Free Nautier and Wilder by Lora Leigh Page A

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
    A ndre 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