Her 24-Hour Protector. Loreth White Anne
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you about the auction?”
“Cassie Mills. She takes a class at the club where I teach martial arts.”
“She Jenna’s friend?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Jenna was feeling an inescapable buzz. Being attracted to a man she was going to see that night was like a drug to her system, a welcome relief from all the sadness that had beset the Rothchild mansion since Candace’s horrible death. “Good morning, Dad,” Jenna said, as she bent down to kiss her father on the cheek. She set a bowl of doggie kibble down for Napoleon, poured coffee from the silver jug Mrs. Carrick, their cook, had left on the patio breakfast table and took a seat with a view of the pool.
The surface shimmered with refracted morning sunlight as Jones, their groundskeeper, cleaned the pool filter. A soft, hot desert breeze ruffled the tops of the garden palms. It was late June, Vegas peaking into summer, and today was going to be a scorcher.
“So?” Harold said over the top of his paper and his reading glasses, his Paul Newman-blue eyes twinkling. “Two mil for the orphan fund? Not bad, sweetheart.”
She grinned. “The FBI agent is not too bad either.”
“When is your date?”
“Tonight. I just sent him a text message asking for his address and to say my limo will be waiting outside his house at 10 p.m.”
“Rather late for dinner?”
She shrugged. “He said he had some kind of evening coaching session with his at-risk teens or something. Anyway, I told him I wanted white flowers and that the rest of the evening was my treat—” she stirred her coffee, chinked the spoon on the side, smiling “—and my surprise.”
Jenna liked this time with her dad. He was a flamboyant casino mogul with movie-star good looks, a much-noted temper, a passion for perfection and a shrewd eye for business. He liked to get up real early each morning, do work in his home office and then kick back for a while over breakfast. It was his time to catch up with Jenna and the newspapers and to drink his coffee. After that he’d go down to the Grand Hotel and Casino, where he often worked well after midnight. He was a driven entrepreneur, and he wasn’t a man who needed much sleep.
But he’d always made time for her, since she was a kid, and Jenna loved him for it. She’d do just about anything for her father. He remained the solid center of her rarefied Vegas life. Her BlackBerry beeped suddenly, and Jenna set down her coffee cup, checked the message. It was from Cassie. FBI agent Perez had apparently just paid her friend an “official” visit, and Cassie wanted to know what Jenna had gotten her into.
“You’ll ask him about the ring, of course.”
Frowning, her eyes flashed up. “Of course.” She hesitated. “Dad—you’ve always said that The Tears of the Quetzal came from granddad’s South American operations, but where exactly?”
“Ah, sweetheart, I’m not one hundred percent sure. All I know for certain is that your grandfather had the diamond set down there, but otherwise, all the paperwork seems to have been lost in an old fire at the South American office.”
She studied him. If there’s one thing Harold always was, it was sure. A teensy icicle of doubt formed. “What exactly do you want me to get out of Lex Duncan?”
He chuckled, removed his reading glasses, blue eyes sparking like the broken surface of the pool catching sun behind him. Yet there was a sharp edge that lurked behind his smile—an edge that appeared whenever Harold spoke about The Tears of the Quetzal. “Anything you can, sweetheart. You could make a monk drop his habit, Jenna, and I have no doubt you can work your charms on this man. I want some idea of the FBI’s thought process in connection with the case. And of course I want my ring back. I want to know where they are holding it. In the wrong hands it—”
“I know the drill—in the wrong hands great misfortune is sure to follow. In the right hands it brings true love. You don’t honestly believe that old Mayan nonsense, do you?”
He gave her an odd glance. “Just look what happened when that lunatic Thomas Smythe got a taste for it. He almost killed Conner’s Vera, not to mention her sister Darla and brother Henry. Although the cops haven’t officially named Smythe as a suspect in Silver’s near-fatal scaffolding accident, I wouldn’t put it past him. And God only knows who killed Candace. That damn ring is cursed, I tell you. I just want it out of circulation, back in the vault where it belongs before it causes any more damage.”
A small shiver passed through Jenna as she thought of what had happened to Candace after she’d removed the rock from daddy’s safe. Her sister had gone and gotten herself bludgeoned to death after wagging it around at a charity event the night before her murder. That ring had been the one thing taken from Candace’s apartment by the killer, only to turn up in the purse of a single mother named Amanda Patterson while she was visiting Luke Montgomery’s casino.
Having possession of that ring had close to gotten Amanda killed as well. And then Luke had stepped up and proposed to her, of all people.
The ring had subsequently been taken into Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department custody, and a man named Thomas was later ID’d as the thief who impersonated a LVMPD officer and stole the ring from the evidence room. Conner had discovered the paste copy left in its place when he’d been sent to retrieve the ring from the police department. He’d then tracked The Quetzal to an exotic dancer and landed bang in the middle of an FBI investigation into a cross-state jewelry thieving ring. Which is how Conner ended up defending—and falling for—a stripper named Vera Mancuso who’d been implicated in the diamond theft by her roommate. The jewel thieves had, however, been caught and that case closed, but it was at that point that the LVMPD and FBI investigation into Candace’s murder had intersected, and how the whole shebang—both the ring and murder—had landed up under FBI jurisdiction.
And now her dad wanted that ring back at all costs.
Jenna shook off an uneasy sensation, reached down and picked up Napoleon. She stroked him absently on her lap. She suddenly wasn’t so crystal clear on what she was doing with the lead investigator on her sister’s murder case.
Or why her father wanted her involved at all.
Lex returned to the FBI field office building after his coaching session that evening to pick up some reports. He wanted to go through the file on The Tears of the Quetzal again, check out the ring’s trail. Somehow, that rock was central to everything—including Candace Rothchild’s death. And now that Thomas Smythe—Darla St. Giles’s boyfriend—had disappeared, Lex was back at square one.
It was late and most of the offices were empty and dark. Lex flipped on the neon overheads. One of the bulbs flickered as he made his way down the corridor to evidence lockup. He hesitated outside the door, a sense of coolness settling over his skin. Damn AC thermostat was on the fritz again, turning the place into a virtual meat locker. He unlocked the heavy door, creaked it open. He hadn’t noticed the creak previously—must be the quietness in the building at this time of night.
Lex picked up the box containing the rock that had caused so much trouble and opened it. He took the ring between his thumb and forefinger, holding the massive stone up to the dim light, he swiveled it.
He was momentarily blinded by a flash of green, violet, then blue light. His pulse accelerated slightly. He’d never seen the rock in this light before. It was magical. He turned it more slowly in his fingers, the facets of light bouncing electrically as it moved. The Tears of the Quetzal. Even the name seemed sad. Somehow poignant. Yet beautiful at the same time. Seven carats of chameleon diamond. Set in gold.
The colors were dazzling. The strange luminous shafts of light emanating from the stone were like the ectoplasmic fingers of some ghost, reaching out to curl back and retreat suddenly as he moved the ring. The play of luminosity absorbed Lex’s attention so fully, so totally, that he was no longer aware of any sound at all in the office, or the fact he