His hair had a transparent whiteness to it that some children have, and he was comfortably tan, looking as if it wouldn’t take much to get him poolside. He looked far too pleasant to be as wealthy as he was rumored to be. It wasn’t fair to have money and good looks both.

“You’d rather be Francine Percy?” Trent said, eyeing me over his wire-rimmed glasses.

I tucked an escaped curl behind an ear, striving for an air of nonchalance. “Actually—no,” I admitted. I must still have a few cards to play or he wouldn’t be bothering with me.

Trent moved to the back of his desk with a preoccupied poise, forcing me to retreat to the other side. He held his dark blue tie to himself as he sat. Glancing up, he looked charmingly surprised as he noticed I was still standing. “Please sit,” he said, flashing me small, even teeth. He pointed a remote at the camera. The red light went out, and he tucked the remote away.

Still I stood. I didn’t trust his casual acceptance. Warning bells were going off in my head, making my stomach clench. Fortune magazine had put him on its cover as last year’s most eligible bachelor. It had been a head-to-knee shot, with him leaning casually against a door with his company name on it in gold letters. His smile had been a compelling mix of confidence and secrecy. Some women are drawn to a smile like that. Me, I get wary. He gave me the same smile now as he sat, his hand tucked under his chin as his elbow rested on the desktop.

I watched the short hair about his ears drift, and I thought his carefully styled hair had to be incredibly soft if just the draft from the vent could lift it like that.

Trent’s lips tightened as he saw my attention on his hair, then returned to that smile. “Let me apologize for the mistake at the front gate, and then with Jon,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you for at least another week.”

I sat down as my knees went weak. He was expecting me? “I’m sure I don’t understand,” I said boldly, relieved my voice didn’t crack.

The man reached for a pencil with a casual ease, but his eyes jerked to mine when I shifted my feet. If I’d known him better, I would have said he was wound tighter than I was. He meticulously erased the question mark by Francis’s name and wrote mine in. Setting the pencil down, he ran a hand over his head to get his hair to lay flat.

“I’m a busy man, Ms. Morgan,” he said, his voice rising and falling pleasantly. “I have found it more cost-effective to lure key employees from other companies rather than raise them up from scratch. And where I would be loath to suggest I was in competition with the I.S., I’ve found their training methods and the skill sets they foster are commensurate with my needs. In all honesty, I would have preferred to see if you had the ingenuity to survive an I.S. death threat before I brought you in. Perhaps nearly finding your way to my back porch is enough.”