Chapter 3

AMELIA

As if he could feel my eyes on him, he looked away from Roose and over to me—directly at me.

When our gazes actually met, a shiver ran down my spine, and the endings of my nerves tingled.

Roose also looked over, and he pointed at me.

“New hotshot, don’t like him,” Sinclaire hissed under his breath.

I glanced his way, noting the heavy scowl on his face.

Roose and the hotshot made their way over to us. Sinclaire stood up next to me on their approach and made a tsk sound that I barely heard because I was focusing so heavily on this new guy who hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

“Good, you’re here,” Roose said to me. “Guys, this is Detective Luc Smith. Luc, these are Detectives’ Brad Sinclaire and Amelia Taylor.” Roose waved his hand at each of us respectively. “Taylor, Luc is going to be your new partner.”

Those were probably the only words that could have broken the lock of our gazes.

My head snapped to Roose as my mouth dropped open.

“What?” Surely I couldn’t have heard him right.

Roose sighed. “I know it’s a shock. Max was called away last night after his father was taken to the hospital, and he won’t be back anytime soon. Luc will step in in Max’s absence. Guys, get to know each other.”

Roose clapped his large hands together and left us, me with my skin burning from shock and Sinclaire staring down the new guy.

I didn’t mean to be rude, but I couldn’t help myself.

I rushed after Roose and followed him across the room as he headed back to his office.

“Roose, what the hell is this?” I demanded. No one else would dare talk to him like that, but I wasn’t like everyone else. I didn’t give a shit about who Roose was, or that he was my boss. I didn’t stand for any nonsense, and this was total nonsense.

“It is what it is, Taylor. Deal with it,” Roose replied, still walking away, completely dismissing me.

Didn’t matter—I pursued him right into his office and even kept the door open.

“Deal with it? That’s your best answer for me? When did Max call?”

I couldn’t imagine Max not alerting me about his father, but maybe it was one of those situations where he just had to grab a bag and go. His father lived in Miami, so yes, I could see where he’d be gone for a while. What I didn’t understand was the need for a new partner, and that guy…Luc.

“He called me in the early hours of the morning. His father collapsed and went into a coma. That’s all I know.”

Jesus. Poor Max. I’d contact him the minute I got out of there. He must have still been traveling to get to Miami.

“How did he sound? Is he okay?”

“Of course he’s not okay,” Roose snapped. “Would you be okay if your father just collapsed into a coma?”

I froze at the question and really thought about it. In this world I’d created, my father was Peter Taylor, from Mom’s stories. But, truthfully, I’d based my perception of him off my old college professor, Dennis Harlman, who’d taken me under his wing after I left my actual home and became Amelia Taylor. Peter knew me by that name, too, like everyone else.

My real father was…well, he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was, wasn’t the man I’d believed him to be, and it had crushed my soul when I found out the truth.

I didn’t hate him, though. I hated who he was and what he was, but I didn’t hate him. If I heard my father had collapsed into a coma, I think the first thing I’d feel would be guilt, then uncertainty—uncertainty due to thinking he was probably getting what he deserved and the coma was God’s way of getting him.

“I don’t need a new partner,” I declared, changing the subject. I didn’t want to think about my actual father right now.

Time was a funny thing. Sometimes it could dim the reasons why you thought something or someone was bad. I needed to have it always at the forefront of my mind that my father was bad news.

“I’ll be fine until Max gets back.”

Roose frowned at me and released a frustrated sigh.

“We don’t know when Max will be back, and you need to have a partner for this case.”

I glowered at him and folded my arms, staring him down as much as he was doing the same to me. The case wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for me. I had been forced to go above him to make the investigation a point of focus, simply because my instincts never failed me. I was always right, and I would have loved to see the day when I was proven wrong.

The case we were working on was linked to something bigger, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on yet, but I could smell it. The gangs were too active—way too active, and I knew that evil bastard Francisco Demarco was behind it. He was a known drug lord who’d worked his way into the city right under our noses.

His activity had started the previous summer after a spree of craziness in Boston that trickled across to us in LA. Suddenly more drug possessions and ODs started popping up, and not the usual sort of stuff. It was serious class A mixtures I’d never seen before.

It was only when things got really bad and there was a shootout at the mall that Roose gave me the time of day, though.

“I run the team,” I reminded him. “This is my case—mine. I have Sinclaire, Jefferson, and Holloway. Send the new guy somewhere else.”

