by Ivy Layne
If I’d known how soon he’d be back, I wouldn’t have thrown him out the door.
I would have shoved him out the window.
Chapter Three
Evers
"Clive Winters is missing,"
My head jerked up, and the droning boredom of the meeting came into sharp focus.
"What did you say?" I asked, watching my older brother Cooper carefully.
He picked up a pencil and pretended to scribble a note in the file in front of him.
He wasn't taking notes. Asshole was fucking with me.
Clive Winters, a.k.a. Smokey Winters, was my case. Or, it had been until I'd fucked everything up, and my brother Knox had taken Clive off my hands.
Cooper opted not to answer, only raised an eyebrow at me. I turned in my chair to face Knox, slouched in the big armchair beside me, an absurdly-big gas station travel mug in his hand.
He gave me a bland look and said, "What?"
"You fucking lost Smokey Winters? How the fuck did you lose him?"
"Why are you so riled up?" Knox asked in that same bland tone he knew drove me nuts.
Brothers. I'd die for any one of them, but they were a bunch of assholes.
"I care," I said, gritting my teeth, "because he was your case."
Knox shrugged his shoulder and took a long sip of coffee. "If it meant that much, you wouldn't have blown the deal in the first place."
He was wrong. I'd blown the case because I cared. For the first time in my career, I'd tangled together business and pleasure and ended up tied in knots.
Knox was right. I'd fucked the whole thing up.
"Maybe if you'd joined the twenty-first century and stopped using paper files, none of this would have happened," my older brother Axel commented with a sly smile.
Axel ran the Western division of Sinclair Security and lived in Las Vegas. He wasn't in Atlanta often, but he'd shown up the night before, saying only that he was in town on business.
I hadn't had a chance to pry the details from him, but his presence at our meeting told me something was up. Something more than Clive Winters going missing.
Used to the ribbing but unable to ignore the urge to fire back, I said, "I like paper files. Fuck off."
Fuck off. The generic response to brotherly teasing. It worked about as well as it usually did. Not at all.
Axel had a point. Using paper files had been stupid. An old hang-up I'd refused to let go until it had been too late. These days there wasn't a scrap of paper to be found in my office. Every piece of case information was safely stored behind multiple layers of encryption.
I wasn't going to get caught again. Not that it mattered. The worst damage had already been done.
Axel wasn't ready to let it go. "How everything got fucked up doesn't matter. What matters is that Summer's father is off the grid. He's a ghost. We need to find him. Yesterday."
"Is that why you're here?" I asked him.
"In a way." Axel shared a long look with Cooper. "Show him."
Cooper pulled a page from the pile on his desk and handed it to me. Numbers in a list, arranged in columns, notes in Cooper's precise handwriting along the side.
Account numbers, dates, amounts. Payments. Or transfers.
I took in the names, the timeline. Money moving from a hidden account under a shell corporation we suspected our father had set up before he disappeared. Money moving from our father to William Davis, now deceased, and from Davis to fucking Clive 'Smokey' Winters.
Fuck me. This was not good.
Our father, Maxwell Sinclair, had disappeared five years before. We'd thought he died when his car shot through the railing of a bridge into a river swollen from rain.
No body had ever been recovered. A few months ago, information had come to light that suggested Maxwell Sinclair was no more dead than I was.
Dead or alive, he'd left us a mess.
I grew up thinking my father was the king of the universe. He protected celebrities. Royalty. Everyone loved him. Respected him.
That hadn't been enough for Maxwell Sinclair. Since well before I was born, my father had been dabbling on the dark side.
I could only assume he did it for the adrenaline rush. We didn't need the money. He'd inherited tens of millions from my grandfather, and Maxwell had always been good at making money grow.
A few years before he disappeared my brothers and I had taken over leadership of the company. Since then Sinclair Security had almost doubled in size.
