ten years old. The Irish assassin with midnight blue eyes stole everything I loved. So I've built my entire life around one goal: making him pay.

But now there's a hit on my head, and the only way to survive is a blood marriage to the man I've sworn to destroy.

He thinks he's my savior. But I know what I saw...death and destruction in his wake, my parents' blood on his hands.

Now I'm trapped in his world, bound by mafia law to a man who makes my body burn with unwanted desire. The ruthless head of a powerful crime family who kills without mercy, but touches me like I'm precious.

He sees through my hatred. He knows exactly how to break down my defenses with his dark games. The way he looks at me, like he wants to equally cherish and dominate me, makes me forget I'm supposed to hate him.

But the deeper I fall into his dangerous world, the more the truth about that night threatens to surface. And when ghosts from his past come looking for me, I'll have to choose between the revenge that's defined me and the man who might be my salvation.

I wasn't supposed to end up in his bed. I wasn't supposed to fall for my enemy.
And I definitely wasn't supposed to discover that everything I believed was a lie.

A standalone dark mafia romance featuring an Irish alpha hero, forced marriage, enemies-to-lovers tension, and an HEA worth fighting for.

Chapter One
Seamus
Something isn’t right. 
It’s too quiet, too still in all the wrong ways. 
The party inside the Romanov mansion here in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, is going strong. The wedding celebration, a union of power between the Assisi family and the Romanovs, went off without a hitch.
Occasionally, music drifts over to where I haunt and skulk the grounds. 
My brother Torin’s reports flow into my earpiece along with the occasional joke from our youngest brother, Declan. He’s with the rest of our crew waiting just outside the party, just in case. It always pays to be prepared. 
The head of the Murphy clan, our eldest brother Callahan, is inside the party, prowling around the guests and probably chain-smoking, if I know him. 
His interjections are few and far between. 
We’re being paid to be here tonight. Some people might say that providing security is a bottom-feeder job, but we’re Irish and we don’t give a fuck about bullshit hierarchies. We care about empire building, making a shit ton of money, and creating strategic ties. Cal has plans he wants to move on, things that can expand our power and establish deeper roots. Things that have nothing to do with what happens tonight.
The Murphy clan has no skin in this game. The Russian gunrunner Dec got us involved with a year ago recommended us for straight-up security.
But as I walk along the paths in the darkness, a weird sense of foreboding claws at my insides.
The pit of my stomach twists and coils. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something, like—
“Holy shit,” I mutter.
A bullet whizzes by me from behind and my attention, which catches a lone figure climbing from the second-floor window, diverts. I whip around, my heart lurching, then steadying because Christ knows I’ve fucking been in this position more times than I can count. I draw my gun, fast and smooth, and I shoot into the dark where the bullet came from. 
I miss.
Whoever took the shot makes a leap at me. 
I tackle him to the ground as he slams a fist into my side. He’s big, and he flips me onto my back. Perfect. I knee the fucker in the balls and grab his hair, giving him the Glasgow kiss and slamming my head into his. He grunts. 
“Don’t fucking move,” I say. “I’m security—”
The man doesn’t wait for me to finish. He slams a fist at my face, but I move and it hits the ground where I’m still lying because this fucker is goddamn heavy. 
I grip my gun in my right hand, jam it into his chest, right at his heart, and pull the trigger. 
He slumps on top of me, dead. With a low grunt, I push him off and quickly roll to the other side, squinting in the darkness, but nothing else moves. No one else is here. 
“Is everything okay?” Torin asks, his voice flooding my ear.
“Just a hitch. Hike up the alert a little.” I frown, looking around, not forgetting the figure I saw. But before I move on that, I look around some more. If anyone else is here, then they don’t give a shit about shooting me. 
