Risking it All
Authors: Tessa Bailey
Tags: #police, #Romantic Suspense, #brazen, #line of duty, #erotic, #new york, #Contemporary Romance
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,
locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Tessa Bailey. All rights reserved,
including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in
any form or by any means. For information regarding
subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 109
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Visit our website at
www.entangledpublishing.com.
Edited by Heather Howland
Cover design by Heather Howland and Amber Shah
Photography from Shutterstock
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62266-564-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-62266-565-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition January 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Table of Contents
Find out where it all began with Tessa
Bailey’s bestselling Line of Duty
The story continues in the exciting new
For more Sexy, suspenseful reads, check
Rules of Protection by Alison Bliss
Fiancée for Hire by Tawna Fenske
For Mackenzie.
Everything
for Mackenzie.
CHAPTER ONE
Here’s your meatloaf. Choke on it.
Seraphina Newsom crossed herself
discreetly as she walked away from the
customer’s table, muttering a quick Hail
Mary for good measure. No sense in
letting her immortal soul go to the devil
because the man had treated her ass like
it was on the specials menu. Still able to
feel the sting of his pinching fingers, she
vowed, then and there, to overtip her
waitresses for the rest of her life. Thirty
percent or bust.
Sera took a deep breath and pushed
through the double doors leading to the
kitchen of Dooly’s. Loud, tinny Greek
music emanating from a portable radio
greeted her, as did scraping silverware
and dishes being submerged in hot,
soapy water. Right on cue, the cook
tossed two more plates of greasy meat
loaf onto the dented metal shelf and
ding
ed the bell, even though she already
stood there waiting. Squaring her
shoulders, she reminded herself why a
girl with a nursing degree and a budding
career in law enforcement would be
donning an apron in the Bushwick
section of Brooklyn.
She was there to get up close and
personal with her brother’s murderer.
“Why you never try my meat loaf,
waitress?” the cook asked her in heavily
accented English.
“Er…gluten allergy?”
“What is this gluten everyone talks
about?”
She started to answer, but stopped.
“It’s probably just a myth. Like Santa
Claus and comfortable thongs.” Satisfied
with his frown and the fact that she’d
avoided telling him his meat loaf
resembled roadkill, Sera took both
plates and backed through the doors.
Into the deathly silent dining room.
Discreetly as possible, she glanced
toward the center of the silence. Two
stools away sat Trevor Hogan. The man
who’d gunned her brother down.
Hogan was a lifelong local who had
started
small-time.
Stealing
cars,
robbing delis, brawling. His ambition
had placed him in the right place at the
right time, and with the help of a metal
baseball bat, Hogan earned the trust of
the boss and took over the protection
racket. Loan-sharking, extorting local
businesses, you name it—Hogan had
both greedy hands in it.
Her brother, Colin, had been a rookie
with the NYPD when Hogan began
branching out, running an illegal
gambling operation so large it had
financed two successful nightclubs,
ballooning his criminal influence even
more. As inexperienced as Colin had
been, he shouldn’t have been anywhere
near Hogan’s case. He’d been too young,
too cocky, wanting to land a major arrest
his first year in the field.
But when your uncle was the police
commissioner, exceptions were made,
no matter how deadly.
She’d been working as an emergency
room nurse at Massachusetts General in
Boston when her brother died. Ironic,
that. After taking a vow to save people’s
lives, she’d been unable to save the life
that mattered most.
Sera smoothed a thumb over the Saint
Michael charm that hung around her
neck. She wouldn’t go as far as to say
the Newsoms were cursed, but…all
right, they were pretty much cursed. The
last three generations of Newsoms,
including her father, had been killed in
the line of duty. Her uncle was all that
she had left, and he ran the city with an
iron fist. As far as the people of this city
were concerned, she didn’t exist. To the
little
family
she had left, she didn’t exist,
either. Seraphina Newsom was a ghost.
To her mind, that invisibility made her
the perfect candidate to go undercover
and find the key evidence to put away
Hogan for life. Rumors of a ledger
containing Hogan’s unsavory business
dealings had long swirled through the
precinct hallways. The rumors were
fueled by the fierce opposition he’d
shown when his financial records had
been subpoenaed during the tossed-out
murder trial. Added to the fact that
Hogan was cocky as hell, and low-level
informants had reported seeing the
ledger, she
knew
it existed. His secrets
were written on those pages.
Not secrets that would take him off the
street. Not the conventional way, at
least. Information was valuable in this
neighborhood, and she could use the
names in that ledger to implode his
operation from the inside out, bringing