CHAPTER ONE

      THE HAWAIIAN ISLAND of Maui was tropical and lush, exactly as advertised, which irritated Dario Di Sione the moment he stepped off his private jet and into its unwelcome embrace.

      The press of the island humidity felt intimate, and Dario didn’t do intimate. The thick air insinuated itself against his skin, making the faded jeans and expertly tailored jacket he’d worn on the long flight from New York City feel limp and too close as he strode across the tiny tarmac toward the Range Rover that waited there for him, as ordered. A gentle breeze carried the exotic scent of the island—deep green things in exultant growth and the rougher, deeper smell of sugarcane production from all those fields they’d flown over on the way in to land—playing across his face like so many unsolicited kisses.

      It only annoyed him more. He was trying to conduct a business conversation, not indulge in sensory overload on a damned tarmac.

      “Is the car waiting as promised?” his secretary, Marnie, asked through the top-of-the-line, brand-new smartphone he had clamped to his ear. He was a proud user of his company’s highly coveted products. “I was very clear about the need for a sports utility vehicle. The road out to the Fuginawa estate is very rough, apparently, and—”

      “I can handle rough road,” Dario told her, trying to rein in his impatience. He didn’t want to be here so soon after the major product launch his company had pulled off this past weekend—or at all, for that matter—but that wasn’t his secretary’s fault. It was his. He should never have allowed an old man’s sentimentality to win out over his own hard-won rationality. This was the result. He was halfway across the planet—when he should have been in his office—surrounded by lazy palm trees and exotic smells, all to appease an elderly man’s whims. “The Range Rover is fine. And here, as ordered.”

      Marnie moved on to the long list of calls and messages she’d fielded during his first absence from the office he’d actually been sleeping in these past few months, a flashback to the kind of stress he’d been under six years ago when he’d first started with ICE. Dario scowled as another sultry breeze licked over him. He didn’t like flashbacks and he didn’t like that breeze, either. It was fragrant and sensuous at once, moving through his hair like a caress and getting beneath the fine linen of the button-down shirt he wore. Like a woman’s fingers trailing down the length of his abdomen, suggestive and mischievous.

      He rolled his eyes at his own flight of fancy, then scraped a hand over his unshaven jaw, aware that he looked a little more disreputable than the CEO of a major computer company, currently the darling of the tech industry and the smitten public, probably should. And he was about as interested in the intimate touch of Hawaiian breezes as he was in being here in the first place. Not at all.

      This entire trip was a waste of his time, he thought as Marnie kept talking her way through the pile of messages and calls that needed his personal attention immediately, if not sooner. He ought to be back in his office in Manhattan today, handling all of this in person. Instead, he’d flown some ten hours down his grandfather’s memory lane to appease the very worst kind of nostalgic sentiment. Giovanni had sold off his collection