Yet. 
I pat down the dead guy, pull out my flashlight, and check his hands and wrists for any telltale tattoos. They could be anywhere, but there’s usually something easily visible. But I don’t see anything. 
Declan’s voice crackles into my earpiece. “Sounded like three shots.”
“And one of us isn’t breathing anymore,” I say. “Guess who?”
“You need backup?” Torin asks.
Normally I’d say yes. But for one guy? No one else? Something the fuck is up. “Not yet, Tor.”
Dec’s a little trigger-happy. “Seamus, I can—” 
“Hold off. Got that, Dec?”
My little brother grumbles. But he knows we’re here for peace, not a war, and people have enemies. There are opportunists who’d like a war, who’d want to break up the uneasy new alliance between the Russian and the Italian families. 
I can handle them. This is what I do.
Still… I get up and kick the corpse out of my path as I say to the dead man, “Told you I was security, dumbass…”
I glance back at the mansion. The figure’s gone. The grounds are big by New York standards and small by everyone else’s. It makes an invasion something we’d definitely see coming. But it also makes individual threats harder to notice. 
Especially if it’s an invasion masquerading as an individual… I let the thought marinate for a minute. 
What the fuck? 
I pause and kneel down on the ground. Wire cutters? I move the flashlight. Abandoned gun. Some strips of wire.
Now my heart stutters.
I know what that means. I carried wire cutters and other tools back in the day for the exact situation when a bomb might need dismantling. Or to adjust timing of the detonation.
Shite. 
A fucking bomb? I hit mute on the call with my brothers. This time, I don’t search for movement. I stay low, moving from the trees to the bushes that line the sculpted yard. 
What kind of bullshit mafia and bratva eejits decided to have no security for this wedding, other than a third party in a show of trust?
I mean, who really trusts anyone these days, unless you’re family? It’s just some bullshit construct to woo people into a sense of false security. 
I peer into the darkness. There. A footprint. A strip of red plastic from a wire. My flashlight picks up on something beneath a bush. If it’s remote controlled, I’m fucked. Everyone here is fucked, too.
I unmute myself. 
“—and I’ll fuck the motherfuckers up the—”
“Shut it, Dec,” I say quietly. “Cal?”
“Yeah?”
“Move everyone to the west side of the mansion.”
“Why?”
“It starts with a B and ends with one, too.” It might sound like I’m making light of the situation, but I’m deadly fucking serious.
He doesn’t ask what kind; he doesn’t tell me to leave it alone. He knows me.
“Be careful now,” Cal says. 
I bend down on my knee to investigate when a twig snaps. I flip around, gun pointed into the night. Another bullet cracks, this one slicing the air near my temple. 
Motherfucker. I hold up the flashlight. That’s when I see him. I line up the shot, aim, and pull the fucking trigger. I’m not at the skill level of Torin, my assassin brother, but I’m damn good. We all are. 
The asswipe hits the ground with a thud.
“Torin, move Dec and the men in at your discretion,” I say. “West side first. Wait until this bomb is dead.” 
Or me. But I don’t say that.
“But—”
“Shut it, Dec.” I lower myself down again to study the bomb.
There’s a timer and enough Semtex to make a big impression—and an even bigger hole in the grounds and the side of the mansion. Everything in me closes in on the bomb. I check the wires, the cutters the dead moron used to set it up ready and waiting. 
It’s simple… I think. There’s less than one minute left on the timer, the red numbers ticking down. My temples throb, sweat prickling on the back of my neck. 
I choose one of the wires. 
And if I’m wrong…
“Boom,” I whisper as I snap it with the cutters. 
The clock stops, and then I pull it apart. “Got it. Sweeping for more, but…” I check the other body. No tattoos, but this one has more weapons. “Get the perimeter swept again.” 
He came looking for his buddy, or to make sure the bomb was still set. And there might be one or two more assholes out here scoping the place out. 
Above, the moon peeks out and I catch a glimpse of something, someone moving. Black streaking behind the figure, then a flash of white. 
