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whoosh of blood in her veins, the too-rapid beat of her heart, the yawning pit of insecurity in her stomach. People did not pay you a fortune to find them a mate, or even a date, if you looked or acted as if you needed the money.
    For years she’d gotten away with the fictional past she’d created and the personal mystique she’d maintained. As the founder and owner of Heart Inc., she’d brokered matches that would make a leverage-buyout king weep with envy and delivered on requested personal attributes (and potential DNA), from IQ to bust size, that would have done a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist proud.
    Her clients had been Greek grocery tycoons well beyond their prime who wanted young, firm flesh still well within its sell-by date, captains of industry looking for smart, but not
too
smart, blondes, brunettes, or redheads who possessed a laundry list of physical attributes, personality traits, and other intangibles, which Nicole had cataloged in her database and managed to provide.
    In the process she’d built a name and a fortune. Both of which she’d lost when her brother’s Ponzi scheme had caused her to be plucked from the A-list party circuit like a tick from a pedigreed poodle.
    The dream mirrored real life as the partygoers’ expressions slid from genial to knowing. Their greetings became barbed. Their eyebrows arched upward and the eyes beneath them narrowed. Their shoulders turned as cold as the peaks of the Himalayas.
    Suddenly she was naked before her dream audience. Her vintage gown puddled in a heap at her feet. She shivered. Her bare flesh goose-bumped with embarrassment and shame. Every inch of her was exposed.
    Nicole awoke naked but not cold. A soft breeze skimmed over her. Slowly she opened her eyes and saw the sheer bedroom curtains billow gently like sails filled with warm air and morning sunlight.
    The whine of a Jet Ski and the more insistent buzz of a motorboat floated in on a salty breeze. Her eyes drifted closed. She did not want to get up. Or pack her things and load her car for the drive down to the Keys.
    She could, in fact, lie here forever in Joe Giraldi’s bed.
    That thought had her eyes flying open, her feet hitting the floor. She found her robe and pulled it on, then washed her face and brushed her teeth, careful not to look too closely in the mirror lest she see a glimmer of neediness reflected back at her.
    It wouldn’t do to get too close or too comfortable.
    There was the scrape of metal on the pool deck. Nicole poked her head outside.
    Special Agent Joe Giraldi sat at the table they’d dined on the night before. His dark hair was still wet from the shower, but he was dressed in a crisp white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned forearms. A tie she’d bought him was knotted at his neck. FBI-issue sunglasses covered his probing brown eyes.
    She could see her own reflection in the mirrored lenses as she approached.
    “Good morning.” He smiled as she sat and tucked her bare feet up underneath her. Without asking he poured her a cup of coffee from the carafe on the table.
    “I thought you’d already be gone,” she said. He was a financial crimes profiler and traveled often. “Didn’t you have an early flight out?”
    “I got a later one.”
    She sipped her coffee and kept her gaze out over the bay, but she could feel his eyes on her behind the mirrored lenses.
    “Did you really think I’d leave without saying good-bye?” he asked.
    She shrugged and took another sip. “I would have understood.”
    He shook his head. “I don’t think you understand half as much as you think you do.” He said this calmly, in a matter-of-fact tone that was hard to argue with.
    She studied his face, which was strong and masculine like the rest of him. The fall and winter had passed in a pleasurable blur interspersed with bits and pieces of unavoidable reality. Heart Inc. was all but dead, her efforts to resuscitate it so far ineffective. A book deal had been