“Old man Winston wants it done properly, all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. So we’ll send this one to him and keep this one for our records,” Violet said, touching a form I’d just printed out.

I picked it up and slid it into the appropriate manila envelope. I had to admit, working one-on-one with Violet Mitchell was an experience. She was not only a dragon lady—tough and no-nonsense—but she was also brilliant. I think I learned more about the law in the few hours I worked with her in my family’s guesthouse than I’d learned in all three years of law school.

She sat back and ran her fingers over her head, pulling at the knots in her blond hair. I glanced at her, admiring her simple beauty. If I had to guess, I would say she was about Brent’s age—thirty-eight—but she looked so much younger. It was only the lines around her eyes, the shadows on her face, that gave away her age. And the success she’d achieved. It took a long time to work up from law student to senior partner, especially to be in the running to be the first named partner since the law firm began fifty years ago…that was incredibly difficult to pull off, especially for a woman in what was still predominantly a man’s world.

If I’d admired her before, I was doubly impressed with her now.

But then there was a little noise from the front of the house and she jumped, reminding me why we were here in the first place.

“It’s just the security guy Bo sent over. It’s okay.”

She glanced at me, then sat up a little straighter. “Of course,” she said, as though she hadn’t jumped, as though there wasn’t tension written in every curve of her face.

I started to straighten up the paperwork we’d generated in our afternoon of work, putting things in order before I went in search of something to eat. I was starving. We’d worked through lunch and it was now nearly seven, much too late to be working. But just as I was finishing, she sighed heavily.

“I guess you want to know why the hell I was hiding in that stupid cupboard, right?”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“You are surprisingly patient,” she said, touching my knee lightly. “I appreciate that. But you were going to ask eventually.”

“I didn’t want to intrude.”

She laughed. “It’s only an intrusion if you didn’t rescue me from a very awkward situation. Anyone else would have called an ambulance like your boyfriend suggested you should have done.”

“You heard that?”

“You will learn eventually that it is very helpful in this line of work to pay close attention to what’s going on around you.” She tilted her head slightly. “Does it bother you that I listened to your conversation?”

I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “I guess I understand.”

She shook her head. “You’re too good to be true, Ms. Second Year.”

I didn’t know what to say to that and she didn’t seem to expect me to say anything. I set the files down on the couch beside me and crossed my ankles, then uncrossed them, waiting for her to speak again. She was staring at her hands, picking at the paint on her nails. It was a clear pink, one of those that barely has any color at all. Tasteful, just like everything else about her careful grooming.

“Your boyfriend said that I was Vincent West’s girlfriend. The truth is, we broke up last week.” She glanced at me, clearly checking for a reaction, but she didn’t get one. “I saw some things on his desk, things that deeply disturbed me. We fought over it and I threatened to go to the state attorney general’s office over it. He kicked me out of the house and shut me out of his life. Just like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She snorted softly. “I’d be lucky if that’s all it was. But it’s not. He’s begun a campaign against me to ruin my reputation, to ruin my credibility. He wants to ruin me so that if I do go to the attorney general, they won’t take anything I have to say seriously.”

“How?”

She smiled, her eyes moving over me slowly. “Never tell a man you love everything about your past. Keep a few secrets because when that relationship goes bad, he could take all those secrets you shared during pillow talk and destroy you with them.”

I tried to imagine Bo doing such a thing, but I couldn’t. Bo wasn’t like that. If things did heat up—yes, please!—and I told him what few secrets I had, he would never use them against me even if we had a bitter break up. He was too kind for that. Too good.

But I didn’t say that aloud.

She sighed. “He’s going to ruin me with a secret I told him, something I hadn’t spoken out loud in twenty years. He was the only one I ever told. And he’s probably going to send me right back to where I came from, right back to that secret.”

“What do you have on him?”

Her eyes jumped to my face. Fear filled them again. “I can’t tell you specifically. But, trust me, it would not only ruin him, it’d put him in prison for life if I did go to the attorney general and he believed me.”

“Well, then, you’re in luck. My brothers and I own a private security company. We could help you.”

She frowned. “You do?”

“Stone Security. My brothers, Brent and Jack, run it.”

She stared at me for a long moment and then began to laugh. “You’re fucking kidding me!”

