Give In to Me (East Coast Mafia #8)

Chapter 1

DIONNE SAID HIS NAME like it was nothing.

“Julian, this is my sister Katy. Katy, Julian Ventura. We were at school together.”

They were standing on the terrace at Haven Country Club, the jacaranda throwing purple shadows across the stone, and Dionne had one hand on Katy’s shoulder, casual, sisterly, already turning back to her iced tea.

It was Katy’s eighteenth birthday. Dionne had picked her up that morning in the black Audi that smelled like leather and the good perfume and had said I’m taking you to lunch, my treat, somewhere special.

Haven Country Club, where a cobb salad cost more than Katy’s weekly grocery budget and the members wore watches that could pay off Amy’s medical debt.

It was the nicest thing Dionne had ever done for her, and Katy had spent the first twenty minutes just trying not to touch anything.

Then Dionne spotted an old university friend crossing the terrace and waved him over, and the whole thing was supposed to be a nothing introduction, ten seconds of social choreography between courses.

Katy glanced up.

He was tall. Dark-haired. He had blue eyes, which shouldn’t have mattered.

Katy had seen blue eyes before, on boys at school and actors on screens and the old man who ran the laundromat on Fig and who always saved her a dryer.

Blue eyes were blue eyes. She knew this.

She was eighteen years old today, as of seven that morning, and sensible about most things, and she knew that the color of a person’s eyes wasn’t a reason for the floor to tilt.

But his eyes weren’t the blue she knew. They were the blue at the center of a gas flame, hot and pale and ringed with something darker, and when they settled on her face, she felt every nerve in her body stand up and pay attention.

He regarded her for one second.

Maybe two.

And then his whole face went taut.

It was fast. If she’d blinked she would have missed it, but she didn’t blink, because her body had locked into place the moment his eyes met hers and blinking was no longer a function her nervous system was willing to perform.

His gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth.

It stayed there for a beat too long, then tracked lower, to her throat, to the collar of her dress, and came back up.

When his eyes met hers again, they were darker.

The pale blue had gone hot, the pupils blown wide, and the expression on his face was something she’d never seen directed at her before, something she didn’t have a name for because she was eighteen and had never been assessed like she was the answer to a question a man hadn’t wanted to ask.

It lasted less than two seconds. Then his expression shuttered, so fast it was like a door slamming. In its place was a face so neutral it could have been carved from the terrace stone.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. Low voice. Unhurried. Perfectly composed, as if nothing had just happened behind his eyes.

But something had.

Katy had caught it.

“Hi,” she managed.

That was it.

Hi.

One syllable.

She was a person who said hi to people she liked and sorry to people she bumped into and once went an entire school dance without speaking to anyone because the music was loud and she didn’t know where to put her hands.

She wasn’t the girl who had a good line ready.

She wasn’t the girl who had any line ready.

She was the girl who stood there with her heart slamming against her ribs and a feeling blooming inside her chest like a flower opening too fast, petals everywhere, no way to close it back up.

He nodded at Dionne and moved on. His shoulders cut a straight line through the terrace crowd, and Katy followed his path until he disappeared, then sat down and picked up her fork and put it down again because her hand wouldn’t hold still.

It wasn’t just her hand. It was also the heat.

It was sitting in a wrought-iron chair on a terrace in Los Angeles on the day she turned eighteen, absorbing the absence where a man had just been standing, and feeling warmth spread across her skin, a phantom trace left by his attention.

She touched her throat where his eyes had lingered.

The skin there felt the same as always. It didn’t feel the same at all.

Dionne was talking about a case at work.

Something about a deposition. Katy said mmhmm and wow and that’s insane at what she hoped were the right intervals and tasted nothing of the birthday lunch her sister had paid for and couldn’t stop studying the spot on the terrace where he’d been standing and thought, with the calm, clear certainty of a girl who had never been calm or clear about anything: I’ve found him.

Her heart felt like it was about to burst with the news.

But she ended up saying not a word about it.

Not to Dionne, not to anyone because honestly...

