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Miami Heat
By
Tressie Lockwood
Miami Heat
Copyright © March 2014, Tressie Lockwood
Cover art designed by Mina Carter © March 2014
Formatting by Bob Houston eBook Formatting
ISBN 978-1-627620-49-9
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or used fictitiously. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Amira Press
Charlotte, NC
www.amirapress.com
Chapter One
Sakura set the phone aside and stood to walk around the coffee table. Earlier she had rolled out an exercise mat in the middle of the floor and prepared to do some stretching, but calls interrupted the plan. Work often waylaid her, which meant she’d yet to complete the area she’d chosen as a workout room. Of course, she wouldn’t do the redesign herself. She had the means to hire a contractor, but she needed to supervise, and back-to-back travel made that impossible.
“Sakura? Are you still there?”
She sighed and raised her hands over her head in a long stretch, then bent over to press her forehead to her shins. “I’m here, Dad. Just—”
“Am I on speaker? You know I don’t like being on speaker, sweetheart.”
She rolled her eyes but didn’t respond.
“I don’t see why you’re going to Miami,” he complained. “There are plenty of leads for shifters in various other places.”
“Are you going to launch into another speech about how great Roger, the new guy, is? I’ve heard it. He’s brilliant. He recovered tons of data from what Shiya dumped, right?”
Her father harrumphed over the line. She pictured his face, scowling, temper rising. Sakura knew how far to push the man before he blew, and she treated him with kid gloves—her dad and her brother, for that matter. They all respected her dad as head of the family and powerful leader of the Keith shifter hunters, but she also recognized how her dad felt about her and her sisters.
Anticipating his reprimand, she continued. “I’m taking a small break, Dad. No big deal.”
“Miami though? Honey, there are many exotic locations you could enjoy for your vacation. If it’s a matter of money…”
“Please.” She chuckled. “The last thing a Keith needs is money.” Her father didn’t understand the more he protested her flying to Miami, the more she desired to go. She’d been honest about her travel plans but not her reasons. Shae’s call took her by surprise, and at first Sakura intended to ignore it and seek out Shiya in Juneau to set her stupid sister straight. Shae, not even being human anymore, was a lost cause, and Sakura still wrestled with whether to fly to Tokyo to hunt her and her lover down. However, when Shae arrived in Tokyo, she had faxed Sakura the picture of their mom, one she’d seen a few times when their brother, Kasen, tried to shove it down their throat as motivation to do their job. Sakura had kicked him in the throat and dared him to try that crap with her again.
When she took the time to examine the picture, along with reading her sister’s message, she came to the same conclusion Shae had. Something wasn’t right, and she needed to get to the bottom of it. She could simply go to her dad and ask him straight out about what really happened to their mother, but if he were willing to come clean in the first place, they wouldn’t be wondering what happened. Now that she considered it, she had no idea why they believed him in the first place. Then again, what reason would she and her sisters have had to think he would lie?
Five years ago, when she got the news her mother was dead, killed by a shifter, she had abandoned her assignment at the time and come home, devastated just like the others. Grief-stricken, they had stood together at her mother’s funeral. She remembered she hadn’t wanted to go on, didn’t think it was possible, but she had hidden it from the others. Shae had been enraged just like Kasen, and Shiya had disappeared behind her computer screen, determined to root out the enemy. Eventually, Sakura found her strength and renewed her dedication to ridding the earth of the unnatural beasts.
Now, she’d been studying the picture of her mother lying in a hotel room bed, her body in tatters. They had blamed the bear shifter all this time, whoever he was. Shae’s lover, a cop, had said the wounds were not made by a bear, but she had no intention of going by his word alone. The one fact she did accept after verifying it was that the bridge in the background was located in Miami, not Vegas. That much made it clear things were not as they seemed, and who knew, maybe her dad was in the dark as much as she was about what really happened to her mother. Whomever had been the cause of her losing the woman she had idolized and loved more than life itself, they would answer to her.
“Daddy,” she said, placating the man, knowing he’d have kept all three of the girls in pigtails and patent leathers if he could, “it’s just for a little while. Don’t sweat it. And if Miami turns out to not be the place for me, then I’ll fly to…somewhere…maybe Madrid.”
Her father sighed over the line. “Okay, honey. One of the men should go with you to keep you safe.”
“I’ll be fine.”
