“I’ll take care of it,” she snapped and was already moving toward the door.
“Let me help, Karena. This is our name on the line,” Monica stated coolly.
“No, it’s my buy, I’ll handle it.”
“Yes. You handle it, and do it fast before word gets out,” Paul said solemnly.
Karena opened her mouth to speak then clapped her lips shut.
Three things were drilled into her and her sisters as they grew up in the Lakefield household: Loyalty. Honesty. Respect.
Only her upbringing held the words she’d longed to say to her father at bay, while the terrible fear that she’d truly messed up guided her quick steps.
Samuel Desdune fell back on the ground laughing as his two-year-old blue Great Dane tackled him to the ground, red ball hanging from his mouth.
Fall was just creeping up on the quiet Greenwich, Connecticut, neighborhood he lived in, delivering a crisp morning breeze in its wake. The trees and shrubs surrounding Sam’s waterfront home were just beginning to show signs of color change, and Romeo was enjoying his morning exercise.
It had been a year since Sam had adopted Romeo from National Great Dane Rescue after Romeo’s battle with kidney failure. Initially Romeo had a fear of all men except Sam, which made it quite difficult when Sam’s older brother, Cole, or his father, Lucien, came for a visit. But then his sister Lynn had brought her four-year-old son, Jeremy, over and Romeo’s attitude toward the male gender had changed.
Rolling Romeo off him, Sam retrieved the ball from the dog’s mouth, got to his feet and tossed it the length of the yard once more. Romeo, with his shiny blue-gray coat and long legs, practically leaped across the grass to retrieve it.
Oh, the joys of being his own boss. D&D Investigations was in its sixth month of business. For two years prior Sam hadn’t had a partner, but after the biggest case of his new career so far—tracking and capturing the man who stalked and terrorized the Bennett family—he’d decided a partner would be nice. For that he’d called on his old friend, Trent Donovan, an ex-Navy SEAL with instincts Sam trusted and a kick-ass attitude he admired even though it still scared him a bit.
Trent ran the West Coast location while Sam concentrated on the East Coast cases. Right now they were handling the surveillance of a cheating husband and the disappearance of a four-year-old girl. For both cases, his twin sister, Sabrina, and Trent’s cousin Bailey could hold down the fort. Bree, the nickname he would always use for his twin, no matter who she married or how many kids she had, was a former Marine. She could hold her own, as she’d shown without a doubt when she’d chased and injured the stalker who was about to shoot her husband, Lorenzo Bennett.
Bailey Donovan was, for lack of a better term, a loose cannon. She was antsy and reckless and itching for some action. That’s why Trent had sent her to Sam, because he didn’t have time to babysit her now that he was married and about to become a father.
For now, however, the missing-child case was making good use of Bailey’s excess energy as she followed lead after lead in the hopes of finding the child before Christmas.
Romeo was back, his natural ears flapping against the breeze as he returned the ball once more. “Good boy,” Sam was saying as the cell phone at his hip began to ring.
“Desdune,” he said answering after the second ring.
“Hi, I hope you remember me. This is Karena Lake-field.”
The red ball fell out of Sam’s hand as Romeo with his large, sometimes awkward body danced around Sam demanding attention.
Of course he remembered her. The petite, brown-skinned beauty with intriguing eyes and tight body he’d met while in Maryland helping Trent with a family problem. How could he forget her?
“Hi, Karena,” he said cheerfully. “It’s nice to hear from you.”
They’d exchanged phone numbers on the plane ride back from Maryland in August and then saw each other again briefly at the opening of the Gramercy II in early September.
No. Sam hadn’t forgotten. She’d felt like sunshine in his arms, then dripped like molten lava when he’d kissed her. He’d wanted to take her up to one of the rooms at the Gramercy II, thought she wanted the same. Then she’d pulled away, left him standing, getting wet in front of the water show, and he hadn’t spoken to her again.
Until now.
“I need your help,” she said, her voice sounding less like the sexy timbre he remembered and just on this side of desperate.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m in trouble,” she sighed. “Big trouble.”
Chapter Two
Sam couldn’t say he was happy about driving into Manhattan on a day he’d planned to spend rolling around in the yard with Romeo.
And he couldn’t say that he liked the tone of Karena’s voice as she asked for help.
What he could say was that he was looking forward to seeing her again. As his body heated thinking about her in the tight jeans and even tighter T-shirt she’d worn on the plane ride they’d shared, he admitted he was really looking forward to seeing her.
Talking to her on the two occasions he’d seen her had been like a breath of fresh air. While she tended to talk too much about her job, as if there was nothing more interesting in the world to her, Sam got the impression she was witty and adventurous, even if she didn’t know it herself. From Noelle he’d learned that she was the middle child of three daughters, born into a very wealthy family now making their name in the art world. Upon returning from his first trip to Maryland he’d run a check on Karena’s father, Paul Lakefield, and came up with a brief family history.
The Lakefields’ wealth stemmed all the way back to California’s historic Gold Rush in 1848, when a slave named Celia Smith was taken by her master’s cousin from Virginia across the country. George Lakefield had instantly fallen for his cousin’s housemaid on a visit to Virginia, and before he’d left he’d had Celia in his bed. Upon agreement with his cousin, George took ownership of Celia and headed west to take up with the other panhandlers in search of gold.
That search led to George Lakefield’s first taste of fortune. In 1863, when President Lincoln declared the freedom of all slaves, Celia Smith had stayed by George’s side, and in the years ahead gave birth to four sons and one daughter. Two of the Lakefield sons moved on to Texas, where they struck oil, while the other two ventured into the steel business. The daughter married and stayed in California, where her descendents now ran the successful Genoa Winery.
It was Paul’s great-grandfather, Mathias Lakefield, who took Lakefield Steel to its victorious holdings, leaving a legacy for Paul and his two brothers to follow.
A very impressive history, Sam remembered thinking as he read, leading to more intrigue about Karena. The first time he’d met her, she’d seemed worried about Noelle and the idiotic ex-boyfriend of Noelle’s Sam had helped Trent and the other Donovan brothers capture. But once that situation was settled and Sam talked to her on the plane, he’d noticed something else about her: she was totally dedicated to her job and her
