Las Vegas: Seduction: The Heiress's 2-Week Affair

“Only if you stop making a fist,” he told her. When he saw her uncurl first one hand, then the other, he released her wrists.

And promptly received a stinging slap to his cheek. Without registering surprise—he really should have seen that coming, he upbraided himself—Matt merely looked at her as he rubbed his face.

“Feel better?”

She wanted to say yes, but nothing had been solved, nothing had been released. She still felt this pent-up anger, and it had nowhere to go. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He wanted to take her hands in his, not to restrain her, but to make contact. He refrained, relying on his words instead to bridge the gap. “Look, I’m sorry about Candace, but unless you want to be next, I think you should leave this alone and let someone else handle it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“That’s an observation. Maybe the ring was just icing on the cake. You said she had bruises on her face. She didn’t when she left here. Whoever killed your sister might have done so in a blind rage. Maybe revenge, not theft, was the motive.”

“Revenge?” Natalie echoed. Candace had been thoughtless and had rubbed a great many people the wrong way, but she was harmless. She’d never done anything to anyone that would make them want to kill her. “You think whoever killed her was trying to teach her a lesson?”

He had a somewhat different theory to back up his thought. “No, maybe they were trying to get back at your father.”

“My father?” she repeated. “Why?” But even as she asked, it made sense—if she thought of the note he’d shown her.

“All rich men make enemies along the way. What better way to get back at him than to kill someone in his family? One of his beloved daughters?”

She was still trying to turn this around on him. “You sound as if you’re familiar with that kind of a life.”

“Just speculating,” he replied. “And if I’m right, you could be in danger.”

“I’m a cop,” she reminded him, deliberately resting her hand on the hilt of the weapon that was exposed beneath her jacket. “Being in danger kind of goes with the territory.”

God help him but he suddenly had a very real urge to see her wearing her holster and a pair of stiletto heels—and nothing else.

“The territory,” he advised, “might just have gotten a little rougher. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

If she could believe that…

But she couldn’t. She knew better. “You have nothing to say about that,” she informed him tersely. “You lost the right to have a say a long time ago, remember?”

He exhaled. It didn’t help, didn’t make the ache in his chest go away. “Yeah, I remember.”

Chapter 5

“You know I can’t release the tapes to you without a court order,” Matt told her. There was protocol to follow, and even if things hadn’t ended the way they did between them, technically his hands were tied. “And I’m guessing,” he went on, “you can’t get one because this isn’t your case.”

Her temper flared quickly, and it took effort to bank it down. She might have known he’d stonewall her. Did he have something to hide?

Natalie narrowed her eyes. She was not in the mood to be waved away like some annoying insect. “Look, Schaffer—”

Schaffer. She was calling him by his last name, the way a law enforcement agent would, he thought. The chasm between them was widening.

Good for her, he thought. She was moving on, or had moved on.

Bad for him, of course, but he’d resigned himself eight years ago that this was the way things had to be. Her father had been right all those years ago—he wasn’t good enough for Natalie. Not because he didn’t love her more than anything in the world but because his family would, in the end, drag him down. And if she were with him, they’d drag her down, too. He couldn’t have that happen.

“However,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him, “there really is nothing to stop you from looking over my shoulder as I review the tapes.”

That stopped her in her tracks. “You’re going to review the tapes?”

She couldn’t read his expression. “The only responsible thing for a good citizen to do, don’t you think?”

Natalie was surprised when a tinge of amusement whispered through her. “Is that what you are, a good citizen?”

“I do my best. Come with me,” he said as he opened his office door.

The moment he did, there was a quick shuffling of bodies and rustling of chairs moving back into place. The techs in the surveillance room were returning to their posts, he thought. No doubt curiosity had gotten the better of them, with more than a few of the people who manned the monitors trying to get closer to his office in order to hear what was being said. Despite the fact that he was head of security for Montgomery Enterprises, he was, in effect, the “new kid on the block,” at least in this location.

Until two weeks ago, he’d been based in Los Angeles, where he would have rather remained. But Montgomery had been adamant that he wanted him at The Janus, and the man did pay a damn good salary. Too good to refuse.

Making no comment about the temporary break that had been taken, Matt walked over to the computer tech seated just outside his office.

“Wilson—it is Wilson, right?” he asked the tall, painfully skinny, barely-out-of-adolescence young man.

Surprised at being singled out and obviously somewhat nervous because of it, the young man bobbed his head up and down. “Yes sir, Stuart Wilson.”

Matt could see Wilson’s Adam’s apple moving up and down like a runaway golf ball. He’d looked into all their backgrounds his first day here. Wilson was the best of the best when it came to computers. What he couldn’t make a computer do couldn’t be done.

But the young technician’s considerable proficiency didn’t make him any less gawky, Matt thought. Wilson really needed to have someone take him under their wing, he mused.

Too bad he wasn’t going to be here long enough for that. Matt had already made up his mind that he was going to be in Vegas just long enough to give The Janus’s security system a once-over and babysit it until Montgomery hired a suitable replacement for him.

“Wilson, I need you to pull up the surveillance tapes that we have of Mr. Montgomery’s gala last night.”

Wilson’s mouth dropped open as his jaw slackened. His small eyes widened as far as they could go. “All of them?” he repeated, stunned. Nervously, he added, “That’s an awful lot of footage, sir.”

He should have been more specific, Matt thought. “Let’s start with what we have between eight and nine o’clock. For the time being, I’m only interested in the first floor.” He narrowed it down even more. “Make it the entrance and the casino floor between that and Ballrooms B and C.”

The two ballrooms had been combined for the evening in order to accommodate all the people who had RSVPed that they were attending. By the middle of the evening, the two rooms were teeming with celebrities. He knew that Montgomery had pulled in a sizable amount for the charity he was sponsoring. In addition he had earned himself a great deal of goodwill and thereby excellent publicity, which he knew had been Montgomery’s underlying goal.

Right now, the man was golden, Matt mused. Luke Montgomery had come a long way from the poor boy who’d been ridiculed for wearing the same clothes to school day after day. And, to his vast credit, Montgomery had risen far above his poverty-stricken roots without resorting to any deals with the devil.

In this case, Matt thought, that would be the other members of his family, from whom he would have enjoyed maintaining a continuing estrangement. However, his brother kept insisting on calling him, asking for help. It wasn’t in him to say no.

He was working on that.

Wilson’s long, thin fingers were flying across the keyboard. The resulting staccato rhythm, coming fast and furious, sounded not unlike rapid gunfire from a small handgun.

As Natalie watched the technician’s monitor, the first of many tapes began to play across the screen. “Here’s the tape of the entrance,” Wilson announced.

Matt nodded. He rethought his offer to Natalie about having her look over his shoulder. He had things to attend to, and if he wound up spending any length of time sitting so close to her, well, he’d just rather not put himself to that sort of test.

Turning to Natalie, he indicated a nearby empty desk. One of the computer techs had called in sick this morning.