Whatever my father was up to, it wasn't about money. From what we'd been able to uncover, he'd roped in an old friend, William Davis, and together the two of them had been into all sorts of ugly shit. Running guns, illegal adoptions, and worse.
The question was what the hell did Clive Winters have to do with any of this? My father and William Davis I could see. They'd been tight since high school, gone to college together, and William, who'd died recently, had been a nutcase.
I didn't have any trouble imagining William operating without a moral compass. And my father? I was learning I knew a lot less about Maxwell Sinclair than I'd thought.
But Smokey Winters… Smokey Winters was a hippie stoner who coasted on alimony from his wife and a family trust he'd managed not to bleed dry. Occasionally, he supplemented his income by slinging weed.
He wasn't very good at it, considering he smoked half of what he was supposed to sell, but Smokey Winters was one of those guys who always managed to get by, one way or another.
I couldn't see him fitting into any puzzle that included my father and William Davis. Yet, here he was, in black and white, in numbers and dates and hefty transfusions of cash.
I stared at those numbers, at Cooper's neat handwriting, and my stomach drew into a knot. Cold, greasy fear settled deep inside me, tendrils spreading to my heart and up my spine.
Summer.
My father was into some bad shit, and if Smokey Winters was involved, that put Summer a hell of a lot closer to any of this than I wanted her to be. If her father was involved, she wasn't safe.
Fuck.
Summer.
Just thinking her name made me want to shut down, to get up and walk out of the room. I didn't want to think about Summer here. She shouldn’t have anything to do with my father’s mess.
From the beginning, from the first time I laid eyes on her, on those long blonde curls and her bright blue eyes, she'd made me crazy. Crazy and stupid. Never in my life had I screwed up so badly with a woman.
"Emma doesn't know about your fuck up," Axel said, not pulling his punch. "I'm going to be around more until we figure out what's going on with Dad, and eventually she's going to want to come to Atlanta to see Summer. I suggest you fix whatever you did before she finds out, or she's going to kick your ass."
"I'm not afraid of your wife," I said with a sneer.
Axel only raised an eyebrow. "Liar."
"If you're not afraid of Emma, you're an idiot," Knox cut in.
I wasn't afraid of Emma Sinclair.
Okay, I was a little afraid of Emma Sinclair.
Emma was an excellent sister-in-law. A redhead with a sharp mind and a bombshell body, she'd hooked Axel the first time he laid eyes on her. She wasn't a ball buster, but she was tough, and she didn't take any crap.
If she found out I'd screwed over her best friend in the entire world? My ass was grass.
"I still don't get why you lied to Summer," Knox said.
"It was easier," I muttered.
"Easy, maybe. That's not why you lied."
Knox wasn't a talker. He saved his words, only using them when they'd do the most good. Or the most damage.
I didn't want to hear what he had to say, but there was no chance he'd let it go.
I should have kept my mouth shut. I didn't.
"Really? Then tell me, oh, wise one, why did I lie?"
"Because Summer Winters scares you shitless. You do know you're not Dad, right?"
Heat flooded my brain and I saw red. Only force
of will kept me in my seat.
I ground out, "Shut the hell up. You don't know what you're fucking talking about."
Knox knew exactly how close I was to taking a swing at him. He only sipped from that ugly oversized mug and said, "Go ahead, be pissed. Doesn't make me wrong."
I was. And it didn't.
"Knock it off," Cooper said, eyeing both Knox and me. "Why he lied doesn't matter. It's done. He fucked up and now he's going to fix it."
"Why am I fixing it? If I fucked up so badly why don't you put somebody else on the case?"
Just the thought of one of my brothers 'fixing things' with Summer made the knot in my stomach wind tighter. She wasn't mine anymore, if she ever had been. That didn't mean one of them could have her.
I handed the paper with the banking information back to Cooper. He took it, shaking his head at me in exaggerated patience and a little pity.
