Chapter 1
The maid’s little girl was hiding behind my trash cans, sobbing because someone had framed her mother for stealing from me and promised she’d be thrown out before sunset. But the moment my vicious Doberman sat beside that terrified child like her personal guardian, I realized someone inside my house had made a very dangerous mistake.
I’d left a meeting I already hated.
Four men were waiting in the east wing with contracts, family names, and plans for a marriage I’d never wanted. I needed air before I agreed to something I couldn’t undo.
Then I heard her.
“Mommy, please don’t let them take you away.”
I stopped cold.
Nobody made Lorenzo Duca stop.
Not anymore.
I followed the sound across the garden until I found a tiny girl wedged between the stone wall and the trash bins. She couldn’t have been older than four. Her arms were locked around a battered stuffed rabbit with one missing eye.
When she saw me, her crying vanished.
Fear didn’t.
Then Pino appeared.
My 125-pound Doberman had put grown men in hospitals. Even my guards gave him space.
I expected the child to scream.
Instead, Pino walked straight to her, lowered his head, and pressed it gently against her leg.
I’d never seen him do that with anyone.
I knelt in the wet leaves.
“Who hurt you?”
Her lips trembled.
Between broken breaths, she told me about a housekeeper named Renata. A gold clock decorated with stones had disappeared. Renata had hidden it inside her mother’s locker, then accused her mother of breaking into my private rooms.
Worse, she’d told the woman that I would have her removed before nightfall.
The child believed she was about to lose her mother.
I listened without interrupting.
I’d built my life around suspicion. People lied to me for money, protection, fear, sometimes simply because they could.
But children rarely invent terror that precisely.
So I held out my hand.
She stared at it.
Then her tiny fingers slipped into mine.
I lifted her into my arms, and something unexpected happened. She rested her head against my shoulder as though she trusted me.
Pino immediately walked beside us.
We crossed the garden together, heading toward the house where Renata was waiting and probably believed her little performance had worked.
She had no idea I was coming.
No idea the child in my arms had told me everything.
And certainly no idea what Pino’s reaction had already made me suspect.
At the marble steps, the little girl suddenly lifted her face.
For the first time, she wasn’t crying.
She sniffed my collar and whispered,
“You smell like coffee.”
I almost smiled.
Then I looked toward the doors.
May you like
“Come on, sweetheart,” I murmured.
It was time to find out who was lying.
