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