Maybe he could use the downtime and go up to the wine country to relax for a few days. He’d ask Tim to recommend a place. As a wine snob, Tim was bound to know the best places in the area. He would unwind with a good bottle of wine in one hand and a book in the other.

Hell, who was he kidding? Since when did he know how to relax? During the last year, he hadn’t taken a single day off away from his company. Even on Sundays, he’d been working, trying to put together another deal, even when Audrey had begged him to go away with her for a weekend. He couldn’t really blame her that she’d found solace in Judd’s arms. He hadn’t exactly been the most attentive of boyfriends. Or the most romantic. He just wasn’t the type.

Daniel already pitied the woman who fell for him one day. Good luck to her ever pulling him away from his work. Audrey certainly hadn’t managed to, and she was beautiful and enticing. But his priority had always been his work, and that wouldn’t change. Ever.

He hadn’t come this far—and without taking any of his father’s money—to have a woman stifle his ambition and make him feel guilty for not spending enough time with her. That was the path other men took. It wasn’t his. He needed the challenge, the conquest, the battles. Not a woman sitting at home and whining that he didn’t have time for her.

He’d pretty much given up on finding the right woman, suspecting that the woman who’d put up with him wasn’t born yet. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried, but the women he’d ended up attracting were like Audrey: high maintenance, spoiled, and ultimately after his money. No, thanks.

Looking back at his life, Daniel couldn’t put his finger on the exact point when he’d turned from a fun loving young man into the driven businessman he was now. Women had always flocked to him, mostly because of his Italian good looks, so he’d never really had to work at it, and had taken them for granted.

Sex was certainly a part of his life, but not an important one. He’d often foregone sex with Audrey for late night business meetings. And it had seemed that she hadn’t minded that much as long as he went to every important society event with her. These events had been few and far between, as most of them bored the hell out of him.

Daniel rarely appeared in any gossip pages, which had bothered Audrey tremendously since she loved reading about herself in the papers. He was much more of a private person and certainly not as flashy as she’d wanted him to be. Looking back now, he didn’t know why he’d ever started dating her. They were completely unsuited for each other.

2

If only Sabrina Palmer had taken the other job she’d been offered and not this one at the Law Offices of Brand, Freeman & Merriweather, she wouldn’t want to crawl out of her skin right now. She’d be sitting in an air conditioned law office in Stockton with a job that would probably go nowhere, rather than having one of the senior associates hover over her from behind, pretending to read the document on her computer screen when she knew he was peering down her blouse.

But no, Sabrina had to go for the job with the most reputable firm in San Francisco in the hope of gaining the right kind of legal experience to advance her career. She’d passed the bar with flying colors and thought she could take on the world, only to come up against an age-old problem: she was a woman in a man’s world.

And now, instead of getting to work on any of the interesting cases the male junior associates were assigned to, she was relegated to routine corporate law while Jon Hannigan, or Slime Ball Jonny, as the secretaries called him behind his back, checked out her boobs.

Not that her boobs were that pronounced, but for her petite size she had a nicely proportioned set, together with a relatively curvy figure. Slim like a model she wasn’t, nor was she tall. She would have loved to be at least a couple of inches taller so not all men would automatically be able to look down to her navel when she wore a vee neckline, but she couldn’t change her genes.

Sabrina wore her hair shorter than she had in law school, and she’d recently had it trimmed so that it barely grazed her shoulders. It was what her enthusiastic hairstylist called darkest brown. He’d also begged her to allow him to lighten it up with highlights, but she’d refused each time and only let him layer it so it framed her face with a softer style.

“You’ll need to rephrase this paragraph,” Hannigan suggested as he leaned even closer and moved his arm past her shoulder to point at the screen. A whiff of body odor accompanied his movement. “You need to convey intent.”

“I understand.”

She knew all about intent. His intent. The day she was introduced to Jon Hannigan, she knew he’d be trouble. The sleazy look he’d given her had told her everything she needed to know: to be on guard. He’d squeezed her hand with his sausage fingers for far too long, and Sabrina had to keep all her cool not to yank it out from his grip, causing an unpleasant scene.