Chapter 1

      Crazy like a fox. Cooper Payne had never understood that phrase until now. He stared across his desk at Xavier Bentler. This wasn’t Cooper’s first experience with an interfering grandfather; his wife’s guardian/grandfather had been a control freak who had manipulated his granddaughters even from beyond the grave.

      “I can’t lie to one of my employees,” he told the elderly man.

      Xavier Bentler was eighty-six years old, but he looked like he was in his sixties. Cooper couldn’t believe that he’d had a heart attack a few months ago. Had he really had one? Or just how manipulative was the old man? The heart attack had compelled Cooper’s friend and employee, Cole Bentler, to fly home for the first time in years—although he hadn’t been gone very long.

      Was this assignment just another ploy for Xavier to get his grandson Cole home to California again?

      “I’m not asking you to lie to him,” Xavier said with a cagey grin. “Maybe you can just withhold some information so that he’ll accept the job.”

      Cooper shook his head and ran his hand over his military-short black hair. He was not going to do that again. The last time he’d sent off one of his bodyguards without briefing him fully on the assignment he had nearly lost him—for good. It wasn’t a risk he was willing to take again, especially as all the bodyguards who worked for Cooper’s franchise of the Payne Protection Agency were his friends and—in the case of Nikki Payne—family.

      Hell, after what he’d gone through with his friends, who had all served in the same Marine Corps unit that he had, they were family, too.

      “I can’t do that,” Cooper said. He wouldn’t betray a friend...again.

      Of course last time it had been more of a joke. But there had been nothing funny about nearly losing Jordan “Manny” Mannes. And this time the danger was even greater.

      “You said that a man already died,” Cooper reminded the older man.

      Xavier Bentler uttered a weary-sounding sigh. “That was most unfortunate. But what’s more unfortunate is that his won’t be the last death. I am certain that someone else is going to die.”

      And Cooper was afraid that person would be his friend if he assigned this job to Cole. He narrowed his eyes as he studied the old man, suspicious of how he could be so certain someone else was going to die. He doubted the guy had what Cooper’s mother did—her uncanny ability to just know that something was going to happen. Everybody had pretty much envied that ability until now. At least Cooper didn’t envy it since he sometimes possessed the ability himself.

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