“Wow.” A voice filtered into the room—deep, masculine, strong.

I turned to see Luc standing at the door. He rested against the frame with his arms folded and a playful smirk on his face that briefly introduced me to his dimples.

“What a way to make a guy feel welcome,” he added.

“No offense, but this isn’t exactly some sort of book club. We don’t welcome people here,” I snapped.

He had the audacity to look amused.

“Okay.” He smiled now, giving me the full effect.

Dimples on his left and right cheeks drew my attention to high cheekbones, and the five o’clock shadow only served to make him look more alluring. His piercing blue eyes bore into me as if he were trying to figure me out.

I hated the flutter of butterflies that filled my stomach and the damn tingle of my nerves.

“Look, no one has time for this shit,” Roose bellowed, drawing my attention back to him. “I’m your boss, and I’m telling you you’re partnering with Luc.”

“Like hell I am. He doesn’t know anything about this investigation. We don’t need to waste time on some new guy you want to dump on us because you don’t know what to do with him.”

Roose’s face turned red. I swore if I were a guy, he’d probably hit me.

“You’re working my last nerve Taylor. Test me and I will suspend you.”

The thing was, I knew he had the power to do it. I almost told him he should, but in that moment, I thought of all the hard work my unit had put into this investigation.

We’d come a long way. We had Montgomery in custody, and that could mean a lot for us. It could mean progress, and me suspended would be a bad thing. So, instead of telling him he should go ahead and suspend me, I said, “Fuck you.”

Leaving him shaking his head, I walked out, straight past my would-be partner and into my office, feeling like I could breathe fire.

***

LUC

Jesus Christ.

Amelia was exactly the female version of Raphael.

Seeing her up close and in the light of day gave me a much better look at my future wife. While she actually bore no resemblance to my boss, she was definitely him in every essence of the word.

Her manner, the don’t fuck with me attitude, and that I’m not backing down unless I absolutely have to personality—that was all Raphael. It had him written all over it, a definitive signature of the familia.

Amelia Rossi had been kept well hidden from the world since the time she left home, but the attitude was a dead giveaway that she was the daughter of Raphael Rossi, Don of one of the most influential crime families in Chicago. I’d never had a woman talk to me like that before, or even talk like that in my presence. We kept our women out of our business, and they knew not to ask too many questions or show any defiance.

Claudius and I weren’t like most of Raphael’s guys. Those guys treated their women like slaves. They’d beat them, abuse them, and replace them like it was nothing. That wasn’t me. Real men didn’t do things like that. They didn’t have to, and they knew they shouldn’t. The women I knew knew me, knew who I was, knew how to behave around me, and wouldn’t dare defy me for fear that I would deal with them in a manner similar to the others.

I supposed it was the expectation of a guy like me, the guy who was close enough to Raphael to be considered the next leader. Others were close, but everyone knew when it came down to it, when it came down to choosing, it was always going to be between Claudius and me.

She spoke like that because she could, and I liked it. I liked her, liked seeing her up close and personal.

I didn’t know what to expect from Amelia. I knew this task of mine was going to be a bitch, but I was game.

After that tirade, Roose simply looked at me and shrugged. I got it—what could he say? He knew why I was here, the real reason. He knew who I was, and he was probably scared of me.

I gave him a curt nod and left to make friendly with my partner.

She scowled at me when I entered the office she shared with Max. I heard he’d protested heavily, for what part he knew, which wasn’t a lot. We told him he needed to move states, uproot and be gone. That was it, no further information given. We had to threaten his family’s life to get him to cooperate and go quietly.

He was safe and truthfully in Miami, but I doubted we’d let him come back to LA, at least not until I’d taken Amelia and gone to Chicago.

There were things that were kept secret, things I wasn’t involved with. Raphael got his secret squad to take care of the extra dirty work. Those guys were secret to even me, and they knew things no one else knew. They made what needed to happen, happen, gave us room to do our jobs, and—most importantly—kept the cops and the feds off our backs.

I didn’t question it, hadn’t ever needed to until recently. There was suspicion on my mind, but not enough to make me divert from the plan, the mission: get the woman, the woman who’d turned her back on me and decided to look through the files on the table.

I walked over to her desk and sat on the edge, much to her annoyance.

“Get off my desk,” she ordered, shaking her head. The ends of her long dark ponytail bobbed as she moved.

I ignored her. “So, are you usually this nice, or is there more to see of you?”

She frowned. “Don’t talk to me.”