Chapter One

The light was playing tricks on him.

The golden haze of the late afternoon sun, and its halo glow, was some kind of illusion. No way, no how, was it possible for anyone to be so gorgeous that she actually shimmered.

Mirage was the more plausible explanation for the platinum blonde stepping out of the Aston Martin at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday in July, looking as if she belonged in a gangster movie. She was the woman they all fought over. The woman who brought the men to their knees.

From the pinup dress, to the pouty lips, to the gleaming car that stretched a city block—or so it seemed—she was…

Glamorous. Sultry. Voluptuous.

Ryan’s fantasy woman.

No question about it.

This was lust at first sight. Pure, unadulterated lust knocking around in his chest and threatening to make matters in his charcoal gray slacks harder than he needed them to be right now.

But he was willing to deal with that problem because the woman could not be ignored. A groan rolled around in his throat as he stared shamelessly over the top of his aviator shades. He walked along the palm-tree lined sidewalk that framed police headquarters, cycling through his best opening lines, even though he had a hunch a woman like that—a woman who wore a black dress with a cherry pattern and bright white sunglasses—had heard them all. Busty and bold enough to pull up to Vegas’s municipal building at midday looking like sin come to life, this woman wasn’t going to be wooed by lines or a standard come-here often?

With one hand on the car door, she glanced to the left, away from him, and pushed her sunglasses on top of her hair. In her other hand, she held a phone, a notepad, and a pen. She bumped her rear against the car door, shutting it with her ass.

What a lucky car door.

He half wished she’d drop the pen, just so he could swoop in and pick it up. Bend down, grab it before it rattled to the street, and gallantly present it.

Then he’d get her number with that pen. She’d be the type to push up the cuff of his shirtsleeve and write it on his arm.

He scoffed at himself. As if that would work. But something had to, because the clock was ticking, and he was ten feet from this heavenly vision. Checking his watch, he saw he had two minutes to spare before he met with the detective. He could do this. He could meet her in 120 seconds.

The sun pelted its hot desert rays at him, radiating off the sidewalks, as he ran a hand along his green tie and cleared his throat. She looked up from her phone, and instantly they locked eyes. Hers were blue like the sea. As she caught his gaze, she arched an eyebrow.

This was it. No time for lines. Just fucking talk to the gorgeous creature. “Seems I’ve been caught staring,” he said as he reached her, claiming a patch of concrete real estate a foot away.

“I’m afraid I’m guilty on that count, too,” she fired back, her voice laced with a torch-singer sultriness, her words telling him to keep going.

She had the pen in her hand and she twirled it once absently.

He tipped his forehead toward it. “Incidentally, I’m astonishingly good at picking up pens that beautiful women drop outside our fine city’s government buildings.”

Her lips twitched. Red. Cherry red and full. He wanted to know what they tasted like. How they felt. What she liked to do with them.

She brought the pen to her lips, danced it between them, raised her eyebrows in an invitation, and then let it drop. It clattered to the sidewalk. “Is that so?”

The pen was like a promise. Of something more. Of flirting, and then flirting back. Of phone numbers to follow. And then some. Oh yeah, so much and then some.

“That is so,” he said in a firm voice, bending down to pick up the writing implement, just as Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ crooned from her phone. He rose, and she was tapping her screen, sliding her thumb across it.

“Must answer this. But thank you so much for the pen. By the way, I like your tie.” She reached out to trail a finger down the silky fabric, her hand terribly close to his chest. Then she held up that finger, asking him to wait.

“So good to hear from you,” she said into the phone, keeping her eyes on him the whole time. “I can’t wait to see you tonight at the gala at Aria,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Ryan as she emphasized that last word. “It’s going to be a fabulous event and we’ll raise so much money. My only hope is there will be some gorgeous man there in a green tie who can afford a last-minute ticket.”

He shot her a grin—a lopsided smile that said yes, the man in the green tie could absolutely afford a ticket.

He nodded his RSVP to the gala. She waved goodbye and walked down the street.

Suddenly, Ryan had plans that night.

