Except Sarah wasn’t dead or defeated. Not quite yet. She googled until she found Will Presser’s website. For a long moment, she stared at the picture of the agent who’d been nicknamed the Viper. Then, her fingers slamming into the keyboard, she’d bashed out an email. AUTHOR SEEKS AGENT, she’d written in the subject line, followed by a paragraph of introduction, a link to her website, and, in conclusion, a bald, unvarnished request: I know I need a new team to take my sales to the next level—or, really, if I’m going to have any kind of career at all. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to take me on.

As shocked as she’d been to find the guts to write to Will, Sarah was even more surprised when the man called her. “Please hold for Will Presser,” a smooth, female voice had said, and there he was, the man himself. “I’ve read your books,” he said, in a voice that was low and intriguing. Sexy, she thought, but with a rasp. A bite. “And I agree with what you said in your letter. The right people ought to be able to break you out. And I think that I can help.”

He’d invited her to dinner at a fancy sushi place, a restaurant whose ten tables were all booked three months out. Sarah had fretted over her clothes—nothing looked right, and she couldn’t afford anything new. She’d finally settled on black pants and an ivory-colored blouse with pearl buttons, with a deep V of a collar that exposed the skin of her chest, and the dip at the hollow of her throat. Once, a boyfriend had called her collarbones sexy. Sarah suspected that her long-ago beau had been desperate to find something about her that he could praise. She imagined him cataloguing her various parts—hair? eyes? breasts?—and finding each of them wanting until he’d finally arrived at her blameless clavicles. So Sarah had put them on display, and worn her hair in a twist that left her neck exposed. She’d spritzed perfume on her pulse points, fastened her mother’s pearls around her throat, and gone out into the darkness to meet the Viper.