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Rockwell Pietre leaned back on the white leather couch in his study. His left arm stretched across the back of the cushions, the three-carat diamond ring glinting on his forefinger. In his right hand, he swirled a crystal rocks glass half-filled with twelve-year-old scotch. Black hair, thinning with his age approaching sixty-eight, was slicked back from a tanned face holding shrewd eyes dark and deep as the water that lapped at the shore thirty feet from the open glass doors of his home. He had learned many lessons in life, most of them because he proved himself to be more clever, quicker, and bolder than his friends. The business he’d built was his. It wasn’t the largest of its kind on the East Coast, or even in Florida. But bigger wasn’t always better. After all, the Roman Empire fel
