Texas Heroes_ Volume 1(134)

Dev would leave, because he had no choice. But it wouldn’t always be like this.

He had to make certain of one more thing. Though her abandonment cut him to the bone, Dev had to know that Lacey wouldn’t suffer. “What about Lacey?”

DeMille snorted. “I know who’s at fault here. I’ll give her everything you could never provide.”

Dev’s pride demanded its due. “You’re wrong. I love her. I can take care of her.”

Charles DeMille just shook his head. “Your father was headed for prison when he died. You think you’ll ever be good enough for my daughter?” He clapped Dev on the shoulder, smug that he had won. “Son, you’re nothing. You never were.”

Then his face turned harsh again. “Now get out of here before I change my mind and call the cops.”





Chapter One





Present Day


Devlin Marlowe entered the ballroom late, pausing at the entrance to survey the crush of people. Houston glitterati had turned out in force. If the women assembled had merely donated the price of their designer gowns and gleaming jewels, no auction would be needed to raise funds.

He could afford the price of admission now, thanks to a series of shrewd investments, but beneath his skin, he still didn’t belong with these people. He might own his own tux, but inside him still lived the boy who’d barely escaped going on welfare.

This occasion gave him a golden chance to do what he wanted: to observe Lacey DeMille at close range before she saw him.

And he wanted that, he realized. Wanted time to assess her in the flesh. Wanted to see if there was anything left of the beautiful young girl he had wanted so badly to choose him.

Before he tore her life apart, he wanted to find the right way to handle it. He owed it to the Gallaghers. They had become more than clients—they were friends he didn’t want to see hurt.

But fate must be laughing up its sleeve at him. Dev sure wasn’t.

Even though he’d done all the investigating himself, a part of him still didn’t want to believe what he’d found.

Out of all the women in the world, what kind of loser luck had him turning up the Princess of River Oaks as the missing baby girl a family had hired him to find?

This wasn’t personal. He couldn’t let it be. Nothing he did could regain the lost years, could repair the awful sense of impotence…of teetering on the brink…of being one of the nameless, faceless poor after their precipitous fall from grace when his father suffered a fatal heart attack, one step away from being jailed for fraud.

They’d held onto their dignity with white-knuckled hands, but Dev still remembered all too well the nights the scared boy he’d once been had dug claws into his sides to keep from giving in to unmanly sobs. The angry teenager who had fought Charles DeMille’s disdain, his hold on Dev’s mother. The young lover whose perfect revenge had turned into his worst defeat.

The man he was now knew that he’d been forged in the fire of his family’s needs. He’d served his time in the military and come back to take them away to Dallas. He’d worked hard, two and three jobs, to support them. He’d built a business and made it successful. He’d found his way on his own and was better off for it.

All that was in the past. This was a job, a special duty for valued friends. Reuniting a woman with siblings she didn’t know she had. He would do it as cleanly as possible, and then go to the next case.

Lacey’s adoption had been done by less-than-legal means and covered up in a way only money and power could manage. Charles DeMille had plenty of both.

It was easy now to see why no one had known. Dev was almost certain that even Lacey had no idea she was adopted—the girl who had walked away because he wasn’t good enough for her blue blood. The girl who had betrayed him, who had chosen a life of ease over his love. Who had taught him a lesson so painful he remembered it still.

It was too rich that Devlin Marlowe would be the one to tell her that her blood was no better than his.

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…Lacey DeMille’s whole life was defined by her parents’ lies. She stood on quicksand and didn’t even know it.

Sleeping Beauty was about to be awakened, one way or another.

But not with a kiss.

And no one had ever called Devlin Marlowe a prince.



Lacey stood with her date, Philip Forrester, and her parents, watching the auction as though she’d had no part in creating it. Her mind drifted to Christina, the little girl for whom she volunteered as a child advocate. To the contrasts between their lives…her own so privileged, so unearned.

The demands of that life sometimes choked Lacey. A part of her wanted badly to care nothing about how she looked or behaved, to run free like a ruffian and just be Lacey, not Lacey of the River Oaks DeMilles.