Copyright © Lizzie Lynn Lee, 2012
All Rights Reserved, Total-E-Ntwined Limited, T/A Total-E-Bound.

Excerpt From: Night of the Lions

She didn’t belong to this most exclusive gentlemen’s club in Manhattan, but the attendant who manned the lobby had let her in because he was mesmerised by her boobs.

She had a great pair.

They were real, thank you very much. Clothed in the black, lacy, padded Victoria’s Secret bra and a white cocktail dress with a dangerously low décolletage, her best assets had charmed many men and let her nose around places that were usually out of bounds.

Catherine Kovac was a private investigator. Not a good one at that, since she barely had a hold on this trade. She had inherited the business from her late brother Jon. She used to be his secretary before Jon died in a car accident a few months ago, and already the agency was sinking like the Titanic. Detective work wasn’t like answering calls or running the payroll, and she’d found herself lousy at locating missing cats or tailing a cheating spouse.

Her current gig, which she hoped would save the business, was to dig up as much dirty laundry as possible on a businessman named Gabriel Larousse. Her client, a forty-something reclusive named Judith Rossi, insisted that Gabe, as he was known, had been responsible for the death of her brother, Cameron Rossi, fourteen years earlier in Africa. Gabe was currently thirty-five years old. The incident must have happened when Gabe was twenty, three years before he’d started his real estate business.

Gabe was a self-made billionaire. He’d started from nothing, working his ass off to flip the first property he’d managed into a profitable venture, and had built his empire from there. He had also been voted this year’s most eligible bachelor, on account that he’d reached the pinnacle of his success at quite a young age. It didn’t hurt that Gabe was easy on the eyes.

Okay, Gabe was hot.

Like, smoking hot.

He and his brothers, Alexandre and Renaud, were the talk of the town. There must have been some good genes in the Larousse family because they were all devastatingly handsome. Cat wasn’t a gal who used that type of hyperbolic shit in her vocabulary, but the brothers were really gorgeous. They all stood over six feet tall, with signature coppery-blond hair, broad shoulders, tapered waists, and long legs. They could have passed as GQ models. And, armed with deep pockets, they were chick magnets. Too bad they were all socially tight-assed—it would take gallons of prune juice to clear up their plumbing. None of the brothers liked reporters, the media, or people like Cat. If they got a whiff that a nosy PI had invaded their personal playground, she would see her ass thrown to the kerb in a blink of an eye.

She tried to be inconspicuous as the club attendant seated her at a table near the bar. His gaze was still hovering over her chest. She sighed inwardly. It was as if he’d never seen natural D cups before. But who was she to judge about men and their obsession with breasts? The compulsion was deep, as if it were coded into men’s DNA.

She ordered a gin and tonic and threw the attendant the sweetest smile she could manage. She hoped he’d be distracted enough not to ask why she was here in the first place. The gentlemen’s club, Rococo Country, was a private establishment catering to members only, a watering hole in which wealthy businessmen in the upper crust of society could socialise, kiss ass, and plot on how to make themselves even richer. She told the attendant in black livery that she was here to meet her lawyer. He was going to be suspicious when her lawyer never arrived.

In the meantime, her target, Gabriel Larousse, stood in the billiards room about twenty yards from where she sat. He was leisurely chalking his cue. His gaze was fixed on the white, red and yellow balls strewn across the table as if they were his mortal enemies. He tapped the cue ball with the precision of a sniper, scattering the other balls into the pockets.

Cat didn’t know much about pool, but that had been pretty impressive. Gabe seemed like one of those people who treated everything as if it were a challenge to conquer. Maybe that was why he was a successful businessman.