I take off. 
Whoever it is moves quick and sure, darting around trees and bushes. 
They know the grounds. I pull my gun and fire a shot to the left. 
The person veers right, and I dart around a tree before coming face-to-face with her. 
A woman.
Even in the dark cover of the trees, she’s fucking beautiful with long black hair and dark eyes. I feign a move to the right, and she races to the left, thinking she can fake me out. I come at her hard and hook a foot around hers, toppling her to the ground. 
I don’t expect how fast she moves as she turns and grabs me, pulling me down on top of her. 
I land on soft, sweet-smelling flesh. Night jasmine, musk, and sandalwood, making the scent sensual, unforgettable, and for a single, twisted moment, I’m mesmerized.
“Get off me,” she hisses.
“Fuck no,” I say, planting a knee between her thighs, up high, where heat and moisture tantalize the skin beneath my pants. “Who are you and why were you breaking into the Romanov mansion?”
“I wasn’t breaking in.” Dark eyes flare. “I just needed—” 
I grin. “To get some air, sweet thing?”
“There’s nothing sweet about me,” she growls as I sweep her hands above her head, pinning them there.
I nudge her soft hair away from her ear. “More like poisonous sweetness, am I right?”
“You’re Irish.” She says it with a twist of hate. 
There’s something in her antagonistic tone that rubs me the right way. 
“That I am, and we both know Romanov would love to have words with you.”
Her reaction isn’t something I expect. She goes still, breath caught, tits pushed up against my chest. She’s not terrified or upset. 
She’s thinking, weighing options. 
“I’m a guest.”
“Maybe, but…” I graze her thigh. 
I only do it to see if I’m right about the figure who was climbing out of the window, to confirm it was her, but she speaks. 
It’s a challenge, a plea, and I’m not a man who deliberately misunderstands. 
“Do it.”
“Think I’ll get distracted?” I ask.
“I don’t think you have the balls.”
Perhaps she’s the type to get off on a little primal play, so I oblige, and I slide my free hand along her thigh, the soft fabric that’s like a second skin gliding against my fingertips, all the way up to her pussy. I don’t know what makes me do it. Her soft and sudden intake of breath, the fuck you, asshole bright in those dark eyes, or the heat emanating from her cunt. 
Because I slide my hand farther up, lightly brushing over her covered pussy, feathering against her clit and then down, along her slit, the heat and wetness that seeps through making me instantly hard.
“Nice little experiment in distraction. But,” I say, pulling my hand away, “you’re wearing a Lycra body suit. Perfect for scaling down from a second-floor window in the dark.” I lean in a little closer, my lips brushing her ear, and she shivers, a soft little moan that licks my dick. “Which makes me think Iosif won’t like to hear about that.”
Her eyes glitter and she moves under me, undulating, rubbing against my cock. I don’t know her game, but that’s what it is. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like certain games, but this one? I want to be the one holding the cards at the end. 
I move my hand away from her thigh and into the pocket of my pants. The shirt I’m wearing transfers her heat, like there’s nothing between us but flesh, and I pull out some restraints, snapping them onto her wrists.
Her eyes widen. I smile. 
“Maybe Iosif Romanov likes it,” she says with a snarl. “Maybe it’s a game we play.”
“You like them older, huh?” As the air thickens, I run my hands over her, and in the pocket of her dress is something small, round, and bumpy. I lift it and pocket it for later.
A snap of a twig and the crush of leaves jolts me. 
“You see them?” a voice says.
Fuck. 
I don’t know the voice. It’s American. I slam my hand on her mouth as she sucks in a breath. I roll us into the canopy of low-hanging tree leaves because these might be her people. 
Then the voice says, “If Hank—”
“Oh shit. Terry’s dead.” A second guy.
Panicked footsteps start running and the pretty, sweet thing fucking bites me. Hard. The pain lances through me, tangling with a throb of need. I lock eyes with her. I’m still on top of her, but as her knee starts to move, I pull a knife and hold it to her throat. 
