My husband’s first love deliberately poured red wine down my white gown in front of Chicago’s wealthiest families, then leaned close and whispered, “A ruined dress can be replaced, Claire. But once a woman loses her place in a man’s heart, she never gets it back.” I smiled, picked up a bottle of champagne, and emptied it down the front of her pink designer dress. Then Vincent appeared—and what he said next silenced the entire ballroom.

By midnight on Friday, the first real blizzard of the season had descended upon Chicago.

Sixteen inches of white, powdery snow had blanketed the streets of the Gold Coast, muffling the roar of the city traffic into a soft, distant hum. Below the penthouse windows, Lake Shore Drive was an empty, black ribbon bordered by drifts of white, while the streetlamps along the park threw long, amber pools of light across the frozen trees.

The master bedroom was warm, lit only by the flickering gas logs of the slate fireplace.

I sat in the middle of the wide, velvet-upholstered bed, wearing one of Vincent’s white formal shirts that reached halfway down my thighs, my knees pulled up to my chest, a sketchbook resting against my shins.

I was drawing.

Not an elevation for a high-rise. Not a structural joint for a shipping crane.

I was drawing his face: the sharp, unyielding line of his jaw; the slight, crooked break in the bridge of his nose from a fight in his twenties; the deep, permanent crease between his brows that only softened when he was asleep beside me.

The bathroom door opened, spilling warm steam and the scent of cedar and shaving soap into the dim room.

Vincent walked out, wearing a pair of dark gray flannel trousers, a white towel draped around his neck. He was bare-chested, his broad shoulders and the dark, intricate ink of his naval tattoos glistening with moisture in the firelight.

He stopped at the foot of the bed, his hazel eyes tracking the pencil in my hand, then moving up to meet my gaze.

“What are you working on, Mrs. Moretti?” he asked, his voice low, husky, stripped of the corporate armor he had worn all week.

“A site survey,” I murmured, not putting the sketchbook down.

“Of what?”

“Of an asset that has become remarkably difficult to value,” I said.

A slow, devastating smile touched his lips. He tossed the towel onto a leather armchair, climbed onto the mattress, and crawled toward me on his hands and knees with the fluid, predatory grace of a panzer moving through long grass.

He reached out, his large, calloused fingers closing gently around the wooden barrel of my pencil, drawing it from my grip and tossing it onto the nightstand.

Then his hands slid down to my waist, lifting the heavy sketchbook from my lap, setting it aside, before his fingers found the hem of his white shirt.

“You’ve spent seven days auditing my family, Claire,” Vincent whispered, his body settling over mine, his weight warm, heavy, and protective as he pressed me down into the goose-down pillows. “You’ve seized my uncle’s terminals. You’ve restructured my shipping lines. You’ve put two million dollars of diamonds around your neck.”

His mouth moved down the line of my throat, his lips hot against the sensitive skin beneath my ear, making a shudder run through my core.

“Are you satisfied with the yield?” he asked against my pulse.

I reached up, my arms wrapping around his neck, my fingers burying themselves in the dark, damp hair at the base of his skull.