PROLOGUE

      ‘DARIO DE ROSSI IS escorting you to the Westchester Ball tomorrow night and you need to seduce him while you’re there.’

      ‘What? Why?’ Megan Whittaker was fairly sure she’d just been transported into an alternate universe. An alternate universe that was two hundred years past its sell-by date. Either that or her father had lost his mind. Whichever way you looked at it, the demand he had just levelled at her from across his walnut desk in the Manhattan offices of Whittaker Enterprises, without even the hint of a smile on his face, was not good news, because he did not appear to be joking.

      ‘To save Whittaker’s from possible annihilation,’ her father snapped. ‘Don’t give me your whipped puppy look, Megan,’ he added. ‘Do you think I would ask this of you if there were another option?’

      ‘Well, I...’ She wanted to believe him, even though she knew his love for Whittaker’s had always taken precedence over his love for his daughters.

      But unlike her sister, Katie, Megan understood that. Having spent the last four years working her way up to head her own tiny department at Whittaker’s, she didn’t begrudge him his dedication to the company that had been in their family for five generations.

      She also didn’t really begrudge him a request so outside the norm for a father to a daughter, or indeed a boss to his employee. She knew that to be successful in business your personal life had to suffer, and personal loyalties could be tested. But this was... Well... It wasn’t even rational. What possible reason could there be for her to seduce any man? Let alone a man like De Rossi, a corporate wolf who had risen through the ranks of New York business society in the last ten years to become one of its prime movers and shakers.

      Quite apart from anything else, if her father was looking for a femme fatale, surely he must know Megan was not the best candidate for the job.

      She simply did not have the necessary temperament, equipment or experience. She had always been more comfortable in business suits and flats than cocktail dresses and heels. She found going to the beauty salon tedious, the concentration on her appearance a waste of time and money. Her intellect and her work ethic were so much more important. And after the few fumbled encounters she’d had at college, she’d been beyond grateful to discover she comprehensively lacked her mother’s voracious and indiscriminate libido. At twenty-four, she was still technically speaking a virgin, for goodness’ sake! These days she would much rather spend her small amount of free time watching TV boxsets with a nice glass of Pouilly Fuissé, than finding a man—especially as the judicious use of a vibrator could take care of her needs without all the awkwardness and disappointment.

      ‘Someone’s buying up all our stock,’ her father said, the vein pulsing at his temple starting to disturb Megan. ‘I’m almost certain it’s him. And if it is him, we’re in serious trouble. We’re exposed. We have to stay his hand. That means making sacrifices for the good of the company.’

      ‘But I don’t understand how...’

      ‘You don’t have to understand. What you have to do is get an invitation back to his penthouse so we can discover if it is him. If you can find out which of our shareholders he’s targeting that would be even better. Then we might have some hope of keeping the bastard off our back until I can secure new capital investment.’

      ‘You expect me to seduce him for the purposes of industrial espionage?’ Megan tried to clarify where her father was going with this, as something became devastatingly obvious to her. He had to be exceptionally stressed to believe she could pull such a plan off with her limited skills, which meant the company must be in serious financial difficulties.

      ‘You have your mother’s face and figure, Megan. And you’re not a lesbian... Are you?’

      Her face coloured, the heat racing up her neck, the impatient enquiry mortifying her. ‘What? Of course not, but...’

      ‘Then what’s the damn problem? Surely there must be enough of that oversexed bitch in you somewhere to know how to seduce this bastard. It’s built into your DNA, all you have to do is locate it.’ Her father was becoming increasingly frantic. The bitterness in his voice at the mention of her mother made Megan’s stomach knot.

      Her father never mentioned her mother. Not ever. Alexis Whittaker had abandoned all three of them—her father, herself and her little sister, Katie—not long after Katie’s birth, and had died ten years ago when her Italian boyfriend’s Ferrari had plummeted from a clifftop road on the island of Capri. Megan could still remember her father coming to tell her the news at her boarding school in Cornwall, his face white with an agonising combination of grief, pain and humiliation. And she could remember the same hollow sensation in her stomach.

      Her mother had been a social butterfly, stunningly beautiful, flamboyant and reckless—with everyone’s life including her own. Megan could barely remember her; she’d never come to visit her daughters, which was why their father had shipped them off to board at St Grey’s as soon as they were old enough.

      The hollow confusion had turned to panic though, when paparazzi photos of her and Katie at the funeral had appeared on the Internet. They had been forced to leave the only real home they had ever known, chased out by the photographers wanting to get a glimpse of the ‘grief-stricken’ Whittaker sisters, and the salacious whispers about their mother’s infidelities, spread by some of the other girls at St Grey’s. Her father had moved them to an apartment ten blocks from his own on Fifth Avenue in New York, employed a housekeeper and a security guard, enrolled them in an exclusive private school and made the effort to visit them at least once a month. And eventually the media storm surrounding Alexis Whittaker’s wicked ways and her untimely death had died down.

      But ever since Megan had been ripped away from St Grey’s, she had promised herself two things: she would protect the sister she loved from the fallout of her mother’s disgrace, and she would work herself to the bone to prove to her father that she was nothing like the woman who had given birth to them.

      And up until this moment, she had thought she’d succeeded. With her second objective at least. Katie, unfortunately, appeared to be almost as wild as their mother, despite Megan’s best efforts to tame her rebellious temperament.

      Megan, though, had concentrated on making her father proud. She’d got a first at Cambridge two years ahead of her peers in computer science. And then an MBA at Harvard Business School specialising in e-commerce. To prove herself worthy, not just to her father but to her colleagues at Whittaker’s, she’d refused his offer of a vanity position and had instead started on the ground floor of the building in Midtown. After six months in the mailroom, she’d applied for an internship in the tech department. It had taken her three years to work her way up the ladder from there, rung by torturous rung. Her recent promotion had put her in charge of the company’s small three-person e-commerce department, finally proving once and for all that her mother’s shameful behaviour had no bearing on