I’d never heard Violet cuss, so that was a bit of a surprise. And to cuss so dramatically over such basic information…hadn’t they done a background check on me when I started working at Grant and Frederick?

“Why is that…?”

“West hates Stone Security. He thinks that they’re renegades. He thinks they do things just barely under the radar and interfere with his investigations. They are the last people I would turn to with this information.”

“Why? If West hates them, maybe they’re the best people to go to.”

She laughed again, but it had this little touch of hysteria to it. She jumped to her feet and began chewing on her nails. “I am so screwed,” she finally declared.

“We could go to Jack. He would help you!”

“But his office is bugged, little girl.” She looked at me like I was literally a child and not the twenty-seven-year-old woman that I was. “You have no idea who you’re playing with here.”

“If West is corrupt, my brothers could take him down.”

She laughed again, more hysterical than before. “Just like they took down Mad Dog last night?” She shook her head, turning away from me. “Mad Dog isn’t down. They’re just pissed now.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was starting to scare the crap out of me. She continued to pace the length of the living room, moving from the windows to the staircase, back and forth, making me dizzy with her twists and turns. I didn’t know what to do.

But then she stopped and turned to look at me. “Can I stay here tonight? Was that the plan?”

“Of course.”

She nodded. “Maybe I could just go. Just leave the area. He couldn’t come after me if he didn’t know where I was.”

“What is he doing to you? Did he hurt you?”

Again, that laugh. A chill ran up my spine. And then she just disappeared up the stairs, never stopping to look at me or ask me another question. She was just gone.

It was creepy.

*

I hate being alone. I offered the guys Bo sent over some food, but they refused. Jack’s orders, I supposed. Never take food on the job. Never look the boss’s sister in the eye. Never answer a direct question. They were like the guards outside Kensington Palace or whatever it was.

I took a beer and went to sit on the front steps, taking the odd sip between nervously picking at the label on the moist bottle. I could see lights on in the main house that suggested Jack was home. It wasn’t like him not to come investigate the sudden occupation of the guesthouse. That suggested that Bo had given him a story that he’d accepted at face value.

Jack always listened to Bo. Me? Not so much.

Bo himself materialized a little after nine, pulling up to the house in his massive pickup truck. It was a Dodge, not unlike Jack’s own truck. Another thing our investments into the firm had paid for.

He settled onto the steps beside me and accepted the half-full bottle of beer I handed over. He took a long swallow, then handed it back.

Was it stupid that when I put my lips on the same bottle it suddenly tasted different? Better?

“How’s it going?”

“I’m sure your minions have been keeping you informed.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to hear it from you.”

I sighed, drinking all but the final swallow of beer before handing it back to him. He drank it, then held the thing between his hands like it was a gift from the queen or something.

Why couldn’t he hold me like that?

“She broke up with the chief of police and she thinks he’s using some secret from her past to ruin her.”

“What secret?”

I shrugged, leaning into him as I did. I rested my head on his shoulder, a sense of exhaustion suddenly overwhelming me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in the amount of fear Violet was clearly living in. How she could keep her sanity like that.

Bo set down the bottle and slipped his arm around me, his fingers caressing the bare skin on my arm.

“She said something about moving on. She said if he couldn’t find her, he couldn’t hurt her.”

“Do you think she will?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“There’s not much we can do to help her if she won’t tell you the truth.”

I thought about that for a moment, trying to ignore the shivers of pleasure his fingers were sending up and down my spine. It was nearly impossible.

“She said that West hates Stone Security.”

“He probably does. We don’t always ask his permission before doing something in the interest of a client. And some of what we do walks a fine line between legal and illegal.”

“She said that Jack can’t handle a fight against West. She said something about someone named Mad Dog, too.”

“What about Mad Dog?” Bo asked, suddenly very interested. He even touched my chin, made me sit up so that he could see my face.

“She said something to the effect that you didn’t take down Mad Dog, you just pissed him off.”

Bo glanced over at the main house, tension suddenly strumming through his shoulders.

“Who’s Mad Dog?”

“It’s not a who. It’s a what.”

“What is Mad Dog?”

Bo slid his arm around me again, tugging me against his side, his hand dangling over my shoulder.

“If she knows about last night, about Mad Dog, then it might be in our best interest to help her out if only to find out what she knows.”

“What are you not telling me?”