"It has to be you. Believe me, I like Summer. I'd love to spare her dealing with you. You'll be lucky if she doesn't try to kill you in your sleep. But it has to be you. Summer is our best chance right now at finding her father. Knox and I are going to keep on his trail, but he's vapor. Summer, we can track. And the perfect opportunity just fell into our laps."
Under his breath, Axel muttered, "You're gonna love this one."
"What? Is she all right? Did something happen to her?"
Cooper shook his head. "Summer's fine. You remember she does work for Cynthia Stevens?"
I nodded. Summer's job was odd, but she was good at it. She was a kind of virtual assistant for a handful of high-profile people. For some she was hands-on, traveling to work with them a few days a month. Some she interacted with only over the Internet, managing their email or social media. Booking flights and arranging appointments. Whatever they needed, Summer handled. I'd known she worked for Cynthia Stevens here and there.
Cooper nodded again. "Cynthia decided she wants to come home while she preps for her next role. Her ex has been a problem. Rehab didn't take, and he won’t leave her alone. He claims he wants her back. Cynthia wants to be near family, and she doesn't want the friction of handling daily life. She had Summer rent the Rycroft estate. Cynthia, her entourage, and Summer are moving in."
"Guess who's doing the security?" Axel asked with another sly grin. Fuck me. He went on, "Cynthia requested you, personally."
"I don't do protection details anymore."
"You're making an exception for this one," Cooper said flatly, his tone brooking no argument.
This morning had started badly and was only getting worse.
Fucking hell.
Cynthia Stevens was the granddaughter of Rupert Stevens, a close friend of my grandfather when he'd still been alive. She was old Atlanta, raised for cotillions and charity luncheons. When she'd run off to Hollywood at eighteen, everyone figured she'd be home within six months.
Instead, she'd busted her ass, waiting tables and taking bit parts until she got her first break. She was beautiful, high maintenance, and talented as hell.
Cynthia Stevens was a diva. She was also my ex.
Slowly, desperately hoping this was a bad dream, I said, "You want me to put together a detail, headed by me, to live in the Rycroft place with Cynthia Stevens and Summer? You realize this is going to be a disaster, right?"
Cooper shrugged a shoulder, his dark eyes, so like our father's, locked on mine. "It doesn't have to be a disaster. You've been moping around here ever since Summer kicked you out. This is your chance to fix it. While you're at it, figure out where her father is and what he has to do with Dad."
"Cooper—"
"No, Evers. I don't want to hear it. Knox is right, you fucked up with her because you were scared. You want to bury your head in the sand and pretend that's not what happened, go ahead. Lie to yourself. If she didn't matter, you wouldn't have cared when she kicked you out. You would have moved on to the next woman and not given Summer a second thought. That's not what happened, is it?"
"When's the last time you got laid, Evers?" Axel asked with a smirk.
Fucking brothers. "None of your business, asshole."
"There's your answer," Knox filled in.
I'd let them set me on fire before I'd admit that I hadn't so much as kissed another woman since I'd walked out of Summer's apartment.
I’d thought about it, wanted to in a vague I should get laid kind of way. Since Summer, no other woman had grabbed my interest. I didn't want anyone else.
"And what about while you were with her?" Axel pushed.
"I wasn't with her. We had a thing," I protested.
"Jesus, you're like the stereotypical commitment-phobe. How many other women did you sleep with while you had your thing?" Axel asked, his words dripping with sarcasm.
"Not everyone is looking for domestic bliss, Axel. Ever since you got married you've been a know-it-all pain in the ass."
"He was a pain in the ass long before he got married," Cooper said. "If anything, Emma's made him more tolerable."
True, but I wasn't going to admit it.
"Answer the question," Knox said evenly.
I didn't want to answer the question. Answering the question would tell them everything they wanted to know about exactly how wrecked I was over Summer.
"None, okay?" Maybe now that I'd admitted it, they'd stop needling me and move on.
No such luck.
"So, she was just a hookup," Axel said, "but in the year you were keeping an eye on her—and sleeping with the target—you didn't so much as touch another woman. Do I have that right?"
