Nope. You can only take a reference to an lvalue, which is (essentially) an expression that is legal to use in the form `my_lvalue = .... Otherwise, there's nothing to take the reference of.

    int* ref1() {   return &1; }
    
    -> error: lvalue required as unary '&' operand
   
    // 

    #include <stdlib.h>
    int alloc()  {
      return *(int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
    }
    int* ref() {  return &alloc();  }

    ->  error: lvalue required as unary '&' operand

You can still be unsafe though, by making a reference to a stack-allocated object and letting it go out of scope :

    int* make_unsafe_ref() {  int a; return &a;  }
    ->  warning: function returns address of local variable