To Kate Rogers for her unsung, invaluable help before, and to Megan Bassett, my editor, for making all my books so very much better.

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE HOUSE HAD not improved since she’d seen it last. It loomed over New York City’s tony Fifth Avenue like a displeased society matron, all disapproving elegance and a style that dated to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Becca Whitney sat in the vast and chilly parlor, stuffed with priceless paintings and fussy, disturbingly detailed statuary, and tried to pretend she couldn’t feel the way her two so-called relatives were glaring at her. As if her presence there, as the illegitimate daughter of their disinherited and long-disparaged late sister, polluted the very air.

      Maybe it did, Becca thought. Maybe that was one reason the great hulking mansion felt like a soulless crypt.

      The strained silence—that Becca refused to break, since she’d been called here this time and was thankfully no longer the supplicant—was broken suddenly, by the slight creaking sound of the ornate parlor door.

      Thank God, Becca thought. She had to keep her hands tightly laced together in her lap, her teeth clenched in her jaw, to keep the bitter words she’d like to say from spilling out. Whatever this interruption was, it was a relief.

      Until she looked up and saw the man who stepped inside the room. Something like warning, like anticipation, seemed to crackle over her skin, making it hum in reaction. Making her sit straighter in her chair.

      “Is this the girl?” he asked, his voice a low, dark rumble, his tone brisk. Demanding.

      Everything—power, focus, the strained air itself—shifted immediately. Away from the horrible aunt and uncle she’d never planned to see again and toward the man, dark and big and goose bump-raising, who moved as if he expected the world to shuffle and rearrange itself around him—and with the kind of confidence that suggested it usually did exactly that.

      Becca felt her lips part slightly as their eyes met, across centuries of artifacts and the frowns of these terrible people who had tossed her mother out like so much trash twenty-six years ago. His were a rich, arresting color, an electric amber, and seared into her, making her blink. Making her wonder if she’d been scarred by the contact.

       Who was he?

      He was not particularly tall, not much over six feet, but he was … there. A force to be reckoned with, as if a live wire burned in him, and from