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      CHAPTER ONE

      RIO D’Aquila was known for many things.

      He was wealthy beyond most people’s measure, feared by those who had reason to fear him and as ruggedly good-looking as any man could hope to be.

      Not that Rio gave a damn about his looks.

      Who he was or, rather, who he had become, was what mattered.

      He had been born to poverty, not in Brazil, despite his name, but on the meanest possible streets of Naples, Italy.

      At seventeen, he’d stowed away on a rusting Brazilian freighter. The crew had dubbed him “Rio” because that was the ship’s destination; they’d tagged on the “Aquila” because he’d responded with the fierceness of an eagle to their taunting.

      The name had suited him much more than Matteo Rossi, which was what the sisters at the orphanage where he’d been raised had called him. “Rossi” was pretty much the Italian equivalent of “Smith.” “Matteo,” they’d said with gentle piety, meant a gift from God.

      Rio had always known he was hardly that, so he took the name Rio D’Aquila and made it his own.

      He was thirty-two now, and the boy he’d been was a distant memory.

      Rio inhabited a world in which money and power were the lingua franca, and often as not handed down as an absolute right from father to son.

      Rio’s father, or maybe his mother, had given him nothing but midnight-black hair, dark blue eyes, a handsome if rugged face and a leanly muscled, six-foot-three-inch body.

      Everything else he owned—the homes, the cars, the planes, the corporate giant known as Eagle Enterprises—he had acquired for himself.

      There was nothing wrong with that. Starting life without any baggage, getting to the top on your own, was all the sweeter. If there was one drawback, it was that his kind of success attracted attention.

      At first, he’d enjoyed it. Picking up the Times in the morning, seeing his name or his photo in the financial section had made him feel, well, successful.

      Inevitably, he’d not only wearied of it, he’d realized how meaningless it was.

      The simple truth was that a man who ranked in the top ten on the Forbes list made news just by existing. And when that man was a bachelor inevitably described as “eligible,” meaning he had not yet been snared by some calculating female who wanted his name, his status and his money …

      When that happened, a man lost all privacy.

      Rio valued his privacy as much as he despised being a topic of conversation.

      Not that Rio cared much what people said, whether it was that he was brilliant and tough. Or brilliant and heartless. He was who he was, and all that mattered was his adherence to his own code of ethics.

      He believed in honesty, determination, intensity of focus, logic—and emotional control. Emotional control was everything.

      Still, on this hot August afternoon, cicadas droning in the fields behind him, the hiss of the surf beating against the shore, he was ready to admit that logic and control were fast slipping from his grasp.

      He was, to put it bluntly, angry as hell.

      In Manhattan, when a business deal drove him to the point of rage, he headed for his gym and the ring in its center for a couple of rounds with a sparring partner, but he wasn’t in New York. He was as far east of the city as a man could get without putting his feet in the Atlantic.

      He was in the town of Southampton, on Long Island’s exclusive South Shore. He was here in search of that increasingly elusive thing called privacy and, goddamnit, he was not going to let some fool named Izzy Orsini spoil the day for him.

      For the past hour, Rio had taken his temper out on a shovel.

      If any of his business associates could have seen him now, they’d have been stunned. Rio D’Aquila, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and work boots? Rio D’Aquila, standing in a trench and shoveling dirt?

      Impossible.

      But Rio had dug ditches before, not that anyone in his world knew it. And though he sure as hell hadn’t expected to be doing any digging today, it was better than standing around and getting more ticked off by the minute.

      Especially when, until a couple of hours ago, he’d had a damned good day.

      He’d flown in early, piloting his own plane to the small airport at Easthampton where he’d picked up the black Chevy Silverado his property manager had left for him. Then he’d driven the short distance to Southampton.

      The town was small, picturesque and