Bo was quiet for so long that I almost moved away from him, anger burning in my chest at the fact that he was once again treating me like a child. I was twenty-seven years old, for crying out loud! I was pretty sure I could handle whatever was going on here.

“Do you remember how I told you that Raelyn—Jack’s Raelyn—hired us to do a job?”

“Yeah.”

“She was a member of this motorcycle club back in Jackson, Mississippi. Kind of an unwilling member. The president of the club—Rage MC—kind of took her as his girlfriend when her mother died. She had nowhere else to go, so she stayed with him until Jack and the DEA busted them a couple of years ago. He gave her his card and she still had it a couple of weeks ago when this MC guy got out of jail and came after her. Jack was protecting her from him when he showed up here in Memphis. He got a local MC to help him out, give him a base of operations and few armed assholes…that guy that was shot here in front of Jack’s house was shot by one of the MC members.”

I remembered that, remembered the trust Jack had me write up for the guy’s parents. He was really torn up about that one.

“So Jack and Rae go back to Jackson and take out Rage’s clubhouse. When the MC president confronts them, Rae is shot and Jack has to take him out. That’s why she’s still in Jackson.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me that?" I demanded. “Why does everyone keep me out of the loop on this stuff?”

“Because we’re trying to protect you. And because she was a client, therefore there’s this little thing called confidentiality.”

I knew that. I was the lawyer, after all.

“At the same time, Rhonda hired us to protect the girls at her club. Jack assigned the job to Brent thinking it would do him some good to hang out with a bunch of pretty women. He meets Dane and…well, I guess you figured that out yesterday at lunch.”

“I think it’s great. She’s got the sort of spunk he needs in a rebound.”

“I’m not sure it’s just a rebound, Remy. You didn’t see Brent last night.”

“That’s what all that was about last night?” I asked, shifting to look him in the eye. “Dane?”

He sighed, reaching over to touch my face, to pull my head back down onto his shoulder. “I shouldn’t really be telling you about this. It’s something Brent should tell, if he wants you to know.”

“But you’ll tell me anyway.”

He groaned. “Of course. I can’t deny you anything.”

That was true. When I was a kid and my parents grounded me for something or sent me to bed without dessert, Bo was always the first one to help me down the trellis outside my door or to arrive at my bedroom door with a piece of cake. He couldn’t stand to see me hurting for any reason.

It was nice to see things hadn’t changed.

“Someone was attacking the girls at Highland, Rhonda’s club. Brent figured out who it was—this guy with the Mad Dog MC—and he went to watch the guy last night, to see if they could catch him in the act. Instead, the guy managed to get into Stone Security’s offices and take her right out of the lobby.”

“Dane?”

“Yes. And when Brent heard about it, he just about went ballistic. Fired the guards who let him into the building, fired the guy who was monitoring the security cameras. And then he and Jack formed a team—with my help—and went to the MC clubhouse to get her back. We took out half a dozen of the club members and got the local police out there, had them all arrested. That guy who came after Dane will be going to jail for a long time.”

“Is she okay?”

Bo rested his cheek against the top of my head. “She’s resting at the hotel with Brent, as far as I know. He took her back there last night while the rest of us were celebrating and no one’s seen either of them since.”

“Good for Brent.”

“Yeah.”

“But what does all this have to do with Chief West? And why would Violet know anything about it?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like the context in which she mentioned it. Makes me wonder what West knows about this fellow, this Trigger, who was after those girls.”

“Or what he knows about Mad Dog as a whole.”

“You need to talk to her, Remy. You need to know what’s going on here. She obviously knows things we should know.”

“She said something else.”

I laid my hand on his knee, spreading my fingers wide for a moment before sliding my hand along his inner thigh. Once again he didn’t pull away. But he didn’t respond, either.

I wanted him to touch me. I’d wanted it for so long that it was almost like a habit for the thought to slide through my mind. I wanted to see his hands on my bare skin, wanted to watch his fingers trace a pattern over my bare belly, my naked breasts. I wanted to see his naked thighs stretched out beside mine, wanted to see the pleasure in his eyes as he gazed down at me in the moments before…just before.

Right now, I only wanted to taste his kiss again.

“Remy,” he said, his voice filled with a new depth that hadn’t been there before, “what did she say?”

