She had done neither. She had instead gotten a highly successful and very beneficial attorney killed and she had ended up, most likely, under Timothy Cranston’s control.

A very, very bad place to be.

If Rudy wasn’t very careful, if his son wasn’t even more careful, then they would soon find themselves facing that bastard Cranston and those hick Mackays in the worst possible way. That was something Rudy intended to avoid at all costs.

He’d had the family investigated after Marlena’s disappearance and Gerard’s death. What he had learned made him wary. The shadowed vendetta that had played out against his organization for a year afterward still had the power to keep him awake at night.

The authorities had watched his family much too closely, his sources among the law enforcement agencies began disappearing, but when his son had been jerked out of England after leaving the family and nearly imprisoned, Rudy had known they had made enemies the family could ill afford. Word on the street was that the Genoa crime organization had shaken the wrong tree in Kentucky and they were going to pay for it.

It was a tree he had no intentions of shaking again in a way that meant he, or anyone in his organization, could be identified.

The only good thing that had come of it? Homeland Security had pissed Andre off enough to return home and ensure that they could never do so again. He was now learning the ropes and moving in as Rudy’s right hand. And a very effective right hand he was.

The bodies Andre disposed of were never seen again. There was no evidence to lead back to Rudy, Andre, or the family, and no loose lips spilling family business secrets.

It was a good life.

Unless those gems weren’t in his possession when the owners came looking for them.

Resignation burned a hole in his gut.

Fuck. He was going to have to go after a Mackay.

He wasn’t frightened of the Mackays, but he was definitely on guard against them.

So much so that he would have gladly let the disappearance of those stones go, unless the Mackay girl tried to sell them. He would have washed his hands of them if the men arriving soon to collect them would have been willing to do the same. Or if perhaps they would have taken the task of collecting them from Kentucky.

That wouldn’t happen, though. At least, not until they wiped every last trace of the Genoa family from existence.

Yes, this definitely had the potential to be very, very dangerous. And that potential was growing by the minute.

SIX

Andre Genoa stared at the hotel from the driver’s seat of the dark gray van with a growing sense of fury as he disconnected the call he’d just taken.

Son of a bitch. He didn’t need this, not right now. Not at this point in the game.

“Marcel says she’s just called for a bellhop, Dennis,” he told the man he’d chosen to retrieve the jewels. “You’ll go up. When she answers the door, load her belongings. Maneuver her cart into the elevator first, where Marcel will be waiting for you. He’ll block her while the doors close. Take the cart to the room service elevator and out the back entrance. I’ll be waiting for you there. We’ll just take everything, then go through it later.”

Dennis was the less violent of the two men, and the one known to be the most protective of his daughter and wife. He was Andre’s best bet in ensuring Piper Mackay wasn’t harmed.

“Got it, boss.” Nodding his head, Dennis opened the door and slid from the front passenger seat.

As the door closed behind Dennis’s bulky form, Nate Ryan, his best friend and partner, moved into the seat, his gray eyes narrowed against the lights of the vehicles moving along the busy street as Andre pulled out of the parking space and headed toward the hotel’s back entrance.

“This doesn’t feel good, Andre,” Nate murmured as they turned down the small street used for deliveries. “It doesn’t feel good at all. Who chose Marcel to head to the hotel ahead of us?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Andre murmured. “Rudy didn’t say anything about sending extra men in.”

He hoped it was just indigestion, but something warned him this task was a hell of a lot more dangerous than the Mexican food they’d eaten earlier.

Marcel tended to give him indigestion, though. The man was a self-important moron. His arrogance had only grown in the past year, after Rudy and Boris Cheslav had chosen him as an emissary between the two families. Marcel had saved Boris’s ass a few years back when he’d learned that a relative of the family working an important drug buy was actually a DEA plant. Boris had immediately moved the other man into the upper level of his organization.

When Boris had approached Rudy with the request to handle the jewels coming into the city, he’d revealed the fact that Marcel, Rudy’s third cousin, was actually one of his men, and would be their contact during the transaction. Which meant Andre couldn’t get rid of him, as much as he would love to.

Marcel was fucking untouchable until the agreement Rudy had made with the Russian family was completed. If the other man disappeared, then the suspicious, highly paranoid Russian might just slip the leash his own son had on him, and strike out at the Genoa family. They couldn’t risk that.

Pulling the van into place, Andre glared at the back entrance of the hotel, willing Dennis to hurry, to complete the theft of the girl’s belongings quickly.

“A fucking Mackay,” Nate sighed beside him then. “What are the chances?”

What were the chances. For a man that didn’t believe in coincidence, he was suddenly being given supposed proof that they existed.

“The chances are pretty much fucking nil,” he growled. “After we get back, find out why she’s here, and start tying up loose ends. I want to know every fucking move she’s made, everyone she’s talked to, and every breath she’s taken since she made the decision to come to the city alone. Dawg Mackay is too fucking paranoid to let one of his sister’s travel here without a baby-sitter. And Timothy Cranston would die and go to hell before he’d let one of them travel anywhere alone without a shadow.” He turned and glared at Nate. “I haven’t found her shadow yet. That means, she doesn’t have one.”