* * *

Ryan wondered if everyone he encountered today had been hired from Central Casting. Because the detective was straight out of a script. If there was a dress code for police detectives, rule number one must be: thou shalt not tightly knot a tie. John Winston had taken that to heart and was sporting the slightly-loosened look, as if he’d been tugging on his navy tie all day, frustration increasing as he questioned belligerent suspects. Then there were the other hallmarks of the job, from the striped button-down with the cuffs rolled up, to the paper cup of deli coffee on the desk in his office. Even the stubble seemed to have been custom ordered to fit the part of homicide detective.

Funny how people could look like their jobs. Briefly, Ryan wondered if the blonde was a movie star. He wouldn’t be surprised.

“Thanks for coming in,” Winston said, shutting the door to his office behind them. Glass windows looked out over the rest of the department, and a sea of half-empty desks. Ryan wasn’t sure if that meant business was good or bad in homicide. “Have a seat.” The man gestured to a frayed brown office chair. “Ordinarily, I’d chat with you in a witness room, but they’re all full right now.”

So it was a busy day here.

“This works fine for me. What can I do for you?” Ryan asked as he sat down, eager to glean any details he could about the reopened investigation into his father’s murder.

Winston had called earlier in the week and asked him to come in. To help shed some light on the case, the detective had emphasized. “You’re not the target of the investigation. This isn’t about you. But you are a potential witness so I’d like to talk to you,” Winston had said on the phone.

Ryan was flying solo here today. Bringing a lawyer in for routine questioning would make it look as if he had something to hide. He did have something to hide, but he didn’t need an attorney by his side to keep the vault in his brain locked tight. That had been sealed for eighteen years, and no crowbar would get it open, so he wasn’t worried.

He was, however, damn curious. He wanted to know what Winston knew about his family. About his mother in prison. About his father, six feet under. Ryan quickly scanned the detective’s desk for any clue as to who John Winston was—a family photo, pictures of the detective with his kid, maybe even some sports memorabilia. But there were no telltale signs, save for an autographed baseball in a plastic case amidst a neat desk covered only with newspapers and a stack of Manila folders.

Ryan was left to his own devices to construct his character bio for John Winston, and he certainly didn’t need a photo on the desk to know the chances were good that Winston was a cop because his dad had been one, or because someone he cared about had been a victim of a crime.

That was how a man usually went into this business. He wasn’t judging Winston. Hell, Ryan fit the bill himself. He ran a private security firm, and he matched the job profile for that profession. Given that his father, Thomas Paige, had been gunned down in his own driveway when Ryan was fourteen, his job motivation was no mystery to anyone.

The detective grabbed the chair opposite Ryan. “I appreciate you coming in,” Winston said, as he held up a digital recorder. “I’m going to record this. Standard procedure whenever we talk to someone.” Ryan nodded as Winston set the recorder on his desk. “And, please, I’d like to keep what you say just between us. We’re going to be talking to a lot of people, and I want you to feel free to speak about what you know of your parents, and for others to do the same. I’m just hoping you might be able to answer a few questions that could help us in this investigation.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ryan said, shooting him a smile. See? Nothing to hide. “You’ve got us all curious. Not gonna lie—we were pretty damn surprised when you showed up at my grandma’s house and told us the case was being reopened. Last thing I expected to hear. What have you got?”

The shooting was eighteen years ago, and his mother was doing hard time for it. She’d gone to trial quickly for murder for hire, along with the gunman, and both were behind bars. Ryan was dying to know why after eighteen years a closed case had gotten hot again.

Winston clucked his tongue and held out his hands wide, as if he was saying he was sorry. “I’m not really at liberty to say yet, since nothing has been confirmed. But some new evidence has come to light, and we’re trying to determine the validity of it.”

“New evidence about my mother’s guilt, or innocence?”

Dora Prince had steadfastly maintained her innocence. Of course, there was hardly an inmate in any prison anywhere who didn’t. Still, she was his mother, and he wanted to know if there was truth to her claim. He’d love to believe her. Hell, he’d be beside himself to learn his mother wasn’t a killer. He’d held on to the possibility for as long as she’d been locked away, grasping it tenaciously, never letting it go, waiting for a moment like this. For the chance that she might not have done it. That he wasn’t raised by a murderer. He dug his fingers into his palms in anticipation.

