Maid for the Hitman: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance Flora Ferrari (summer beach reads TXT) 📖

“Swear you won’t hurt me,” I say.

“I swear,” he growls. “I’d die before I hurt you.”

I reach forward and grab the door lock, my twisted emotions causing my hand to tremble as I slide it loose. I know this could be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and yet I can’t bring myself to stop the movement.

I grab the door handle and pull it open, trembling more and more each second, convinced that I’m going to be met with the barrel of a gun.

But Ryland is unarmed, standing there in a silver colored suit the same shade as his hair.

He stares at me for long moments, his clean shaven jaw tight, his eyes narrowed. His hair is the color of iron, and his eyes are a bright startling blue. He’s tall, at least six and a half feet, and wide.

His muscles throb through his suit.

I step back on jelly-like legs, my heart pounding heavily in my chest, my clit singing and becoming tingly and super-sensitive against the impossible roughness of my panties.

He steps into the room, ducking under the doorframe, his lips twisted into a slight smirk. He turns and closes the door – showing me the muscled broadness of his back – and locks it with a definitive click.

He turns back to me, staring down, his jaw pulsing.

“You said you weren’t going to hurt me,” I whimper.

“I’m not,” he snarls, stepping closer, closer until his musky cologne washes over me.

Or maybe it’s not his cologne. Maybe it’s just how Ryland smells, manly and woodsy and overwhelming.

“Then why are you looking at me like that?” I whisper.

He chuckles darkly and averts his gaze, scanning our small apartment. It feels even tinier with his massive body filling the space.

“I don’t like men hurting women,” he says. “So if I seem angry, maybe that’s why. You need to pack a bag.”

“What? Why?”

He turns his gaze back to me, those wolfish blues pinning me in place. It’s like he can see right through me. The crazy thought rises in me that he knows how badly my body is tingling, all my nerves set slight, blazing under his attention.

“Because you’re coming to live with me,” he says firmly. “You and your mother. I have a large estate and I can hire discreet nurses to take care of her.”

“What?” I say, shaking my head slowly.

Surely this is a fever dream.

Any second now, I’ll wake up to find I’m in bed with mom, my hands wrapped around her hot body, her heat and her sweat transferring to me and driving me to wild, impossible fantasies.

Live with this man, in his estate?

“You can’t stay here,” he snarls. “You need to stay out of sight. Vito has to believe you’re dead.”

“For how long? I can’t hide forever.”

“For as long as it takes,” he snaps.

He takes another step forward, his firm body pushed right up against mine now. My breasts flatten against his stomach. My nipples tingle and harden, and a flush spreads over my cheeks and down my neck.

“This could be a trick,” I murmur.

He sighs. “It’s not a trick,” he says. “It’s a… job offer.”

He smirks, his eyes dancing with a teasing light.

“A job offer?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m going to have to empty my estate of all the staff when you come to stay. So I’ll need a maid. I think you’d work very well. Once I get you the right uniform.”

Is he mocking me?

I take a step back, scared that I’ll do something humiliating if we remain pressed so closely together—scared I’ll kiss him.

I can only assume he’s making fun of me because the alternative makes no freaking sense. The alternative is that he’s attracted to me.

I’ve never had much attention from men, or even from boys in high school.

Not positive attention, anyway.

I’ve always been too curvy and angry for them, I guess.

But the way Ryland’s looking at me, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he wanted me, really wanted me, as I’ve never been desired before.

“A uniform,” I murmur. “You want me to wear a uniform for you.”

He grins like a wild beast, a tendon in his neck becoming tight, tense. “You need to pay your way somehow, but we can worry about that later. For now, you need to pack a bag.”

“I can’t just… What will Mom say?”

“Explain it to her,” he says. “Tell her the truth. Tell her you’ll both be murdered in the most violent way imaginable if you stay here.”

He steps forward, brushing up against me again.

My nipples tingle and my insides throb, my panties flooding with wetness. He glares down and for a moment, I think he’s going to press his smirking lips against mine.

But then he swaggers past me and drops onto the couch, folding one leg over the other and laying his arm across the back.

“Hurry up, Rosie,” he says. “I haven’t got all day.”

I walk past him, feeling his eyes burn into my back as I head toward the bedroom.

Or am I just imagining, wishing, projecting?

I know I should question this more, but I’ve spent the whole day waiting for a gun to be shoved into my face.

Having a silver-haired, handsome giant sitting on my couch instead feels like a blessing.

CHAPTER SIX

Ryland

I look around her tiny apartment, clean but far too small, far too cheap-looking for a woman who deserves palaces and gowns and waiting staff, and all the finer things in life.

My balls are still throbbing as I wait for her and her mother to emerge from the bedroom.

Being so close to her makes me ache, my chest getting tight, the base of my cock going stiff and ready to explode any second.

I want to roar that she’s mine, that every inch of her curvy body belongs to me and me alone, but my main priority right now is convincing her to get out of here before Vito learns that I’ve betrayed him.

Telling her she could be my maid wasn’t part of the plan, but the more I think about it, the fiercer my