Her 24-Hour Protector(13)
Mercedes had bid on him? The wife of the man who had once employed his mother in his Vegas casino as a croupier? The man who’d fired Sara Duncan when she fell pregnant with him, necessitating her move to Reno, to start a new life. Just him and her.
“Interesting, huh?”
It was plain freaking weird. “Mmm,” he said, opening a file, but his pulse had quickened.
“So, what d’you think the grand Vegas matriarch wanted with you? You think she pushed up the bidding just to get up Jenna’s whatoot?”
He glanced up sharply. “Tell you what, Perez. Why don’t you and me go for a little drive and check out that new shooting range? And while we’re there you can tell me how and why you signed me up for that bachelor auction while I try not to shoot you. Because I’m thinking it was you who set me up, not the Rothchild heiress.”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “We can go shoot. From that photo it looks like you could let off a few.”
He grabbed his jacket angrily, took her elbow. “For starters,” he growled as he led her out the door, “who approached you about the auction?”
“Cassie Mills. She takes a class at the club where I teach martial arts.”
“She Jenna’s friend?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Jenna was feeling an inescapable buzz. Being attracted to a man she was going to see that night was like a drug to her system, a welcome relief from all the sadness that had beset the Rothchild mansion since Candace’s horrible death. “Good morning, Dad,” Jenna said, as she bent down to kiss her father on the cheek. She set a bowl of doggie kibble down for Napoleon, poured coffee from the silver jug Mrs. Carrick, their cook, had left on the patio breakfast table and took a seat with a view of the pool.
The surface shimmered with refracted morning sunlight as Jones, their groundskeeper, cleaned the pool filter. A soft, hot desert breeze ruffled the tops of the garden palms. It was late June, Vegas peaking into summer, and today was going to be a scorcher.
“So?” Harold said over the top of his paper and his reading glasses, his Paul Newman-blue eyes twinkling. “Two mil for the orphan fund? Not bad, sweetheart.”
She grinned. “The FBI agent is not too bad either.”
“When is your date?”
“Tonight. I just sent him a text message asking for his address and to say my limo will be waiting outside his house at 10 p.m.”
“Rather late for dinner?”
She shrugged. “He said he had some kind of evening coaching session with his at-risk teens or something. Anyway, I told him I wanted white flowers and that the rest of the evening was my treat—” she stirred her coffee, chinked the spoon on the side, smiling “—and my surprise.”
Jenna liked this time with her dad. He was a flamboyant casino mogul with movie-star good looks, a much-noted temper, a passion for perfection and a shrewd eye for business. He liked to get up real early each morning, do work in his home office and then kick back for a while over breakfast. It was his time to catch up with Jenna and the newspapers and to drink his coffee. After that he’d go down to the Grand Hotel and Casino, where he often worked well after midnight. He was a driven entrepreneur, and he wasn’t a man who needed much sleep.
But he’d always made time for her, since she was a kid, and Jenna loved him for it. She’d do just about anything for her father. He remained the solid center of her rarefied Vegas life. Her BlackBerry beeped suddenly, and Jenna set down her coffee cup, checked the message. It was from Cassie. FBI agent Perez had apparently just paid her friend an “official” visit, and Cassie wanted to know what Jenna had gotten her into.
“You’ll ask him about the ring, of course.”
Frowning, her eyes flashed up. “Of course.” She hesitated. “Dad—you’ve always said that The Tears of the Quetzal came from granddad’s South American operations, but where exactly?”
“Ah, sweetheart, I’m not one hundred percent sure. All I know for certain is that your grandfather had the diamond set down there, but otherwise, all the paperwork seems to have been lost in an old fire at the South American office.”
She studied him. If there’s one thing Harold always was, it was sure. A teensy icicle of doubt formed. “What exactly do you want me to get out of Lex Duncan?”
He chuckled, removed his reading glasses, blue eyes sparking like the broken surface of the pool catching sun behind him. Yet there was a sharp edge that lurked behind his smile—an edge that appeared whenever Harold spoke about The Tears of the Quetzal. “Anything you can, sweetheart. You could make a monk drop his habit, Jenna, and I have no doubt you can work your charms on this man. I want some idea of the FBI’s thought process in connection with the case. And of course I want my ring back. I want to know where they are holding it. In the wrong hands it—”