Las Vegas: Seduction: The Heiress's 2-Week Affair

“People, maybe,” he allowed. “But not me.” And then the import of what she was saying hit him. “You’re talking about the Tears of the Quetzal? That was the ring that was stolen?”

“As if you didn’t know. Someone saw you escort Candace out.”

They were attracting attention despite the closed door. Some of the people in the outer office kept glancing in their direction. Matt walked over to glass walls and one by one lowered the blinds, giving them privacy.

It also created a sense of intimacy that he really didn’t want. Right now, it only complicated things. But he wanted prying eyes even less, so he left the blinds where they were. “A lot of people saw me escort Candace out.”

“How far out?” Natalie challenged heatedly. “To your car? Maybe you decided to take her for a little drive and wound up at her place?”

Candace and Natalie might have been twins but he had never met two sisters who were so utterly different, not just in looks but in personality. He had never experienced the slightest attraction, not even momentarily, to Candace.

“I walked her to the entrance,” he told Natalie. “Where she went from there and with whom, I have no idea.” She looked unconvinced. “I can show you the tape that verifies that.” Although, he thought, he shouldn’t have to.

“Tapes can be doctored,” she countered. “As I remember, you were pretty good at that sort of thing. ‘Enhancing’ I think you called it.”

That both wounded and irritated him, but he let it go. Instead, he appealed to her logic. Her logical mind was one of the things he’d loved about her.

“Natalie, think about it. What could I do with the ring if I did take it? I can’t fence it. It’s not some little piece of glitter. This rock is famous. Pieces have been written about it. A lot of people know what it looks like.”

Everything Matt said made sense, but she wasn’t willing to let him off the hook just yet. She needed more answers. “My father says he’s into your family for a lot of money.”

He was surprised her father had admitted that. Arrangements had been made secretly, so no one would know that Rothchild was in financial trouble.

“The family lent him money, yes.”

Matt couldn’t help thinking how ironic that was. Eight years ago, Harold Rothchild had come to him for the express purpose of buying him off. The man had offered him a quarter of a million dollars if he promised to disappear and never get in contact with Natalie again. Angry and offended because he knew that in Rothchild’s eyes, he wasn’t good enough for Natalie, he’d told her father what the man could do with his money and his offer.

And then, days later, his brother had succeeded in doing what Rothchild couldn’t. He’d succeeded in making him leave Natalie, but for completely different reasons.

Natalie was looking at him suspiciously. They both knew what her father thought of the Schaffer family. “Why would your family give him a loan?”

Because Rothchild had told Natalie about the loan, he didn’t feel bound by the initial promise of secrecy surrounding the deal. “Your father overextended himself. A note was due on his casino, and he stood to lose everything.” He shrugged carelessly, his custom-made jacket rustling. “I was in a position to help.” He’d been the one who had brokered the deal, acting as a go-between with his family and Rothchild.

That didn’t answer her question. She pinned him with a look. “Again, why?”

He’d asked himself the same thing. This was a man who, eight years ago, would have gladly seen him run out of Vegas on a rail. But then he rethought his position. “Because he was your father, and I thought that what happened to him affected you. If he had to file for bankruptcy, your inheritance might be in jeopardy as well.” He smiled at her. “Let’s just say I thought I owed it to you.”

Damn it, his smile wasn’t supposed to affect her anymore, wasn’t supposed to make her knees feel weak. She was a cop, for God’s sake.

“You don’t owe me anything, Schaffer,” she told him, her voice edged with steel. “Except for straight answers.”

“I gave you that,” he told her. “I didn’t kill Candace. I didn’t have her killed, either,” he added, covering all his bases. That, hopefully, out of the way, he had questions of his own. “How did she die?” he wanted to know.

She didn’t answer him immediately. Instead, she looked at him for a long moment, debating whether or not she believed him. God help her, she did. Did that make her a fool?

After a beat, she decided there was no harm in answering. The papers would be carrying the story soon enough, and the media always had a way of ferreting things out.

