Chapter 1
GRIFFIN
I know a woman in trouble when I see one, and that’s a woman in trouble.
The woman pulling up in the golf cart fifty yards away from me through the trees is none of my business. Still, I stop and lean against a tall, leafy alder, my phone propped under my chin, watching as the driver practically sprints around the cart to help her out and onto the footpath.
Strains of upbeat music and chatter from the crowd at the end of the path drown out most of the forest sounds.
“Griff?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” I say into my phone.
I straighten my tux’s lapels, trying to focus as my colleague and best friend Ford launches into an update of what I’ve missed since I left yesterday.
The woman’s holding herself stiffly, like she’s waiting for something—or someone—to jump out of the trees. To anyone else, I think it would look like she’s here to enjoy a wedding, just like me. Not that “enjoy” is a word I’d normally couple with “wedding.”
She smiles, saying something to the driver, who leans a little too casually against the roof of the cart, like he’s trying to be chill. I don’t blame him. This woman’s not just beautiful. She’s objectively stunning.
She looks around her person, then tucks the blond waves tumbling over her shoulders to one side as she reaches into the cart to grab something she must have forgotten.
Whatever it is she’s looking for must be on the floor of the cart, because she leans way in, kicking up a bright pink heel that looks sharp enough to kill a man as she strains to reach.
Her poufy pink dress barely reached mid-thigh when she was standing.
I grit my teeth as the driver gets an eyeful of whatever’s under her skirt. Luckily he immediately does the right thing by shoving his hands in his pockets and looking up at the sky.
“Good man,” I mutter.
“What?” Ford asks, pausing his reading.
“Nothing. Just wedding stuff.”
Just a beautiful woman I think is worried she’s being followed stuff.
Ford shuffles through papers on the other end of the line. “Okay, so like I say, at two-thirty, his goon leaves the building, heading south in the Escalade…”
It’s shitty of me not to give Ford my full attention. But the scene before me has superseded work.
The woman emerges with a purse in hand. As she stands up straight again, her face angles this way for the first time. I can’t see fine details, but I still clock high cheekbones and a heart-shaped face tinged pink from hanging practically upside down.
I also see the way she jerks at the sound of a twig snapping and how her fingers clutch the little purse so tightly it looks like she’s going to snap it in half.
I’m not worried anyone’s here. This wedding’s nestled in the trees in the far corner of my family resort’s golf course, well away from the public.
I personally vetted the special security my sister, the hotel’s CEO, hired for the event.
It’s a huge unit, and that’s on top of the bride’s personal detail.
In fact, our regular resort staff were relieved from transport duty; that driver’s security personnel.
On top of all of that, the guests had to sign NDAs.
But except for that last point, she doesn’t know all that.
Even from here, I can see the smile she gives him as she leaves is fucking dazzling. She gives him a little wave, and the driver—probably an ex-marine—grins and waves back like Forrest Gump as she takes off down the path on foot.
“Griff?”
Shit. Ford says my name in a way that I know means I missed something important.
“Sorry. A lot going on over here.”
I’m no better than the driver, who’s pulling away to head back to the resort, clearly reluctant to leave. His eyes dart one last time to the woman before he drives out of sight.
I run a hand over the back of my neck, turning away. It’s not like me to be distracted. Especially not when I want to hear what Ford has to say.
I picked up a bit, here and there. And as I return focus, one of those bits floats to the surface. “Wait, did you say something about Lionel?”
Lionel McCrae is the CEO of McCrae & Associates, the white-label protection firm Ford and I work for. Our boss.
There’s a long pause. Ford’s not used to me not paying attention.
“Yeah,” he says. “Hey, you okay?”
“Fine,” I bark.
He chuckles. “That’s more like it.” Then his voice turns sober. “Griff, I said that feeling you had the other day that something’s up with Lionel. I…don’t think you’re wrong.”
That’s enough to bring me fully back. “Tell me.”
“You said you thought he hadn’t been himself for a while.”
“He hasn’t.” It’s been a few months. The changes are subtle, but I know how to read people. I’ve worked for the man for a decade. I know him better than half my siblings, which says a lot—I’ve got four of them.
“I saw three more locked meetings on his calendar,” Ford says. “When I asked him about them, he gave me the brush-off.”
Something tickles along the length of my spine. Up until a few months ago, Ford and I had Lionel’s full confidence. As his seconds-in-command, he’d run everything by us for our professional opinions. Even meeting potential clients, many of whom were highly vulnerable political targets.
“He did the same for me, telling me the meetings were personal appointments.”
“I call bullshit,” Ford says.
