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Chapter One
Of all the attributes the woman had to recommend her — and there were many — what appealed to Ethan Maddux most about Abigail Lee was her moxie.
Ethan momentarily tuned out his assistant's list of rapid-fire reminders and concentrated on the woman standing serenely amidst the chaos in his office. She silently studied the Mark Rothko hanging over the fireplace while his staff buzzed around in their usual near frenzy. With his flight to Prague for an international economics summit less than two hours away, and his clients demanding his attention, his staff had their hands full managing the breakneck pace of his life and his business.
The arrival of the indomitable Ms. Lee on the scene had the impact of a nuclear bomb. He narrowed his gaze to study her profile. Sunlight streamed through the enormous plate-glass windows of his thirty-second-floor office in downtown San Francisco. Limned as she was by the bright glow, he could understand what Harrison Montgomery saw in the woman. Her conservative business suit barely disguised generous curves'the kind of curves Ethan personally believed were designed to drive a man crazy. She'd pulled her hair into a complicated-looking style. Twisting the ends into a circle, she'd held it in place, barely, by a pencil at the nape of her neck. He especially liked the pencil. Its chewed eraser told him she wasn't nearly as calm as she looked, and the temptation to pluck it out and send that mass of honey-colored waves tumbling down her back had his fingers twitching.
"Ethan?"
Though he'd seen the womanonly a handful of times in the past several years, something about her had always intrigued him. Probably, he conceded, it was the contrast between a pencil with a chewed eraser in her hair and a less-than-innocent reputation when it came to her relationship with Harrison Montgomery. In Ethan's experience, ambitious businesswomen didn't generally style their hair with battered pencils.
"Ethan?"
He had to be a first-class fool, he decided, for even giving the woman a second look. But there was something oddly fortuitous about her unexpected arrival today. A week ago, he had endured a theatrical breakup with his fiancée of six months. Pamela had flung a string of accusations at him — everything from "dissociated" to "socially dysfunctional."
It wasn't her accusations that bothered him.
What she hadn't said had been enough to make him swear off messy relationships. She had carefully dodged the subject of their sex life, which had turned intense and unusually heated over the past several weeks. She hadn't mentioned that Ethan had begun to loosen the reins of his formidable reserve and let his fiancée — the woman who was a week away from committing the rest of her life to him — see the raw passion he'd worked for years to subdue. She had carefully avoided saying that he'd terrified her when he'd finally shown her a glimpse of the side of himself he kept carefully locked away.
He couldn't blame her for that. He feared it too.
He'd inherited that passionate wild streak from his mother — and from Harrison Montgomery.
Ethan had watched that wildness destroy his mother, then slowly erode whatever respect he might have had for his father. As a very young man, he'd vowed to bury the reckless sensualist inside him beneath an implacable calm and sound reason. Therein lay the path, he'd discovered, to security and peace.
Generally, he succeeded so well at taming the beast that he'd earned a reputation for emotional ruthlessness and unshakable calm. That reputation had helped him build a financial empire on seemingly reckless gambles and risks.
On occasion, however, the curse of his genetics got the better of him. In those moments a stark, raging passion surfaced. It forced him to wrestle with it until he slammed shut the door of the interior vault in which he held that side of himself.
Unfortunately, in an unguarded moment he'd allowed Pamela to see a portion of it. Wise woman that she was, she'd run as far and as fast as she could.
And he'd vowed never to let it happen again.
Which definitely meant he had no business looking at Abigail Lee as anything other than a likely nuisance and a potentially serious problem.
"Ethan!" Edna's voice held a rare exasperation.
Reluctantly, he pulled his gaze from Abigail and forced a smile for his secretary. "Helmut Zeiterling is meeting me at the airport, Edna. I got it."
She frowned at him. "You aren't listening to a thing I'm saying."
"Don't be ridiculous." Ethan tossed several more files into his briefcase. "You know I hang on your every word. Did you pull the Connolly file?"
"Of course." She tapped the red folder on his desk. "You can review it on the plane. Edward is expecting your call tonight."
"Edward's an ass," he said, and added the file to the stack.
Lewis O'Kane, Ethan's vice president of legal affairs, choked. "Ethan, you can't ignore this. My source at the Justice Department says they're very serious about prosecuting him."
"I'm not going to ignore it. I'm just going to tell Edward he's an ass. What the hell was the man thinking?" Ethan glanced at his public relations assistant. "Which reminds me. Maggie, please make sure that any statements we issue specify that Maddux Consulting only worked with Edward Kinsey's domestic technology affiliates. What he did with his import-export interests was his own business."
"I've already written that into our releases," she replied. "Do you still want to wait until questions are asked before issuing the statement?"
"Absolutely." Ethan flipped through the stack of pink messages Edna handed him. "Send flowers to Letty. Something expensive and tasteful" — he crumpled the top message — "a..."
My One and Only. Copyright © by MacKenzie Taylor. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