“My guess is that the blow to the back of her head did it. And whoever was there got in a few licks on her face as well.” Natalie shuddered. Had Candace suffered before she died? Lord, she hoped not. “Revenge, hatred, I don’t know.”

His eyes held hers. “And you thought I would do that?”

She gave him a nonanswer. “I had to ask.”

He had a lot coming to him for the way things had ended between them, but not that. “No, you didn’t.”

Her temper flared. “Yes, I did,” she insisted, struggling to keep her voice under control. “Because I don’t know you.”

Yes, you do, Natalie. In your heart, you know me, he thought. And then another thought hit him. “Let me ask you a question.”

“All right.” Not knowing what to expect, she braced herself. “Ask.”

He sat down on the edge of his desktop, crossing his arms before him. “Have the rules changed since I left Vegas?”

He looked relaxed all of a sudden. Why? Where was he going with this? She became suspicious. “Depends on what kind of rules you’re talking about.”

He watched her expression as he spoke. “The rules that say a detective with a personal stake in a case isn’t supposed to be allowed to investigate said case.”

He should be the last one to talk about rules, she thought angrily. “No, they haven’t changed,” Natalie replied stoically.

Matt spread his hands in a silent question. “Well then, why—?”

She stopped him before he could go any further. “My captain put me on bereavement leave.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Well, not only did she not know him but he obviously didn’t seem to know her, either she thought bitterly. “Do you honestly expect me to sit with my hands folded and not even try to find my sister’s killer?” she snapped.

“No,” he admitted, “I expect you to do exactly what you’re doing. We have that in common, you and I.” Their eyes met, and she wanted to look away, but found she couldn’t. “We’re both loyal to our families—even when they don’t deserve it.”

She took offense for her sister. “You’re a fine one to pass judgment.”

“I was talking about my own family,” he clarified quietly, and with those few words, he effectively took the wind out of her sails.

“Oh.” For a second, she was completely at a loss as to how to respond.

Sensing her discomfort, Matt changed the topic. He always had been in tune with her. “So, you’re a police detective.”

She looked at him warily. “Yes.”

He smiled. It went straight to her belly. “Can’t say that’s something I saw in your future.”

“I don’t think there was anything you saw about my future.” She couldn’t refrain from making the dig. It kept her from demanding to know why he had walked out on her all those years ago without so much as a word of explanation.

There were so many things he wanted to say to her, but he didn’t. They would all sound like excuses. And he knew she was better off this way. And safer. That had always been his goal, the motive behind his actions, to keep her as safe as possible. And that meant they couldn’t be together. But if he’d told her the truth back then, she wouldn’t have allowed it to keep them apart.

It was better this way. If he’d begun to waver in his decision, Scott’s phone call had convinced him otherwise.

“I’d like to see those surveillance tapes from last night if you don’t mind,” she said crisply, her tone indicating that even if he did mind, she would still find a way to view them.

There were an awful lot of tapes to go through. They had a hundred different cameras just on the ground floor alone. That made for a great deal of viewing time. “What exactly is it that you’re looking for?”

She wanted to say “anything suspicious” but she kept it succinct. “I want to see if Candace went home with anyone, or if anyone followed her.”

There, at least, he could be of some help. “Well, I don’t know for certain if anyone followed her, but I can tell you that when she left here, she was alone. I stood at the entrance and watched her for a few minutes to make sure she didn’t double back.”

He made Candace sound like some sort of undesirable. Granted her sister had been loud and tended to be outlandish at times, but she’d never been barred from any place. Casinos vied for her attendance.

“Exactly why was she escorted off the premises?”

“You’d have to take that up with Luke Montgomery,” he told her.

His answer wasn’t good enough. “You have no thoughts on that?” she wanted to know. “No impressions as to why he’d ask you to remove her?”

He told her what he knew. “They looked like they were quarreling when Montgomery signaled for me to come over.”

The bartender had said the same thing. “Quarreling? Quarreling about what?” Maybe Montgomery sought Candace out later in her condo, to pick up in private where they had left off. She needed to know the nature of the argument.