My hand stopped deep inside his thigh, just inches from that place that I didn’t have the right to touch. Not yet. But I would.

“She said Jack’s office is bugged.”

“What?”

“She said West had a bug in his office.”

Bo sat up, the movement knocking my hand from his thigh. He stood, facing the direction of the main house, his hands on his hips. He reminded me of a hunting dog on the scent for a second, the way he stood so completely erect, his attention so tightly directed.

“It’s not possible,” he finally said, turning toward me. “We sweep the offices every morning. And we have security everywhere. No one could plant something in Jack’s office without us being aware of it.”

“He should probably still know about it, just in case.”

Bo studied me for a long moment, his eyes moving slowly over the length of me. Then he slowly focused on my face.

“Stay here tonight, okay? I’ll have a couple of new guys come in, stay the night, too. Then talk to her in the morning, try to get as much information out of her that you can.”

“Okay.”

“Stay close to her, but not too close. And if anything happens, you scream at the top of your lungs.”

I held out my hand, let him lift me to my feet. I pretended to lose my balance, falling against his chest. “You really do care, don’t you?”

He touched the side of my face, then glanced over his shoulder toward Jack’s before pushing me into the shadows of the house. My back hit the rough brick façade of the house, but then he stole my lips and I forgot about the uneven surface ripping at the back of my silk blouse. It was a kiss that said so much more than the ones last night, a passionate kiss that had a touch of desperation behind it. I sighed into him, wrapping my arms around his neck to pull him down, closer to me. I was a tall girl, but Bo was even taller, a good six inches taller than me. And those broad shoulders…sometimes I felt a certain lack of daintiness around average sized men. Bo had a way of making me feel petite. Delicate.

He pushed me harder against the bricks, one hand sliding over my hip and down my thigh until it hooked under my knee and drew it up over his hip. He pressed himself into me as his hand found its way under my skirt. My body screamed in delight for the promise of that touch, my lower belly bursting into life, places inside of me that hadn’t been touched in much too long aching for the fulfillment of that promise. And they were so close to getting what they wanted.

My skirt moved easily up toward my hip, my panties so flimsy that a stiff wind might have ripped them out of the way. His determined fingers found no barrier as they slipped under my ass and brushed against lips that were swelling with need. He groaned against my mouth when he touched me, his lips sliding down to my throat as his fingertips sought out that magic button that had the power to bring a scream to my lips.

I ran my fingers through his hair, pulling him down against me, loving the way his hot breath felt against the swell of my breasts. He nibbled at the soft mounds, seeking out my nipples through the material of my blouse and the expensive bra underneath. It was my turn to groan, sounds slipping from my throat that were only a small sample of what was waiting deep in my chest. And then he was back at my mouth, his fingers doing such a delicious dance against my clit that I was pretty sure I was about to go out of my mind.

I wanted him. I wanted him inside of me so desperately that I was moving my hips in a most undignified way, aching for the feel of him, begging without sound for more. When his fingers slipped inside of me, filling the depth of me, I cried out silently against his mouth. And he just kissed me harder, danced inside of me both above and below.

Was it any wonder that I came so fucking quickly?

My whole body seemed to vibrate against him, the moans slipping from my lips enough to tell an entire story in just a few syllables. His fingers stilled as he pressed his face against my shoulder, his breathing as rough as mine. But then he straightened my panties, my skirt, and just held me against his chest as he rolled a little, resting his shoulder hard against the side of the house.

I touched his face, pulled his lips up to mine. “Come inside.”

He groaned, pulling back just slightly. I could see the need there in his eyes, could see that he wanted to. But I could also see something holding him back.

“I have to go to the office. I have to make sure there’s nothing actually in Jack’s office.”

“No, Bo…!”

But he was already pulling away, his lips pressing a lingering kiss against mine as he walked backward. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

“You can’t take this back, Bo.”

“I know, Remy.”

His eyes stayed on me until he had to turn around or risk life and limb. He paused as he climbed into that big Dodge pickup, though, that need still shining from his eyes.

I moved back to the front steps and lifted my hand in a salute of farewell. He returned it before roaring away, disappearing around the curve in the lane in a cloud of dust.

“Aww…new love,” Violet said surprisingly close to my ear as I stepped through the front door of the house. “I remember those days.”