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Charlee. “We’ll be gone in a couple of minutes. No need to start something.”
    “Hidin’ behind the skirt, are you?” Thurgood mocked Mason.
    “Just move aside, please,” Mason said calmly.
    “Whatcha gonna do if I do this?” Thurgood plastered a hammy palm on Charlee’s fanny.
    “Hand off my ass, Thurgood,” Charlee said over her shoulder.
    Not only did Thurgood not remove his hand from Charlee’s backside, but he looked at Mason and wagged his lascivious tongue.
    Anger, hot and quick, shot through Mason. He slapped a hand around Thurgood’s wrist and jerked him off the bar stool.
    Two seconds later, Thurgood lay flat on his back on the floor, Mason’s Italian leather loafer pressing against his windpipe.
    “Hey, Thurgood, looks like the preppie’s kicking your ass.” Leroy laughed and slapped his thigh.
    Charlee turned away from the bar to watch Mason with a bemused smile.
    “I think you owe the lady an apology.”
    “Yeooow.”
    “Apologize,” Mason said, increasing the pressure on Thurgood’s Adam’s apple.
    “I tworry, Charlee,” Thurgood rasped.
    Charlee peered down at the man. “Maybe next time you’ll keep your hands to yourself.”
    He nodded, or as much as he could manage with a shoe at his throat.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Charlee said to Mason. “I got what we came for.”
    “Catch you later, Thurgood.” He lifted his foot from the man’s neck and followed Charlee’s provocative fanny straight out the door.
    “You’ve been holding out on me, Gentry,” she said once they were on the sidewalk. “Not quite as blue-blooded as you appear. Where’d you learn those moves?”
    “Fourth-degree black belt, tae kwon do.”
    “No shit.” She shot him a pensive look and then smiled.
    “No shit.”
    “Oooh, now I’m really titillated. Cursing and everything. What would your mama say?”
    “Are you making fun of me?”
    “Who me?” Charlee started to slide over the door frame and into the driver’s seat.
    “Wait.”
    “What?”
    Mason hurried over to the driver’s side and opened the door. “A lady should allow the gentleman to open the car door for her.”
    Charlee shook her head. “For one thing, no one has ever accused me of being a lady, and for another, you just blew it.”
    “Blew what?”
    “I was actually beginning to like you and then you had to go and remind me what a pompous jackass you are.”
    “What? What’d I do wrong?”
    She slammed the car door shut and then climbed over the door frame with a glower. “Get in.”
    Women. Who could figure them? Try to do something nice and you ended up making them mad.
    “So what did you find out about our grandparents?” he asked after she started the engine.
    “Maybelline did indeed meet some guy, who sounds like he could be your grandfather, at four o’clock this afternoon.”
    Mason exhaled sharply. Okay. Now they were getting somewhere.
    “According to the bartender, the man left with her.”
    “Anything else?”
    Charlee swiveled her head to look him squarely in the eyes. “I’ve never seen Maybelline cry. I mean not ever. Not at weddings, not at funerals. Not when I graduated high school. Never.”
    “So?”
    “Kelly claims when they left the bar, not only was your grandfather looking pretty grim but my grandmother was bawling her eyes out.”
    Nolan Gentry sat beside Maybelline in the Las Vegas airport waiting for their flight to L.A. Absentmindedly he drummed the manila folder she’d given him against the metal armrest.
    The contents of the file confirmed the awful news Maybelline had broken to him over the phone two days earlier. If he didn’t intervene, the financial empire his father had started and he and his older brother Harry had built into a Fortune 500 dynasty would be utterly destroyed, ruining not only Nolan but his son and grandsons as well.
    And the damnable thing was he couldn’t say anything to anyone. Not yet. The necessity for silence was the reason he’d taken the five