Matt made an educated guess, based on what he knew about Candace. “I think your sister wanted to cause a sensation with her ring, and Montgomery wanted the focus to remain on the gems at the gala. Montgomery went to a lot of expense to get celebrities to donate the jewelry and get them all under one roof and, well, Candace always had a way of making love to the camera, to the exclusion of everyone else.”

Natalie’s eyes narrowed. “I guess you would know about the lovemaking part.” The retort was out before she could prevent its emergence.

She’d managed to catch him completely off guard. “Excuse me?”

Oh, he was good, Natalie thought. He really looked as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Give it up, Matt. Candace told me that she thought you were really good in bed. One of her ‘better’ lovers, I believe she said.”

For a moment, he was speechless. “Candace would have no way of knowing that.”

She wasn’t about to be taken in by his act, no matter how much part of her wanted to believe it. “Oh, don’t bother playing innocent with me, Matt. Why would my sister lie?”

“The last thing I am is innocent,” he informed her. “But I never made love to your sister and as for why she would lie to you, I could think of a dozen reasons. Her being a pathological liar would be at the top of the list.” He saw that made Natalie angrier, but he stood by his statement. “I think, between her lifestyle, the booze, the drugs and the men, your sister lost her grasp on reality a long time ago.”

Incensed, heartbroken and still in shock at seeing Matt after all this time, Natalie found herself in a very fragile state. Far more fragile than she ever thought she would be. Without thinking, she reacted, defending a sister who could no longer defend herself. She took a swing at Matt.

He caught her by the wrist, stopping her fist from making contact and then quickly caught the other when she switched hands.

Furious, she tried to pull free. “Let me go,” she fumed.

“Only if you stop making a fist,” he told her. When he saw her uncurl first one hand, then the other, he released her wrists.

And promptly received a stinging slap to his cheek. Without registering surprise—he really should have seen that coming, he upbraided himself—Matt merely looked at her as he rubbed his face.

“Feel better?”

She wanted to say yes, but nothing had been solved, nothing had been released. She still felt this pent-up anger, and it had nowhere to go. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He wanted to take her hands in his, not to restrain her, but to make contact. He refrained, relying on his words instead to bridge the gap. “Look, I’m sorry about Candace, but unless you want to be next, I think you should leave this alone and let someone else handle it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“That’s an observation. Maybe the ring was just icing on the cake. You said she had bruises on her face. She didn’t when she left here. Whoever killed your sister might have done so in a blind rage. Maybe revenge, not theft, was the motive.”

“Revenge?” Natalie echoed. Candace had been thoughtless and had rubbed a great many people the wrong way, but she was harmless. She’d never done anything to anyone that would make them want to kill her. “You think whoever killed her was trying to teach her a lesson?”

He had a somewhat different theory to back up his thought. “No, maybe they were trying to get back at your father.”

“My father?” she repeated. “Why?” But even as she asked, it made sense—if she thought of the note he’d shown her.

“All rich men make enemies along the way. What better way to get back at him than to kill someone in his family? One of his beloved daughters?”

She was still trying to turn this around on him. “You sound as if you’re familiar with that kind of a life.”

“Just speculating,” he replied. “And if I’m right, you could be in danger.”

“I’m a cop,” she reminded him, deliberately resting her hand on the hilt of the weapon that was exposed beneath her jacket. “Being in danger kind of goes with the territory.”

God help him but he suddenly had a very real urge to see her wearing her holster and a pair of stiletto heels—and nothing else.

“The territory,” he advised, “might just have gotten a little rougher. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

If she could believe that…

But she couldn’t. She knew better. “You have nothing to say about that,” she informed him tersely. “You lost the right to have a say a long time ago, remember?”

He exhaled. It didn’t help, didn’t make the ache in his chest go away. “Yeah, I remember.”

Chapter 5

“You know I can’t release the tapes to you without a court order,” Matt told her. There was protocol to follow, and even if things hadn’t ended the way they did between them, technically his hands were tied. “And I’m guessing,” he went on, “you can’t get one because this isn’t your case.”

