Have Mercy. Jo Leigh

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СКАЧАТЬ of blush that had filled her cheeks burst into a heat that burned. She didn’t care if he left or not. She was out of there.

      Behind her, as she hurried to the grooming salon, she heard his measured footsteps. It was only when she was safe with a door and a room between them that she felt the trembling, immediately followed by a hot surge of humiliation. She was twenty-seven years old, and she still was a complete idiot when it came to men. Not that she was completely inexperienced, but then, none of her experiences had been very good.

      She’d missed out on the whole flirting thing. For that matter, she’d never really dated, not like normal girls had. In the end, it was just easier to be with the animals. At least there, she knew just where she stood.

      “GET ON TAYLOR'S case first thing in the morning,” Will said as he logged into his laptop. “That delivery should have been made yesterday.”

      “Got it,” Anita said. She moved on to the next order of business in her usual professional manner.

      Anita had been his administrative assistant for three years, and she was damn good at her job. She kept the distractions to a minimum and while they were friendly, she didn’t bother him with her personal life, or expect to know about his.

      He’d formed the company eleven years ago, when he’d seen the signs that corporate wellness was going to become a matter of necessity. WD Fitness Equipment designed health facilities for businesses across the country. He had a great team working for him, but he was still the man in charge, and taking any time away from work was costly.

      “I’ve made your reservations for the trade show in Paris. You’ll be leaving on the twenty-first.”

      “Fine. Where are we with the end-of-month numbers?”

      He listened as he glanced at the e-mails, at least sixty, waiting for him, then clicked over to Google. After typing in “diamond dog collar” he was surprised to find so many hits.

      Anita said something that he made her repeat. When she was finished, he wrapped things up, anxious to get to his personal business.

      “Will you be coming in tomorrow?”

      “I’ll see. I might be able to come in around ten, but don’t make any appointments.”

      He heard a phone ring in the background, and let Anita go. The office wasn’t far, just across town in SoHo, but until he knew exactly what was going on with Drina, he didn’t want to leave the hotel.

      He went back to his online search, running down the list of hits. Although he didn’t see many links to diamond dog collars made recently, there had been several in the news from the 1920s. Evidently, diamonds on dog collars had been in vogue, and several well-known socialites had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to upstage their neighbors.

      There were a few pictures, and one of them looked a lot like the collar he’d seen on Lulu. He’d call an old friend of his, a P.I. from Jersey, and get him to look into the possibility that the collar had been purchased at auction or if the transaction had made the news. He wished he could have turned this whole mess over to Ricky, but the matter required his personal attention. So while Ricky did the research, Will would do some digging the old-fashioned way—by getting someone to talk.

      Not someone. Mercy.

      He wondered again about her story. She really was lovely. Tall, slender but not ridiculously so, she reminded him of a colt. Skittish and headstrong, it would be a challenge to get past her defenses. But worth it, he thought. Not just because she would know about the collar, either.

      He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to get to the bottom of things here, but he wasn’t quite as anxious as he’d been this morning.

      Mercy had been clear that she wasn’t going to help him train Buster. Will smiled as he recalled her delectable pout. He’d always liked a challenge, especially when the reward was so tempting.

      3

      THE HUSH ROOFTOP garden was as lush with fragrance as it was with beauty. Drina had found a small wooden table under a shade tree where she could drink her mimosa and stare at her still-empty journal. She closed her eyes as a warm humid breeze caressed her face, wishing as always that Marius could be with her.

      If Marius had still been alive he would have approved. Her duty was to make sure the bastards paid for what they’d done. To catch them at the perfect moment and expose them for the thieves they were.

      After another sip of her drink she picked up the pen that had been her husband’s. It was silver and it had once had the name of a stranger engraved on the top, but now there was no name, only the memory of her beautiful Marius…and how she missed his touch.

      She put the pen to the paper, marking down the date, the weather, the scent of roses. And then she went back in time, to before she was born. The stories of how the family had come to America were more vivid to her than the television show she’d watched last night.

      All her life the old ones had repeated the tales, had sat the children around the tables and gone through the litany of trials they’d faced while keeping each other safe, always begun and ended with the dangers of assimilation. They were separate. They were special. No one was safe outside the circle of family.

      She wrote quickly, not lifting the pen for a page, then two, as she remembered her mother. She’d been fourteen when she’d come to NewYork, already married and pregnant with Drina’s eldest brother. The trip over on the boat had nearly cost Stefan his new life, but once Mama had gone to New Jersey with Papa, he’d flourished. The family had grown with uncles, aunts, cousins. They worked together, lived together. Drina had spoken the old language until she’d been forced to go to school. It had been a horrible time for her. Strangers, strange ways. The other children laughed at her Romanian accent, at her lunches, at her hand-me-down clothes.

      It didn’t matter. The family was everything, and from the time she could walk she’d been in training.

      In her family, the girls were treated no differently from the boys except that they learned early to use their sex. Not that way. That was what the outsiders believed, but in her family, they raised good girls. Good girls who were expert pickpockets and who understood how to work the con.

      She’d been pure until the day she’d married Marius. How she’d wanted him. He was the best-looking boy she’d ever seen. The moment they’d met, she’d known they would be together. Forever.

      They would have still been together if it hadn’t been—

      The ding of the elevator made her look up, forgetting for a moment where she was. A blink later she remembered why she was here, and that she had to be careful.

      She closed the memory book, finished the rest of her drink. Then sat back in the shadows to wait. To see if they kept to their schedule. To see the bastards who’d sent her Marius to prison and to his death.

      Five minutes passed with nothing but the breeze to stir the air. She thought of Dennis, her current gentleman friend. He was pleasant, a decent man, but just another distraction. As she waited, she wondered again why she bothered. The only thing that mattered in her life was this. Was revenge.

      Another two minutes, and she wished she hadn’t finished her drink. Then a sound.

      She waited, knowing she would see them as they walked СКАЧАТЬ