The Mafia Boss’s Puppy Stole a Secret Contract—Then the New Maid Ended Up Wearing His Glasses

The first sound was not a shout. It was not a command for the guards to draw their weapons, nor was it the cold, lethal click of a safety being disengaged.

It was a tick.

A tiny, involuntary spasm in the muscle along the right hinge of Adrian Moretti’s jaw.

Elena watched it through the magnified lenses of his glasses, her breath caught in her throat like a jagged shard of ice. She saw the dark stubble along his cheek pull taut, then relax. His dark, straight eyebrows—normally drawn together in a perpetual, intimidating scowl that could silence a city council meeting—fluttered upward by a fraction of an inch.

Then came the rumble.

It started deep within the iron cage of his broad, heavily muscled chest—a low, raspy, scraping vibration that sounded like an engine that had spent nine winters locked in an abandoned barn, struggling to turn over against years of rust and neglect. It was rough, dry, and completely alien to the architecture of the room.

Nathan Cole’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. His hand slipped entirely off the grip of his concealed firearm, his arms dropping heavily to his sides as if his tendons had been severed. The two security sentries behind him exchanged a look of pure, unadulterated panic, looking around the room as though the ceiling were about to collapse.

Adrian’s lips parted. A short, breathless bark of air escaped his throat.

“Ha.”

Elena blinked behind the oversized frames.

Adrian tried to stop it. He clamped his jaw shut, his knuckles whitening where they rested on the edge of the leather blotter, the veins in his neck bulging as he fought against the sudden, violent uprising of his own diaphragm. But the image before him—this tiny, fierce brunette kneeling on his floor, pointing at a smug, twelve-pound puppy with a mutilated four-hundred-million-dollar document in its mouth, deadpanning an excuse like a truant schoolchild—shattered nine years of carefully constructed misery in the span of a single heartbeat.

The second laugh tore through his defenses like an artillery shell.

It was a full, deep, resonant baritone laugh that erupted from his lungs, rich and unvarnished, rolling across the vaulted ceiling of the office and vibrating against the tall glass terrace doors. Adrian leaned his head back against the dark leather headrest, his shoulders shaking with genuine, helpless mirth, his chest heaving beneath the black silk of his shirt. The sound was astonishing: warm, powerful, and utterly human, stripping thirty pounds of invisible armor from his frame and erasing the brutal, predatory lines from his handsome face.

The guards stood paralyzed. Nathan Cole looked as though he had just witnessed an oil painting step down from the wall and begin tap-dancing across the floorboards. In twenty years of service, through wars, funerals, betrayals, and triumphs, Nathan had never heard Adrian Moretti produce a sound louder than a conversational murmur. The Don did not laugh. The Don did not smile.

Yet here he was, roaring with amusement in the center of his fortress.

Elena remained completely motionless on the floor, her hazel eyes wide with profound, disbelieving shock. Slowly, with agonizing care, as if she were defusing an unexploded ordnance, she raised her left hand. Her slender fingers touched the cold metal temples of the reading glasses.

With two fingers, she carefully, gently slid the titanium frames off the bridge of her nose.

Adrian’s laughter began to subside into low, rhythmic chuckles that rumbled in his throat. He brought his head forward, his gray eyes bright with an unfamiliar, dazzling light, looking down at Elena with an intensity that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. There was no anger in his face; there was only an overwhelming, dangerous curiosity.