All of Juliana Lark’s hard work is finally paying off. Brewed Moon, her trendy downtown St. John’s café, is finally turning a profit, and she is on her way to business success. Her days are consumed with running her business, but her nights belong to Leather & Lace, an exclusive club that facilitates sexy rendezvous for its members. It was at the club’s Halloween masquerade ball that she met a mystery man in a fox mask, and their subsequent encounters have been lifting her love life to new heights. Just as Juliana’s stars seem to be aligning, her life gets turned upside down when she witnesses a grisly murder behind her café on a quiet winter morning. Shaken to her core, she calls the only person she can trust to protect her – Detective Mitch Swanson.
Mitch, the leader of special team trained to fight organized crime, suspects this latest killing in a string of murders is linked to Yuri Petrova, the head of a Russian crime syndicate. A major war between two gangs is boiling over into barely-contained bloodshed, and this latest crime is putting his friends in the crosshairs. Unfortunately, Mitch’s team has been unable to get any concrete evidence to hold their prime suspect. Mitch is reluctant to involve Juliana in the case for her own protection, but he can’t deny that the killing at her café might be the break his team needs to blow the case wide open – and end the turf war before more lives are lost.
Meanwhile, the street violence reaches a fever pitch and Mitch is torn between protecting his witness at any cost and falling in love with her while keeping secrets from both her and his team. At the centre of the chaos, Juliana fights to maintain some normalcy in her life, and her independence despite Mitch’s intensifying insistence that she lay low with him until the danger subsides. However, she finds the stress of doing nothing is worse than the danger, so Juliana clings to the two bright spots in her life: the café and her anonymous lover from Leather & Lace, who may be someone more familiar to her than she realizes.