Chapter
1

Two days later

TWENTY BUCKS says the guy in the Armani suit is hired muscle."

Hired muscle? Katya Dekker looked up from her auction catalog.

"Where?" She glanced around the outdoor amphitheater, her brow furrowing. She knew what her secretary, Alex Zheng, meant. She knew exactly what he meant, and she could only think of one reason for there to be any "hired muscle" at an art auction: her.

The thought only deepened her scowl.

She followed Alex's gaze across the delicately lit nighttime grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens, searching through the crowd and the two dozen canopied tropical huts that had been erected for the dining comfort of the evening's guests. She found the "hired muscle" on the edge of a group of people next to the caterer's tent.

He was good, discreet, but she could spot a security detail at a hundred yards—and he had "high-priced bodyguard" written all over him, very high priced.

"What do you think of the suit?" Alex said. "I almost bought that one myself."

"No way, babe. Too structured. Too conservative," she told him, her gaze going over the man in the distance. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him, other than his choirboy looks, his shock of silky brown hair, and the alertness of his every move—the dead giveaway. He was quartering the gardens with his gaze, looking for God only knew what. Fund-raising art auctions hosted by the Denver Botanic Gardens were not hotbeds of intrigue.

"Not with my blue silk shirt," Alex countered. "So you don't know him?"

"No," she said, trying to keep her jaw from clenching, trying to hold back the first, faint teasing of the headache she felt coming on. Even for August, the day had been unconscionably hot, and for Denver unbelievably humid, and the night wasn't setting up to be much better—especially now.

A bodyguard. Dammit. She knew who was behind this, just like she knew this wasn't the sort of event that required a bodyguard. Bottles of French wine and magnums of French champagne were being opened by bartenders in tuxedos. White-boxed dinners tied with forest green bows were being delivered to the tables by waiters in tails. Every female patron at the art auction had been given an orchid wrist corsage upon arrival, and each man sported a boutonniere of exotic rain forest leaves and a bit of liana—even the choirboy. Tonight's auction was for the Amazon River Basin Coalition and in honor of the Botanic Gardens' new orchid pavilion. Alex had designed the boutonnieres, his contribution, and they were nothing short of fabulous, very masculine, very primal. They would speak to the Rain Forest God in every man, and to his wallet, according to Alex, who had impeccable taste and instincts—two of the many reasons he was Katya's right-hand man.

His six years with the Los Angeles Police Department were another.

"What about the other man?" he asked. "Next to the Jaguar Gate."

Two bodyguards?

"My mother wouldn't dare," she muttered, biting back a curse and turning toward the Jaguar Gate, a multicolumned, elaborately constructed plywood and papier-mâché portico serving as a grand entryway into the party.

There was only one man standing beneath the fierce black cat bridging the last pair of palm tree posts, and he turned away just as she looked at him. All she saw was his back and the champagne flute in his hand as he disappeared into the trees, but that was enough to make the hair on her nape rise in sudden, unexpected awareness.

She hadn't known the first guy, but this one . . .

After a couple of seconds, she let out her breath in a soft rush and told herself to get a grip. Of course she didn't know him. Maybe it was the cut of the stranger's dark hair, longer than most of the men's at the exclusive and rather elegantly conservative soirée, that had sparked her fleeting instant of recognition. Maybe it was his height, or the way he carried himself, or maybe it had been nothing at all.

She'd been wrong before in her life, an inordinate number of times actually, especially about men.

Copyright © 2005 by Tara Janzen