CHAPTER ONE

      FIVE SEPARATE EMISSARIES had already been sent from competing hotel conglomerates to convince the notably impossible Jason Kaoki to develop the unspoiled private island in the Pacific he’d inherited from his late father, international playboy and real estate tycoon Daniel St. George. All five had failed.

      Miserably. And quickly.

      Lucinda Graves had no intention of making herself the sixth.

      It had taken her forty hours of brutal long-haul travel to make it across the planet. Forty miserable hours from the gray bustle of London in what passed for its rainy spring to this tiny, shockingly bright island sunning itself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was thousands of miles from anywhere, surrounded by nothing but salt and sea stretching out toward the horizon in all directions—a state of affairs that might have made her anxious had she possessed the wherewithal to consider it in any depth.

      Because she was tired. More than tired. Somewhere over North America, Lucinda had gone past “tired” entirely and had found herself in the realm of a pure, bone-deep exhaustion the likes of which she wasn’t certain she’d ever felt before in her twenty-eight years.

      But she was not to be deterred.

      She would be the one to land this deal. She knew it.

      The simple truth was that she would accept no other outcome.

      When failure wasn’t an option, she liked to tell herself, the only remaining possibility was success.

      The tiny little hopper plane, barely large enough to hold the pilot—much less an uneasy passenger who preferred her jets sized to carry hundreds, the better to imagine it wasn’t a plane at all—landed rather too bouncily for her taste over what she assumed had to be some kind of lagoon, the water blue and turquoise and gleaming.

      She was too bleary-eyed and hollowed out from too many time zones to care.

      When she stepped out of the plane onto the little dock that stretched out over the water—a dock, of all things, instead of any kind of proper tarmac, or climate-controlled, civilized airport—the humidity walloped her. It was like a fist, wet and hot. It was an instant, relentless assault and it nearly took her to her knees, right there beneath some rattling palm trees and the careless, blinding sunshine.

      Lucinda had assumed she was duly prepared. She’d known she was heading to a tropical island, obviously. And she’d been to beaches before, like the last corporate retreat her company had taken to sun-drenched Spain—where she’d been expected to conduct business while sitting beside a pool, brandishing drinks festooned with foliage and pretending to be relaxed and carefree in a bloody sarong. She’d assumed this would be more of the same, if farther away than a quick hop to Spain. A beach was a beach, she’d assured herself as she’d set off what seemed like a lifetime ago.

      But it turned out she wasn’t prepared for this remote Pacific island that didn’t appear on most maps and had no official name. Maybe it was impossible to be prepared for this much tropical heat all at once, heavy and intense.

      Her hands went to her hair at once. Bright red and embarrassing, its mission in life was to curl dramatically and unprofessionally at the slightest provocation. Lucinda went to great lengths to keep it neat and sleek. She kept it ruthlessly straight and swept back into a severe bun