But the expression on Winston’s face was stony, his eyes hard. “New evidence about the crime,” he said, giving nothing away. “I know you were fourteen at the time, but is there any chance you remember some of the people your mother was associating with then?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. The answer was yes, and the answer was no. Ryan knew more than he should, but not enough to make sense of what his mother had given him, and he sure as hell didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He bought himself some time. “Can you be a little more specific?”

“We want to know who she spent time with. Beyond Stefano,” he said, dropping the name of the shooter, who was also behind bars.

“I’d just finished eighth grade.” Ryan was keenly aware of his own body language, of how he was sitting, how he was trying to strike a mix of casual and interested. Even though he was innocent, even though he didn’t have first-hand knowledge of the murder, he had intel about his mother that he didn’t intend to share, and that made him hyper-vigilant. Never say a word. He’d taken that directive from her to heart when he was younger, and as the years went on, too. Besides, what he knew would have no bearing on his mother or her freedom. But rather than focus on the classified documents inside his head, he narrowed in on the truth as he answered. “I didn’t have a great sense of the conversations she was having with that guy or any others—beyond the customers who came to our house to pick up clothes and costumes.”

Winston nodded and rubbed a hand over his chin, slowing as he seemed to consider. “We just want to get a better understanding of everything that happened. Something that might seem innocuous to you could actually wind up being a key piece of information for us. Were there new people in her life? Did she have any new friends?”

Ryan’s senses tingled as his analytical mind played connect-the-dots. “Does this mean you think there were others involved?”

Winston leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, the classic pose for trying to get somebody to open up. “Listen, I’m really just trying to get a better picture of what her life looked like at the time of your father’s murder. Trying to understand who she was involved with. It could be relevant to the investigation.” Winston made an encouraging gesture with his hands. “The customers you said would come over to pick up clothes—was there anyone new in the months or weeks prior?”

Ryan scrunched up his forehead, rewinding time. “Around then she was sewing leotards for a local gymnastics team. She tailored dresses for some of the girls in the neighborhood going to prom. She joked once that she had so much leftover fabric that she was going to start making dog jackets,” he said, and Winston’s lips quirked up in the barest grin.

“I like dogs,” Winston said.

“Same here.”

“Any idea who her clients were? Beyond the gymnastics folks? Her friends?”

“Sorry. I honestly didn’t keep track of who her friends were,” Ryan said, speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“Listen, if anything comes to you, I’d greatly appreciate if you could share it with me,” Winston said, turning off the recorder then pushing back from his seat and standing up.

Ryan tilted his head. “What is it you’re looking for, detective? It would help me if I knew what sort of info you think would be useful.”

“Honestly, anything,” he said, emphasizing the last word with a touch of desperation. “Even if it seems like nothing—even if it seems like the smallest piece of evidence,” he said as he opened the door to his office and escorted Ryan through the main office, which reeked of the late afternoon scent of TGIF even though it was Thursday, as weary cops and detectives finished phone calls, shuffled papers, and glanced at the clock as if they were all counting down the minutes ’til quitting time.

Ryan couldn’t blame them. He was eager to end this workday and get on his phone to sort out his new evening plans at Aria. He said goodbye to the detective and left, returning to the blanket of heat outside, where he dropped his shades over his blue eyes and scanned for the Aston Martin. The car was still there, but the blonde was gone.

Damn. He wouldn’t have minded another chance to drink her in. She would be a balm after that conversation with the detective, which had stirred up too many memories and far too many buried emotions. The past was such a thorny son-of-a-bitch. Diving back to his younger years was not a favorite hobby of his. Those days were messy and dangerous, and he wished he could leave them behind him.

He’d never been able to, though. They had dug claws into him. Grown knotty roots inside his head and his heart.

All the more reason to focus on the things that would take his mind off his obsession with the past.

Like tonight, and the chance to see the sexy blonde again. As he walked down the steps, he wondered briefly what kind of business she had at the municipal offices. One thing he was fairly certain about—she probably wasn’t talking to homicide detectives about an eighteen-year-old case.

A case he’d love to know more about. What he wouldn’t give to know what was inside John Winston’s head.