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a good woman to love. Not anymore. He’d had one disastrous marriage that he never talked about and it had left him a confirmed loner.
    Amazing, how a man so willing to risk everything making millions could refuse to take any risks at all, in matters of the heart.
    Â 
    * * *
    Damian frowned as he looked over the magazines spilling across his desk.

    Headlines screamed at him.
    Are You Sexy Enough to Keep Your Man Interested?
    Ten Ways to Turn Him On
    Sexy Styles for Summer
    The Perfect Tan Starts Now

    Was there really a market for such drivel? He’d seen Gabriella curled up in a chair, leafing through magazines like these, but he’d never paid any attention to the print on the covers.
    Or to the models, he thought, his frown deepening as he leafed through the glossy pages. Why did so many of them look as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks? Surely, no real man could find women like these attractive, with their bones almost protruding through their skin.
    And those pouting faces. He paused, staring at an emaciated-looking waif with a heavily made-up face who looked up from the page with an expression that made her appear to have sucked on one lemon too many.
    Who would find such a face attractive?
    After a moment, he sighed, closed the magazine and reached for another. Laurel’s photograph wasn’t where Gabriella had said it would be. Not that it mattered. There’d been no good reason to want to see the picture; he’d directed his secretary to buy these silly things on a whim.
    Come on, man, who are you kidding?
    It hadn’t been a whim at all. The truth was that he’d slept poorly, awakening just after dawn from a fragmented dream filled with the kinds of images he hadn’t had in years, his loins heavy and aching with need...
    And there it was. The photograph of Laurel Bennett.
    Gabriella had been wrong. Laurel wasn’t nude, and he tried to ignore the sense of relief that welled so fiercely inside him at the realization.
    She’d been posed with her back to the camera, her head turned, angled so that she was looking over her shoulder at the viewer. Her back and shoulders were bare; a long length of ivory silk was draped from her hips, dipping low enough to expose the delicate tracery of her spine almost to its base. Her hair, that incredible mane of sun-streaked mahogany, tumbled over her creamy skin like tongues of dark flame.
    Damian stared at the picture. All right, he told himself coldly, there she is. A woman, nothing more and nothing less. Beautiful, yes, and very desirable, but hardly worth the heated dreams that had disturbed his night.
    He closed the magazine, tossed it on top of the others and carried the entire stack to a low table that was part of a conversational grouping at the other end of his office. Jean could dispose of them later, either toss them out or give them to one of the clerks. He certainly had no need for them, nor had he any further interest in Laurel Bennett.
    That was settled, then. Damian relaxed, basking in the satisfaction that came of closure.
    * * *
    His morning was filled with opportunities for that same feeling, but it never came again.
    There was a problem with a small investment firm Skouras International had recently acquired. Damian’s CPAs had defined it but they hadn’t been able to solve it. He did, during a two-hour brainstorming session. A short while later, he held a teleconference with his bankers in Paris and Hamburg, and firmed up a multimillion dollar deal that had been languishing for months.
    At twenty of twelve, he began going through the notes Jean had placed on a corner of his desk in preparation for his one o’clock business luncheon, but he couldn’t concentrate. Words kept repeating themselves, and entire sentences.
    He gave up, pushed back his chair and frowned.
    Suddenly he felt restless.
    He rose and paced across the spacious room. There was always a carafe of freshly brewed coffee waiting for him on a