The Perfect Con (A Bad Boy Romance Novel) (Bad Boy Confessions Book 1) Read Online Free

darkened. “I didn’t ask you to think about me at all.”
    Leo’s jaw clenched and my body tingled responsively. “Good,” he said. “I won’t.”
    “I’m the one who was the fan of the show,” Gabe interjected. “And you were magnificent, eight years ago or not.”
    “Are you gay?” Madeline asked flatly.
    Gabe considered her. “Not that I’m aware of,” he answered. “I just watch a lot of TV. A lot.”
    “I’m not into ballet, personally,” Leo explained with a terse impatience. “I’m in the business of…um…goods relocation.”
    “Goods relocation,” I echoed thoughtfully. A slow smile spread over my lips. “I like that. Cute.”
    Of course he was a thief. I should have known. Swooping in with his associate, a bullshit story at the ready, his pressed shirt and his pressed slacks alongside that goofy t-shirt and pants obviously unchanged from the night before; of course they were thieves. That was how they knew me. They knew me through my family name.
    Castillo—not exactly a rare name in Florida, but it could have been that my family was the most famous bearer of the patronym. My father, Arturo, had been a mover on the black market. Drugs and organs and guys with no thumbs and no names, guys only known as “Worm.” He’d been shunted off to federal prison some—wow—it had been over ten years now. Eleven. Only nine more to go before he got the option of parole. My mother had ratted him out for immunity, and she’d disappeared afterward. I’d never see her again, I was sure of it.
    But my uncle was smarter about it. He had a shell company as a “systems analyst” where all the money moved. From the outside, he would appear to be a legitimate businessman. Unless he actually left prints somewhere, he was golden.
    But he didn’t know that I knew about that, and he’d be horrified if he learned it. As far as I was concerned, he was Uncle Ronnie, rotund, congenial, and law-abiding. Mom and Dad had been forced to come out as career criminals a long time ago, and I had wanted to join them on jobs—before all those arrests, of course—but they’d refused nonstop. No matter how often I begged. And I had seriously begged. They kept calling me innocent, their little girl, blah, blah, blah. I was not “innocent.”
    “Maybe we should have this conversation somewhere else,” I suggested, glancing over my shoulder. After what had happened to my dad—I was hyper-aware of the possibility that anyone could be listening at any time, and the consequences could be dire. Though, if it had taught me anything, it was not to trust the ones you love.
    Leo glanced up and down the walkway and nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said.
    “You’re not leaving, are you?” Madeline snapped. She looked back and forth between the two of us. “Because I’ve been starving since the Adderall wore off, and all the food here is junk.”
    Leo flicked the cuff of his dress shirt and checked his watch. I smiled. He couldn’t have been any older than his early thirties, and he still used a real watch. So did I, and I had felt like the last of a dying breed for ten years now.
    “Hm,” he said. “It’s after three now. How about an early dinner at a nice, quiet bistro?”
    “How about dancing?” I countered.
    “Dancing?” he repeated, as if he had literally never heard the word before.
    Madeline crossed her arms in front of her chest and grimaced. “How fun,” she mused. “Business dancing.”
    “There’s a foam bar on the strip,” I told them excitedly. “I haven’t been dancing once since I got here.” When I glanced to Leo, expecting that stern expression of his to be steadfast, I was surprised by a fleeting kind of wonderment in his eyes. As soon as our gazes met, it vanished, and it seemed as if he made sure to immediately frown at me.
    “We’ve only been here for a few days,” Madeline was reminding me. While Leo and I had been looking at each other, her voice had become little more