CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER ONE

      SAMANTHA BREWSTER was bone-weary even though she’d slept like a corpse the night before, but crossing too many time zones always did her in.

      Why wait for a better moment to slip away?

      The party was going full steam. Carin’s and Rafe’s guests crowded the living room; the band was playing a hot samba and everybody was having a blast. Surely nobody would notice if she left, not even her ever-diligent mother and sisters.

      Sam took a sip of her caparhinia, savoring the sweet taste of the rum, and put the glass on one of the little tables scattered over the moonlit terrace. She’d done the right thing by making an obligatory appearance at the festivities. Now she could go upstairs, kick off her spiked heels, trade her green silk cropped top and trousers for a T-shirt and a pair of cotton panties and tumble into bed. That was all she wanted to do, after spending forty-plus hours waiting in terminals and getting on and off airplanes. Jakarta to Honolulu, Honolulu to San Francisco, San Francisco to New York because she’d wanted to make a quick stop in her apartment, and then New York to Sao Paulo…

      Just thinking about it made her want to curl up right there on the flagstone terrace and sleep.

      Sam grinned. She could just imagine her sisters’ reactions if she did. And her mother’s. Marta would be horrified, more horrified than she’d been a couple of hours ago when Sam had teased her about what she planned on wearing to Carin’s and Rafe’s party.

      “Jeans and a T-shirt?” Marta had said, staring at Sam as if she were a changeling who’d been dumped on the doorstep at birth. “To your sister’s fifth anniversary party? Honestly, Samantha…”

      “Honestly, Mom, Sam’s kidding.” Carin had shot a beseeching look at her over their mother’s head. “Isn’t that right, Sam? You’re just joking.”

      “Of course she is,” Amanda had said quickly, flashing the same ‘oh please, don’t make a scene’ look.

      Too bad, Sam thought ruefully. Marriage changed people. Once upon a time, her sisters would have known a gag when they heard it. Of course, she’d been joking. Even she knew better than to turn up at a party like this in jeans. It was just that she was tired to start with and when she realized her ever-hopeful family was still trying to get her Settled Down and Married, well, she’d gone from tired to cranky in the blink of an eye.

      So, okay. Sam ran her hands through her hair even though she knew it wouldn’t do much good. The humid Brazilian night had turned the tumbling auburn waves into a mass of wild curls despite enough hair spray to lacquer the entire chorus line in a Las Vegas production but she supposed she looked civilized enough to go back through the living room, nodding and smiling to anybody foolish enough to try and engage her in conversation. She could probably even assure Carin she was having a wonderful time, if she bumped into her. All she had to do was make it through the hall, to the stairs, and…

      Sam’s breath caught.

      A man had just entered the living room. He was tall, with the kind of wide-shouldered, lean-hipped, long-legged body that did justice to his black tux. His hair was the color of midnight, his eyes were blue or gray—it was hard to tell, at this distance—and were set in a face that was all hard lines and chiseled bones.

      He was, to put it bluntly, a gorgeous specimen. A woman would have to be dead not to notice. Suddenly Sam didn’t feel quite so tired anymore.

      If her sisters wanted to play matchmaker, why didn’t they set her up with someone like this? Not that it would get them the desired result. Handsome or not—and on a scale from one to ten, this guy was an absolute twelve—she wasn’t interested in settling down…and that, Sam thought with a sigh, was the reason her family never steered her to hunks.

      Men who looked like this weren’t Suitable. They didn’t have Marriage on their minds any more than she did. She’d heard the speech often in the days when she’d still been foolish enough to take the latest man in her life to some family function.

      “He’s charming,” Marta would say during the inevitable post-mortem, “and handsome, of course. But, darling, you know he’s not husband material. He’s, well, he’s Unsuitable.”

      Well, yes. Unsuitable for marriage, maybe, but marriage wasn’t the only reason a woman would want a man. And Sam would tell her mother she was right, that Jason or Brad or Charlie was definitely not a man who would ever Marry and Settle Down and that was fine because she wasn’t a woman who was interested in those things, either.

      Unfortunately, her mother just wouldn’t believe it. Neither would her sisters, now that they were married. Sam had become her sisters’ Project. They’d taken up their mother’s cause. That was why she knew, in her bones, that somewhere in this crowd lurked the newest in the long list of men who were Eminently Suitable, someone her family was convinced she would just adore.

      Mister Eminently Suitable. Mister Deadly Dull.

      Sam took her glass from the table and sipped at her drink. The hell she would.

      She wouldn’t adore any man with marriage on his mind, who’d want to clip her wings, put her into a gilded cage, turn her from a world-class translator fluent in half a dozen languages into a kitchen-class housefrau with a hundred recipes at her fingertips.

      Her family actually thought that would make her happy. It was the reason they kept introducing her to the Eminently Suitable men they believed capable of transforming and reforming her. Last time, Marta had come up with a stodgy academic twenty years her senior. The time before that, it had been a widowed rancher who’d given her a fascinating evening telling her all about the finer points of bull semen.

      The truth was that both men had been nice enough, but Sam wasn’t looking