LITMIR.BIZ

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To wise and wonderful Catherine Mann for reading this

       book while she made yet another cross-country move. Thank you, my friend! And to Dean, for always helping me to live by my own light.

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      1

      IN NEARLY TEN YEARS of stakeouts with the New York police force, Detective Duke Rawlins had never allowed anything to distract him from his job.

      Too bad the file photo of knockout designer Amanda Matthews didn’t know that.

      Duke stretched in the limited space offered by his police-issued, unmarked car. He smoothed his finger over the grainy black-and-white image stapled inside his latest case file. He needed to arrest Amanda’s drug-smuggling boyfriend this morning. Salivating over a Manhattan socialite with more mob connections than dinner invitations wasn’t about to get the job done.

      Since when had Duke started going for the mob moll type anyway? No matter how long her family had been in the social register, Amanda Matthews’s father was a couturier to every mobster in the city. By the look of things, Amanda would follow right in Daddy’s footsteps.

      Not that it mattered to Duke.

      He slapped the file closed and tossed it across the bench seat. He’d definitely been pursuing Amanda’s boyfriend, Victor Gallagher, for too long.

      So what if Amanda’s high cheekbones and pouting lips imparted a movie-star glamour Duke found damnably attractive? She would probably stroll out of Gallagher’s apartment any moment after a night of torrid sex. Maybe that little reality check would force Duke to get his mind back on his work—back on the promotion that Gallagher’s conviction would solidify.

      He patted his gun and the pocket that held his badge, grateful he wasn’t the type of guy to get distracted on the job. Reaching for the car door handle, he prepared to face the key conviction in the Garment District’s drug smuggling ring. After today, Duke would gladly banish Amanda’s photo to a filing cabinet in the nether regions of the police station.

      That is, if she wasn’t connected to her boyfriend’s crimes.

      Duke started to step out into the late spring drizzle when a taxi pulled up to the apartment he’d been watching, the bright yellow cab a splash of color in a gray day. On instinct, Duke pulled his car door shut. From his angle across the street and down a few buildings, he had a view of both sides of the cab.

      The newcomer was probably no one—just another artsy type who called this trendy area of the Lower West Side home.

      Except that the endless feminine leg emerging from the cab didn’t look like it belonged to no one.

      No. This trim calf and knee was sheathed in a light veil of pink, as if some clever spider had woven a cotton candy web around that expanse of perfect flesh. Capping off the pink stocking and mouthwatering leg was a hot pink shoe that looked more suited to the bedroom than the puddle-covered pavement of West Twenty-eighth Street.

      He recognized that shoe. The Barbie doll he’d bought for his niece two years ago had been wearing heels just like it. This was the first time Duke had seen such impractical footwear on a walking, talking—

      Woman.

      Duke swallowed hard as the second leg swung down to the concrete. A sweat broke out when a trench coat and hourglass figure slid from the cab. Light brown hair and an all-too-familiar movie-star pout made his jaw drop.

      Amanda Matthews had arrived.

      Duke reminded himself to breathe. To think. He had a job to do, damn it.

      Unfortunately, all he could think of was how odd it seemed for Victor Gallagher’s sexy girlfriend to be entering his apartment building at 9:00 a.m. rather than leaving it.

      Did that thought rank as a distraction from his case, or was he thinking about it by thinking about her?

      Damn.

      It looked like Amanda Matthews didn’t have any intention of being banished to the filing cabinet any time soon.

      AMANDA HAD NEVER fully appreciated the silk lining of her trench coat until she slithered her way out of a taxi in the garment with nothing on underneath it.

      Well, almost nothing.

      The metal hooks on her garters scraped lightly against her thighs as she hopped a puddle on West Twenty-eighth Street. The tantalizing abrasion reminded her she did indeed wear something beneath the oversize camel-colored coat. But she hardly counted the pink lace merry

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