What is everyone else getting out of this?

The heated thought scorches itself into my soul like the tropical sun that’s beating down on the white sand beach, and I shift in my lounge chair, shaded by an elaborately patterned umbrella. Turquoise ocean waves lap rhythmically at the shore. I lift my feet from where they’ve been buried in the sand underneath the chair and brush them off. I feel like an idiot in this pair of bright lime green swim trunks, one of ten bathing suits my staff stocked in the master suite closet of my elaborate vacation home.

I’m not going to go swimming. Odds are, I’m not even going to take off the white t-shirt I’m wearing with the trunks.

I take another bite of what’s supposed to be lunch. It’s something delicate and fruity—the chef is one of the best in the British Virgin Islands, if not in the world—but every bite I put in my mouth reminds me of chewing Hawaiian Punch–flavored cardboard.

My phone sits silently on the table. I’m supposed to be on vacation from Wilder Enterprises for three whole weeks—the first vacation I’ve been on since taking over the reins of my father’s company six years ago, after he made an absolute disgrace of it—and my executives have been strongly encouraged to forget that my phone number even exists for the duration of my stay.

My jaw clenches at the interminable, abysmal silence. I’m already regretting agreeing to take this vacation and issuing that order. Without any emails and texts coming in, I have no earthly idea what’s happening at the company while I’m away, and I need to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Not keeping a close eye on everything, my thumb on the pulse, is the kind of thing that sends businesses right off the rails. It sure as hell happened with my father. He let things lapse. He seemingly disappeared for an entire year, only checking in at the office every now and then it seemed, as he took one expensive vacation after another and started pursuing a bunch of birdbrained hobbies, dragging my mother all across the planet, from one destination to the next, and before you knew it, Wilder Enterprises was hemorrhaging out of control, losing contracts, its reputation, everything he had worked so hard for all these years.

I wind my fingers around a narrow, sturdy glass filled almost to the top with something sweet and light and alcoholic, but I don’t take a sip, instead simply staring at the contents.

“You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

I look up into the pale blue eyes of a lithe blonde woman with enormous tits, and I dismiss her callously before she can speak another word. I can tell by the barely-there bikini, the sarong tied suggestively around her waist, that she’s the kind who wants to weasel her way into my life by promising that it will only be a fling, but then she wants more, and before you know it, you’re calling security to have her dragged off your property. A thousand dollars says she’s renting one of the expensive vacation residences along the beach.

I’m never going to see her again, so I tell her the truth. “I’m not.”

A smile perks at the corner of her lips. It does nothing for me. She’ll be here or somewhere like it, trolling endlessly down a beach, long after I’m gone, looking for a prize. “I could help you with that,” she breathes out seductively.

I give her a tight-lipped smile. “I’m sure you could.” Then I stand up from my lounge chair, taking the glass with me. “I have to go.”

She pouts a little, and her eyes narrow as she looks me up and down. “Stay…with me.” Her hand is moving toward her neck, toward where the bikini is tied in the back, casually, like she’s going to make it look like an accident.

A cold wave of anxiety sweeps through me then, rocking my heart back into place. I can’t stand the silence of the phone, the lack of communications, the creeping sensation that things are slipping out of my grasp, like I might come home to news like I did last time, when my mother committed suicide. I feel like one more false move might send someone else careening over the edge. My father’s the only one I have left. We hardly ever speak, after what he did, sending the company into an abyss so that he could enjoy himself…

Jesus.

Get me out of here.

I turn away brusquely from the blonde, stalking up the beach toward the house, already firing off messages to my driver, to my pilot—an emergency call to get things packed up and moving. I want to leave within the hour.

I’ve been on vacation for three days, but it’s all I can take.

My desk phone bleats from the corner of my desk. Its belligerent tone hammers against the wall of concentration I’ve built, allowing me to focus intently on wrapping up my latest case. I’ve spent a good hour longer than I should have fine-tuning the summary presentation for my boss, but I want it to be perfect. I’m on the verge of accomplishing something great at the FBI, creating a career and a name for myself in the Bureau that my parents will be proud of, but more importantly, one I want so badly I can taste it.

“What’s up?” I say into the phone, still trying to surface from the depths of the summary.

“You working on something?”

“Finishing up the summary for the Christiansen Inc. case.”

“Leave it, and come to my office.”

My boss, Milton Jeffries, clicks off the line without saying another word. My heart beats fast in my chest as I shove my chair away from my desk. The urgency in his voice tells me this is something new, something big, something I could hang my hat on.

When I knock at his door, he’s hunched over his keyboard, as usual, his salt-and-pepper hair impeccably styled and his suit neatly pressed, the very picture of a detective from the old noir films, even though he’s somehow firmly rooted in the present. “Sit down,” he says without preamble, and I drop into the seat across from him. “I need you on a new case. Hand off the summary to somebody else.”

“But—” I’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this thing, but I bite back the rest of what I was going to say. Going to battle so I can finish up some paperwork is not how I’m going to climb the ladder here…and I’ve already been climbing at a record pace. No reason to derail my progress now. “What’s the case?”

Milton pushes a folder across the desk toward me. “Wilder Enterprises.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. They deal in energy technology, and they’re like this with the government.” He wraps two fingers around each other in a symbol of tightness. “Sensitive information, going both ways.”

“What’s the deal?”

“Someone’s stealing their tech secrets and selling them out to a contact in China. It might be the Chinese government.”

“Shit.”

Anything involving the illegal transfer of information between someone in the U.S. and the Chinese government would be a big, nasty deal—something way over my pay grade—and I instantly understand why as I scan over the contents of the folder, names and dates rolling along…until I see the picture.

“Who’s that?”

The man stares seriously out from the image, blue eyes blazing even in the still-life picture. That is one cut jaw.

Milton cranes his neck. “Dominic Wilder. He owns the company, and he’s still in the dark about all of this. He has to be, because we don’t know yet if he’s involved.”

I give a low whistle and flip the page, even though I want to keep staring into those eyes for the rest of my life. “Got it.”

“Review the materials and get back to me by the end of the day with any questions. You start early next week as an employee in one of their departments—it’s all in the folder, along with your undercover identity.” Milton says briskly. “And Viv?”

I look into his eyes, my hands tightening on the folder. “Yeah?”

“I don’t need to tell you this, but—”

“This is an important one.”

One sharp nod, and I’m dismissed.

My heart pounds in my chest as I make my way back to my desk. This could be it. This could be the case I’ve been waiting for—the one that will make all my years of hard work worth it, the one that will wipe away all the angry sneers and comments from the men who didn’t want me spending so much time at the office, the one that will make me into the kind of woman who doesn’t need a man for anything.

All the years I’ve spent alone and lonely will finally pay off.

It will have all been worth it—worth it to land this one case.