I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. Ford didn’t believe me when I first brought it up.
I don’t give a shit about credit, but on this matter particularly, I wish I didn’t feel vindicated.
There was a time I would have called Lionel a second father.
But I can’t reconcile that man with his recent behavior.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you at first,” Ford says. “But to be fair, you’re suspicious as fuck about pretty much everything. To hear you voicing that shit about Lionel—I didn’t want to see it. I half convinced myself it was just time for you to take a vacation.”
“I’m on vacation right now.”
“A day off is not a vacation.”
“I took the back roads.”
Ford scoffs. “Driving isn’t a vacation, either, even if you go the long route.”
“I’d beg to differ.” Driving here via the old winding highways of upstate New York and Vermont last night on my Bonneville—a bike I fully restored in my workshop this year—felt like a holiday.
So did coming home to my cabin outside Quince Valley, where I hadn’t been in three weeks since we’d been on assignment in Queens.
“Is that all you noticed?” I ask, already knowing it won’t be.
That sick feeling I first felt when I started noticing Lionel’s odd behavior spreads in my guts.
Instinct tells me something’s off, and not just a little bit.
Inadvertently, I turn back to where the woman went, as if looking for an antidote.
To my surprise, she’s still there, only farther up at the end of the treed path that runs parallel to the one I’m on now. She’s paused to look at her phone.
Her whole posture is stiff.
She looks the way I feel.
I force myself to turn away again and begin walking toward the wedding site, which I can see and hear through the trees up ahead—at least three hundred people are here, and they make a good amount of noise.
If she’s not my client and not in imminent danger—and I know she’s not—then she’s not my problem.
I have problems all on my own without looking for more.
“No, that’s not all I noticed,” Ford says.
I slow my pace.
There’s a long pause again, like he’s considering how to phrase something. “Lionel wants us to wind down the surveillance on Creelman.”
I freeze. The music’s louder here, the din of the crowd only a dozen yards from where I stand. “I’m not sure I heard you right.”
“No, you heard me right,” Ford says grimly. “He’s dismantled the team.”
“The fuck?” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’ve been staking out Creelman for weeks, with guys watching his every move.
Our company isn’t law enforcement, though several of our colleagues are ex-cops or military.
McCrae & Associates protects good guys and helps push good ideas.
Often, that means watching bad guys. Like in the case of our current client, an executive at a construction company whose company is doing deals with criminal organizations.
Vincent Creelman’s a higher-up in one of those organizations—one that’s been the target of drug, extortion, and worst of all in my mind, sex-trafficking allegations, though law enforcement has never been able to make anything stick.
“Creelman’s a thug, through and through,” I grit out into the phone. “This doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
“We all know Creelman’s a bad fucking guy of the first order,” Ford agrees. “And Lionel knows our surveillance proves he’s been blatantly bribing local politicians for years.”
It makes no sense he’d want us to back down. “He called the guy a scumbag, for chrissakes.”
“It’s not great,” Ford agrees.
I’m fucking dumbfounded. “Where’s the rest of the team?”
“Getting reassigned.”
“Attention beautiful people!” A voice cuts through the last of the trees between me and the open space where wedding-goers mill around rows of white chairs.
A chic-looking Black woman with a shaved head and a pink blazer grips the mic at the podium.
“The ceremony of the century will begin in fifteen minutes.”
“Fuck, I’ve gotta go,” I tell Ford, very much not wanting to go.
He chuckles. “The ceremony of the century, huh?”
“Fuck you.”
“Call me when you can. There’s more.”
“What do you mean, more?”
But Ford’s already ended the call.
“Sonofabitch,” I say out loud. I’d say it to his face if he were here. He knows if he said any more, he’d risk me jumping on my bike and heading back to the city.
But I can’t ditch my brother’s wedding with a clean conscience.
I’m known for being inexplicably absent in this family.
Hazard of the job. And my personality. But skipping out on my brother’s wedding would be a dick move, especially since I’m in the wedding party.
I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a dick.
Family is always number one, even if I don’t always tell them that in words.
I slip the phone into my breast pocket and pick up the pace down the last section of the path, setting work out of my mind for now. I’m good at compartmentalizing.
Of course the moment I shut the door in my brain on work, it goes straight back to the woman in pink.
“Fucking stop it, asshole,” I mutter to myself oh-so-kindly as I step out into the back of the crowd. “It’s time to act like weddings are my goddamned happy place, not scan the crowd for women in peril.”
One particular woman in peril.
As I cross the back of the grassy area set up for the wedding, I attempt to shut the door on her, too. Only a shiny pink toe pokes into my mental doorframe right before I click it shut.