I didn't dignify his question with an answer.
"But she didn't mean anything. You're over her."
I made a sound in the back of my throat that was supposed to be a yes. I couldn't make my mouth form the word. I wasn't even remotely over her. I'd been working my way around to figuring out how to win her back. How to explain.
It had started innocently enough.
My brothers and I had grown up side-by-side with the Winters family. While the Sinclairs were well-known and had a nice chunk of change in the bank, our lives didn't come close to that of the Winters.
Notorious for scandal and billionaires a few times over, to us, the Winters were family. So, when Emma's best friend turned out to be an estranged cousin, we decided to keep an eye on her. She'd seemed legit, but when long-lost relatives come out of the woodwork, nine times out of ten they're aiming straight for the bank account.
No one was taking advantage of the Winters family on our watch. Defying expectations, Summer hadn't made any attempt to reach out to the rest of the Winters family.
She’d established her business in Atlanta, made friends, went out for drinks or to the movies. Dated here and there. Though the Winters' high profile would have helped her attract clients, Summer stayed far away.
I could have watched her from a distance. I didn't need to make contact. But I hadn't been able to stop myself. In every area of my life, my self-control was absolute. Until it came to Summer.
Cooper flipped open his laptop and started tapping keys. Without looking at me, he said, "I'm sending you the Stevens file. They move in on Friday. You need to take a team out to the house, make sure it's secured, and be there when she arrives. Details are in the file." He tapped the final key and looked up. "This is your chance, Evers. Don't fuck it up again."
I stood, eager to get out of the office. Out of the building. I needed to clear my head and think. I'd been looking for a way back in, but babysitting an ex-lover while trying to win back another was a disaster waiting to happen.
A disaster, and my only shot.
One way or another, I'd figure out how to make it work. I wasn't going to fail.
Not with Summer.
Not this time.
Chapter Four
Summer
Rycroft Castle looked like it belonged in a different century. In another country. Maybe in another dimension. In the center of an oversized lot in Buckhead, surrounded by trees that buffere
d the sounds from the road, it was easy to imagine I'd walked straight into a fairytale.
The massive house looked like it had been built centuries before. In fact, it was the dream of a tech billionaire who'd fallen in love with the idea of building his very own castle in the heart of Atlanta.
He'd had money to burn, and he’d poured it into Rycroft Castle, importing the marble from Italy, the bar from a pub in Ireland. Fashioned after a French château, with three-inch thick creamy limestone walls and a slate roof, it loomed over me, both imposing and fanciful.
Sporting an indoor pool modeled after a Roman spa, four separate kitchens, a theater, card room, three formal parlors, a music room, and a wine tasting room bigger than my condo, it was hard to imagine the owner had given it up.
After a few years of living in Rycroft Castle, he'd grown bored and moved out, focusing his attention on a modern monstrosity in Silicon Valley, closer to his corporate headquarters. He still owned the place, renting it out under special circumstances to high profile guests. When Cynthia Stevens told me she wanted to come home for a few months but had no intention of staying with family, I knew exactly who to call.
She was going to go crazy when she saw this place. Cynthia was larger-than-life, with a talent as overwhelming as her beauty. A princess to the core, she'd fit right in at Rycroft Castle.
Of all my clients, Cynthia was my favorite. She could be a diva, and like most wealthy and successful people, she wanted what she wanted when she wanted it. Cynthia was high on standards and low on patience. She was also funny and kind.
I wouldn't say we were friends, exactly. I'm a glorified PA and she's an Oscar-winning movie star.
But Cynthia never treated me like the hired help. She'd told me once that she saw her team as partners all playing a role in creating the persona that was Cynthia Stevens.
If any of my other clients had asked me to move in and manage their lives full time, I might have balked. Not that my other clients were bad, but there's a big difference between working remotely and living in the same house with someone. Especially when they were your employer.