Her temper flared quickly, and it took effort to bank it down. She might have known he’d stonewall her. Did he have something to hide?

Natalie narrowed her eyes. She was not in the mood to be waved away like some annoying insect. “Look, Schaffer—”

Schaffer. She was calling him by his last name, the way a law enforcement agent would, he thought. The chasm between them was widening.

Good for her, he thought. She was moving on, or had moved on.

Bad for him, of course, but he’d resigned himself eight years ago that this was the way things had to be. Her father had been right all those years ago—he wasn’t good enough for Natalie. Not because he didn’t love her more than anything in the world but because his family would, in the end, drag him down. And if she were with him, they’d drag her down, too. He couldn’t have that happen.

“However,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him, “there really is nothing to stop you from looking over my shoulder as I review the tapes.”

That stopped her in her tracks. “You’re going to review the tapes?”

She couldn’t read his expression. “The only responsible thing for a good citizen to do, don’t you think?”

Natalie was surprised when a tinge of amusement whispered through her. “Is that what you are, a good citizen?”

“I do my best. Come with me,” he said as he opened his office door.

The moment he did, there was a quick shuffling of bodies and rustling of chairs moving back into place. The techs in the surveillance room were returning to their posts, he thought. No doubt curiosity had gotten the better of them, with more than a few of the people who manned the monitors trying to get closer to his office in order to hear what was being said. Despite the fact that he was head of security for Montgomery Enterprises, he was, in effect, the “new kid on the block,” at least in this location.

Until two weeks ago, he’d been based in Los Angeles, where he would have rather remained. But Montgomery had been adamant that he wanted him at The Janus, and the man did pay a damn good salary. Too good to refuse.

Making no comment about the temporary break that had been taken, Matt walked over to the computer tech seated just outside his office.

“Wilson—it is Wilson, right?” he asked the tall, painfully skinny, barely-out-of-adolescence young man.

Surprised at being singled out and obviously somewhat nervous because of it, the young man bobbed his head up and down. “Yes sir, Stuart Wilson.”

Matt could see Wilson’s Adam’s apple moving up and down like a runaway golf ball. He’d looked into all their backgrounds his first day here. Wilson was the best of the best when it came to computers. What he couldn’t make a computer do couldn’t be done.

But the young technician’s considerable proficiency didn’t make him any less gawky, Matt thought. Wilson really needed to have someone take him under their wing, he mused.

Too bad he wasn’t going to be here long enough for that. Matt had already made up his mind that he was going to be in Vegas just long enough to give The Janus’s security system a once-over and babysit it until Montgomery hired a suitable replacement for him.

“Wilson, I need you to pull up the surveillance tapes that we have of Mr. Montgomery’s gala last night.”

Wilson’s mouth dropped open as his jaw slackened. His small eyes widened as far as they could go. “All of them?” he repeated, stunned. Nervously, he added, “That’s an awful lot of footage, sir.”

He should have been more specific, Matt thought. “Let’s start with what we have between eight and nine o’clock. For the time being, I’m only interested in the first floor.” He narrowed it down even more. “Make it the entrance and the casino floor between that and Ballrooms B and C.”

The two ballrooms had been combined for the evening in order to accommodate all the people who had RSVPed that they were attending. By the middle of the evening, the two rooms were teeming with celebrities. He knew that Montgomery had pulled in a sizable amount for the charity he was sponsoring. In addition he had earned himself a great deal of goodwill and thereby excellent publicity, which he knew had been Montgomery’s underlying goal.

Right now, the man was golden, Matt mused. Luke Montgomery had come a long way from the poor boy who’d been ridiculed for wearing the same clothes to school day after day. And, to his vast credit, Montgomery had risen far above his poverty-stricken roots without resorting to any deals with the devil.

In this case, Matt thought, that would be the other members of his family, from whom he would have enjoyed maintaining a continuing estrangement. However, his brother kept insisting on calling him, asking for help. It wasn’t in him to say no.

He was working on that.

Wilson’s long, thin fingers were flying across the keyboard. The resulting staccato rhythm, coming fast and furious, sounded not unlike rapid gunfire from a small handgun.