Nate’s expression hardened. “Someone playing with us again?”

“That’s what my gut’s telling me.” Andre made the realization in a flash. “Someone’s definitely playing with us, and I want to know why.”

* * *

The planner Jed had scrawled his number in lay on the table next to the door, where Piper had thrown it after having to force herself not to call him. Again.

She wanted to call him.

She wanted to rail about the decision to travel to New York alone, and she wanted to curse Eldon Vessante to the pits of hell, and she needed someone to listen to her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anyone she could call whom she could trust to keep the details to themselves.

Even Amy, the friend whose sister had given her a ride to the train station, couldn’t be totally trusted. If Amy even suspected Piper might be harmed, or had been, then she would call Dawg in a New York minute.

Amy might not know Dawg. She may not have a very high opinion of him after some of the stories Piper had told her about his protectiveness, but Amy had become a good friend over the past few years. She returned to Somerset each summer just to see Piper’s new designs, and over the course of those visits, they had become close.

Besides, Amy also trusted her sister, Gypsy, and Gypsy was a female version of the Mackay men. Pure military, tough, and suspicious. She would convince Amy to call the Mackays, if she didn’t just call Natches herself.

The only bright spot in the night was that she had been able to get a ticket on a train departing in two hours. It would put her in Louisville five hours later, and from there the price for a rental car home wouldn’t give away the fact that she had been in New York City.

Dawg would have pups if he ever found out she had traveled there alone. He was so damned protective and controlling of his sisters’ lives that he had even fully vetted their roommates at college. She and her sisters had become so disgusted over the choices he had given them that they had opted to just share an apartment together.

Piper hated it.

She hated having to look over her shoulder at every party she went to and every event she attended. Even worse was how often her dates and potential lovers looked over their shoulders.

The few men Piper had actually considered sleeping with had run so damned fast once they’d realized who she was related to that there hadn’t been a chance of finding out whether they were as compatible as she had thought they might be.

The men who hadn’t run had been far too much like the male Mackays for her to even consider, once she realized the traits they shared with her family members. She was terrified of ending up with a man just like Dawg, or worse yet, a man who reported to him.

That would be so humiliating.

She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being in a relationship where she couldn’t trust her lover to have more loyalty to her than he had fear of her brother.

Would Jed really fear Dawg, though?

She couldn’t imagine that happening, but she could imagine him reporting to Dawg simply because he believed her brother would have the right to know what she was doing, when, and where.

She glanced to the planner again as she finished packing her duffel bag with the items she’d bought before leaving for the meeting with the bastard who had tricked her into coming to New York. She’d literally upended her purse to get all the little packages of stones and colored glass into the duffel, and stuffed all the fabric and notions in after them.

It would serve Eldon right if she did tell Dawg exactly what he had done. Dawg and her cousins would be in New York City so fast no one would dare realize they were gone. And they would beat the skinny, rat-faced little pervert to a pulp.

The thought of it was immensely satisfying, but she knew she could never do it.

Shaking her head at the pleasurable image and heading across the room to collect her planner, she was brought up short by a knock on the door.

The bellhop was quick. She had called the front desk and asked them to give her an hour before sending him up, but she didn’t mind leaving a little earlier than she had planned. It would give her a few extra minutes to settle onto the train and feel a little sorrier for herself.

Mockery curled her lips. If there was one thing she didn’t do well, it was feel sorry for herself.

Dawg wasn’t really a prison warden, though in the past year, she admitted, there were often times she accused him of being one.

Checking the peephole quickly, she saw a large form dressed in the familiar hotel jacket and quickly opened the door.

For the second time that night, her world went to hell.

She had seen Eldon’s attack coming; she wasn’t expecting this one.

The second the door parted from the frame it slammed inward with such force Piper found herself thrown back into the room, where she crashed into the room service cart delivered earlier.

Dishes and food were suddenly flung across the floor as the cart took her weight, and Piper let out a piercing scream.

Don’t be quiet, Dawg had always advised her and her sisters. There was nothing an attacker hated worse than having attention called to his actions.

And evidently it was the truth.

“Shut up, bitch.” Enraged, the apelike figure dived for her as Piper fought to scramble away, using every breath she had to scream her lungs out.

A heavy fist caught her shoulder, causing her face to slam into the side of the dresser.

For a moment, her senses were rattled, light flashing before her eyes and exploding in vibrant color as she fought back the dizzying darkness gathering beyond the lights.

A hand attached to her upper arm with bruising force, jerking her from the floor as a hoarse demand was growled in her ear.

“Where is it?”

Where was what?

She screamed again, struggling against him as she tried with every blow to bury her fist or a foot into his balls.