“Looks like you’ve been stranded,” a smooth male voice suggested intimately. “How about a drink with me?”

Erin turned in the direction of the voice and murmured a firm “No, thanks” to the young man with the clipped mustache. He shrugged his shoulders at her denial, as if it was her loss, and manipulated his attention to a lanky blonde sitting near the dance floor.

Erin made her way back to the car. The drizzle had turned into a downpour and the late afternoon sky had blackened. The drive home was automatic, and as the windshield wipers slapped the rain off the glass, Erin thought about Mitch and what it would be like without his presence in the bank.

She had suspected for several months that Mitch was in the throes of some personal problem. At least it had appeared that way. He had seemed tired and worried—no, more than that—tense, tightly coiled. The closer the final date for the imminent bank sale had drawn, the more tightly wound Mitch had become. Erin had told herself at the time that it was only her imagination, that all of the employees of First Puget were bound to be a little anxious about the new management. But now, as she drove through the dark, slick side streets, she chided herself for not seeing and acknowledging what had been so transparent: Mitchell Cameron was in deep trouble. Its exact nature she couldn’t guess, but it was serious enough to have cost him his job.

Without thinking, she killed the motor of the car as she pulled up in front of the Victorian apartment house. Closing her eyes and rotating her head, Erin tried to relieve the tension in her neck and shoulders. She wondered about Kane Webster. What kind of a man was he? What did she really know about the man, other than the few neatly typed memos with the bold signature that had crossed her desk?

She hadn’t heard much about his personal life. Apparently he preferred his privacy. Occasionally Erin had seen his name in print—in the financial pages. If she had read anything about him in the social pages, it usually had to do with his ex-wife, a gorgeous model who had made an unsuccessful attempt at becoming an actress. But that was several years ago, before an accident that had killed Jana and left the daughter crippled, or so it was rumored.

Erin frowned to herself as she thought about her new employer. One thing was certain: Kane Webster had made his fortune on his own, spending the last decade purchasing failing financial institutions and transforming them from operating in the red to operating in the black. He had gained a reputation in financial circles for being something of a rogue because of his unorthodox methods of operation. But if results were the measure of success, Kane Webster was prosperous. It was as if King Midas had reached out and touched the ailing banks himself.

Wearily Erin got out of the car and locked the door. She started up the short shrub-lined walk to her home and smiled at the elegant old house. It was a lovely Victorian manor, perched on a hill overlooking the city. The front porch was comfortable and trimmed in ornate gingerbread. The turn-of-the-century home had been fashioned into apartments twenty years before, and the contractor had taken care to accentuate the nineteenth-century charm of the house. Erin had fallen in love with it the first time she had laid eyes on it. Ignoring opposing arguments from just about everyone she knew, she had used her small inheritance as a down payment and purchased the building two years ago. Or to be more precise, she and First Puget Bank had purchased it; there was still a sizeable mortgage against it.