What was there to tell?

She’d met her sister’s friend for ten seconds at a country club she couldn’t afford to eat at, and she’d felt a thing, and the thing was too large and too sudden and too stupid to say out loud.

Katy Gates didn’t tell people things. She was the quiet one.

The girl who sat in the back of the classroom and handed in her homework on time and ate lunch alone with a book because making friends required a kind of social bravery she’d never figured out.

She got herself to school. She packed her own lunches.

She’d been managing her mother’s bills since she was fifteen and Amy’s hands were too unreliable to hold a pen, and she was good at being invisible, and she didn’t fall apart over a man’s eyes and a two-word introduction.

Except she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

Not just his face, but how he’d taken her in.

The drop of his gaze to her mouth.

His pupils blowing wide before he’d shut it down.

She was eighteen and she’d never been kissed and she didn’t fully understand what she’d read on his face, but her body understood.

Her body had cataloged every microsecond of that attention and was replaying it on a loop behind her eyelids every time she closed her eyes, and the replay came with heat, a low warm pulse in her belly that she didn’t have a word for because nothing in her experience had prepared her for a man studying her throat and making her feel it hours later in her own bedroom in the dark.

His name sat in her mouth for days.

Julian Ventura.

She said it once, alone in her bedroom, just to feel how it sounded, and then buried her face in her pillow because she was eighteen and ridiculous and this was exactly the sort of thing her mother had done and look how that turned out.

Amy had fallen for Harrison Gates the same way.

Fast, total, with a certainty that rational people called reckless and Amy called love.

Harrison had already divorced Phyllis by then, but that hadn’t stopped him from treating Amy like a convenience and Katy like a footnote.

The smallest possible alimony. No birthday calls.

No holidays. Amy’s heart had broken so completely that she’d spent years trying to numb it with things that came in bottles and plastic bags, and Katy had learned to cook dinner at nine and forge her mother’s signature on school forms at twelve and never, ever count on a man who made your pulse race.

She Googled him anyway.

Julian Ventura. Twenty-eight. Founder and CEO of Gubat, a gaming company that had made him a billionaire before most people his age had finished paying off student loans.

An MMORPG empire that spawned book franchises and movie deals.

The articles called him “reclusive” and “notoriously private.” One gossip piece called him “the most eligible ghost in Los Angeles.” There were almost no photographs.

A conference panel where his face was half-turned.

A charity gala shot where he was leaving the frame, seized mid-stride, his profile sharp against the flashbulbs.

She’d studied that profile for so long her phone screen went dark and she’d had to tap it back to life with a finger that wasn’t quite still.

THE MONTHS PASSED.

The crush didn’t.

Katy went back to Haven every month for Dionne’s lunches and scanned the terrace every time. She wore the green dress that made her eyes something worth noticing and told herself she was just hungry for the cobb salad, which was a lie so transparent she almost laughed.

He wasn’t there in July. He wasn’t there in August. In September, she thought she recognized his profile near the valet stand, and her entire body lit up and then the man turned and it was no one, a stranger with the wrong face, and the crash that followed left her hollow for a week.

She went back to school that fall. Junior year, a year late, because she’d taken the previous year off to care for Amy during the worst of the rehab.

The pills and then the withdrawal and then the long, ugly crawl back to something resembling a person.

Katy had cooked and cleaned and driven her mother to meetings and held Amy’s hair back on the bad nights and lied to the school about a family emergency, which wasn’t entirely a lie.

She’d lost a year. She didn’t regret it.

Amy was clean now, one year and counting, a paralegal by day and a student by night, and Katy was proud of her mother in the fierce, private way of a girl who’d learned to parent her own parent.

But school felt different now. The other juniors were seventeen, and Katy was eighteen, and the gap felt wider than a single year.

She sat in the back of her classes and did her homework and ate lunch alone with a book and said sorry when someone bumped into her and thought about Julian Ventura approximately four hundred times a day.

October. Dionne’s lunch. He wasn’t there.

November. He wasn’t there either.

December. He wasn’t there still.