As Natalie watched the technician’s monitor, the first of many tapes began to play across the screen. “Here’s the tape of the entrance,” Wilson announced.

Matt nodded. He rethought his offer to Natalie about having her look over his shoulder. He had things to attend to, and if he wound up spending any length of time sitting so close to her, well, he’d just rather not put himself to that sort of test.

Turning to Natalie, he indicated a nearby empty desk. One of the computer techs had called in sick this morning.

“Why don’t you pull up a chair beside Wilson?” he suggested. “He’ll be able to go through all the pertinent tapes for you.”

Wilson stopped typing, anxiously darting his eyes between the two of them. “Is there anything specific that you’re looking for?” he asked Natalie nervously.

It was easy to see that the tech was far more comfortable with computers than he was with people, Natalie thought. She pulled the chair over from the other desk and sat down beside Wilson, then took out the photograph she had of Candace and placed it beside the keyboard.

“I’m looking for any footage you have of this woman.” She looked at the tech’s face, expecting to see some sort of indication that he recognized her sister. Candace had attended every wild party, frequented all the casinos and in general had done her level best to turn herself into a household name.

Candace, Natalie couldn’t help thinking, would have been bitterly disappointed with Wilson. There was absolutely no sign of recognition. He merely nodded at what he took to be his assignment. “Okay, let’s see if I can find her.”

As the tech began typing again, Matt withdrew. Natalie was aware the exact second that he stepped away and went back to his office.

Damn it, eight years and her Matt-radar was as keen as ever. The very air seemed to change when he was close by.

Get a grip, she sternly reminded herself. You’re here to find Candace’s killer, not reignite something that was doomed from the beginning.

With concentrated effort, Natalie settled in and focused on the images that were going by on Wilson’s screen.

More than an hour had passed. Her neck was getting stiff, and she felt as if she was going to go cross-eyed. Tape after tape had been accessed and screened. A lot of the “beautiful people” came and went, each and every one of them had been greeted by Montgomery with enthusiasm.

The man certainly looked the part of a casino mogul, she couldn’t help thinking. It was almost as if he’d been sent over from Central Casting. Suave, six foot two, muscular, dark-haired and handsome.

Almost as handsome as Matt.

Where the hell had that come from? she silently lamented. Looks weren’t everything. As a matter of fact, looks were nothing, absolutely nothing if there was no heart. She’d learned that the hard way, thanks to Matt Schaffer.

Her mind wandering, she was suddenly jolted back to the present. Alert, she straightened in her seat. “Wait, go back,” she ordered Wilson.

The tech jumped in surprise. Quickly, he rewound the footage.

“Stop!”

“This her?” he wanted to know. He’d just accessed footage from the front of the casino. The time stamp on the tape was 8:47 p.m. A sultry Candace, her scarlet gown clinging to her curves with every step she took, filled the monitor. Natalie thought she heard Wilson murmur an appreciative, “Wow.”

That was the best word to use when summing up Candace, Natalie thought. Wow.

As she watched her sister walk down the red carpet, she felt a lump suddenly forming in her throat. Her eyes were moistening.

Damn it, where were all these stampeding emotions coming from?

She usually had better control over herself than this. But then, she supposed in her own defense, she wasn’t usually confronting videos of a slain family member while sitting in the office of a former lover who had turned her heart into Swiss cheese.

Blowing out a breath, Natalie forced herself to watch the screen and analyze what she saw. This was no time to give in to tears.

From all indications, Candace appeared to be alone. And then, as Natalie watched, her sister’s face lit up as if she saw someone she knew. Not unusual in a town that her sister had regarded as her personal playground, Natalie mused wryly. Whoever she spotted was off camera, part of the reporters elbowing each other out of the way for an outstanding shot.

As she continued to view the tape, she saw Candace begin to head directly over toward Montgomery.

Unlike his gracious behavior toward all the other attendees, the casino owner actually looked annoyed to see Candace. There wasn’t even the pretense of cordiality, she noted.