I plant my knee between those slender thighs and remove my sore hand from her mouth. 
Her eyes spit pure hateful fire. 
I move in close so our mouths almost touch. A beat of need pulsates in the air. Her eyes still spark with anger but there’s something else, too. 
Desire. 
I run my tongue along her bottom lip. Her entire body jerks. I adjust the knife, so I don’t slit her throat. 
But I will if she does something stupid like screaming.
“Alert them,” I whisper, “and you’ll bleed out in seconds.”
Defiance flares and she hooks those bound hands around my head and pulls me down. The knife slips, but I draw it back, right as her lips crush mine. 
She kisses me, a violent fuck of a kiss, tongue invading and seducing. I kiss her back just as hard and desperate. I don’t care about anything but the fact she tastes like hate and sex and poison with a sugary edge. 
For a moment the world wavers and questions of Hank and the other men fade.
I’m rocking against her, a dry hump that she grinds on. And then warm wetness hits my fingers holding the knife. 
Dammit.
I’ve cut her. 
“Fuck,” the first one says. “We need to get out of here.”
I lift my head. 
“Help,” she screams, withering defiance in her face. I pull free, then push down on her hips as I flip her over so she’s face down. They’ve turned and are now running this way, and I shoot at them. A bullet hits the tree next to me. 
Then both men fall to the ground. My brother Declan appears with a shit-eating grin on his face. “Just saved yer life there,” he says. “You…”
His voice trails off as he looks past me. I turn, too. Because I see the same thing he does, a light that flares. 
It’s a cobbled-together flash bomb that does nothing but catch attention, which is its purpose. If there’s one, there might be another, as the flash bomb usually comes along with something more serious. “Get out. There’s a witch here. Get her, move our men back, and clear the perimeter.”
“But—”
“Do it, Declan,” I snap. 
I race to the bomb, skidding down as I search the area. There. Another rigged, fucked-up little flash bomb. It’s meant to cause noise, and it’s meant to cause confusion. Irish-style, down to its little green wires. 
I make short work of disarming it. 
But back in the day, one trick people like Paddy O’Sullivan had, and fuck it, like I had, was to distract so we could do what we needed, and then the real bomb would go off. 
The double flash bomb is a blast from the past, a Paddy special, so yeah, I’m betting there’s another. 
The Semtex bomb seems to be the work of someone else, someone with skill, someone with real intent. Could it be this fucking Hank they mentioned? Or the girl?
I look, scrambling for the wires when I spy the gate to the manicured back courtyard. The garage sits behind that, then there are supply rooms and guest rooms. We did a run-through of the property before the event began. 
The gate is the perfect cover for a second device since a car is parked right on the other side. 
I spot a long-ass rag running from the open gas tank of the car all the way to this side of the gate. The stench of gas punches the air. I rip the rag out, throwing it far away, and then I waste seconds digging around for the bomb. 
Fuck. Under the ivy. I look at the red numbers and grit my teeth. The timer’s almost counted down to zero. I don’t have time to disarm it. Fuck. Fuck. I pull a wire, and it doesn’t stop the timer. It doesn’t blow me up, but…
I run, right as it explodes, the force hurling me into the air before throwing me to the ground. 
My ears ring and a shout rises in the distance from our men. I roll to my back, staring at the stars before staggering to my feet, very disoriented. 
The woman has something to do with this. I know it. Feel it. Her blood’s on my knife. I bring the blade to my lips and lick the salty, metallic wetness before snapping the knife shut and putting it in my pocket where it clinks against whatever I stole from her.
I run back to where I left her. But I only find Dec holding the restraints. 
I pull out the thing in my pocket. 
It’s a gold crest. A wolf. 
I look around for a sign of her. 
“No one was here when I got here,” Declan says. “You’re… a bit crispy.”
I ignore him and dart into the darkness, scouring the area.
But I come up empty. 
She’s fucking gone.