When he eased back, she swept aside one of the bra’s cups and framed herself with her hand, offering the nipple to him.

“You’re amazing,” he whispered.

Jim bent down and captured her flesh with his lips, sucking on her gently. As she gasped and thrust her hands into his hair, her breast cushioned his mouth and he had a moment of raw lust, the kind that turned men into animals.

Except then he remembered the way she’d looked at him, and he knew he wasn’t going to have sex with her. He was going to take care of her, here in the truck cab, with the heater going and the windows fogging up. He was going to show her how beautiful she was and how perfect her body looked and felt and…tasted. But he wasn’t taking anything for himself.

Hell, maybe he wasn’t all bad.

You sure about that? his inner voice cut in. Are you really sure about that?

No, he wasn’t. But Jim laid her down on the seat and wadded his leather jacket into a pillow for her head and vowed to do the right thing.

Man…she was drop-dead gorgeous, a lost, exotic bird who’d found a chicken coop for shelter. Why on God’s green earth did she want him?

“Kiss me,” she breathed.

Just as he braced his weight on his heavy arms and leaned over her, he caught sight of the digital clock on the dash: 11:59. The very minute he had been born forty years before.

What a happy birthday this had turned out to be.

CHAPTER
3

Vin diPietro sat on a silk-covered sofa in a living room decorated in gold, red and creamy white. The black marble floors were covered with antique rugs, the bookcases were filled with first editions, and all around his collection of crystal, ebony, and bronze statuary gleamed.

But the real showstopper was the view of the city over to the right.

Thanks to a glass wall that ran the entire length of the room, Caldwell’s twin bridges and all of its skyscrapers were as much a part of the decorations as the drapes and the floor coverings and the objets d’art. The sprawling vista was urban splendor at its best, a vast, glimmering landscape that was never the same, even though the buildings didn’t change.

Vin’s duplex in the Commodore took up all of the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors of the luxury high-rise, for a total of ten thousand square feet. He had six bedrooms, a maid’s suite, an exercise room, and a movie theater. Eight bathrooms. Four parking spaces in the underground parking garage. And inside everything was exactly as he wanted it, every square of marble, slab of granite, yard of fabric, plank of hardwood, foot of carpet—all of it had been handpicked from the best of the best by him.

He was ready to move out.