LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE HAWAIIAN ISLAND of Maui was tropical and lush, exactly as advertised, which irritated Dario Di Sione the moment he stepped off his private jet and into its unwelcome embrace.

      The press of the island humidity felt intimate, and Dario didn’t do intimate. The thick air insinuated itself against his skin, making the faded jeans and expertly tailored jacket he’d worn on the long flight from New York City feel limp and too close as he strode across the tiny tarmac toward the Range Rover that waited there for him, as ordered. A gentle breeze carried the exotic scent of the island—deep green things in exultant growth and the rougher, deeper smell of sugarcane production from all those fields they’d flown over on the way in to land—playing across his face like so many unsolicited kisses.

      It only annoyed him more. He was trying to conduct a business conversation, not indulge in sensory overload on a damned tarmac.

      “Is the car waiting as promised?” his secretary, Marnie, asked through the top-of-the-line, brand-new smartphone he had clamped to his ear. He was a proud user of his company’s highly coveted products. “I was very clear about the need for a sports utility vehicle. The road out to the Fuginawa estate is very rough, apparently, and—”

      “I can handle rough road,” Dario told her, trying to rein in his impatience. He didn’t want to be here so soon after the major product launch his company had pulled off this past weekend—or at all, for that matter—but that wasn’t his secretary’s fault. It was his. He should never have allowed an old man’s sentimentality to win out over his own hard-won rationality. This was the result. He was halfway across the planet—when he should have been in his office—surrounded by lazy palm trees and exotic smells, all to appease an elderly man’s whims. “The Range Rover is fine. And here, as ordered.”

      Marnie moved on to the long list of calls and messages she’d fielded during his first absence from the office he’d actually been sleeping in these past few months, a flashback to the kind of stress he’d been under six years ago when he’d first started with ICE. Dario scowled as another sultry breeze licked over him. He didn’t like flashbacks and he didn’t like that breeze, either. It was fragrant and sensuous at once, moving through his hair like a caress and getting beneath the fine linen of the button-down shirt he wore. Like a woman’s fingers trailing down the length of his abdomen, suggestive and mischievous.

      He rolled his eyes at his own flight of fancy, then scraped a hand over his unshaven jaw, aware that he looked a little more disreputable than the CEO of a major computer company, currently the darling of the tech industry and the smitten public, probably should. And he was about as interested in the intimate touch of Hawaiian breezes as he was in being here in the first place. Not at all.

      This entire trip was a waste of his time, he thought as Marnie kept talking her way through the pile of messages and calls that needed his personal attention immediately, if not sooner. He ought to be back in his office in Manhattan today, handling all of this in person. Instead, he’d flown some ten hours down his grandfather’s memory lane to appease the very worst kind of nostalgic sentiment. Giovanni had sold off his collection of beloved trinkets years ago and had talked about them endlessly throughout Dario’s youth. Now, ninety-eight years old and facing down his impending death with his usual sense of theater and consequence, the old man wanted them all back.

      They remind me of the love of my life, his grandfather had claimed when he’d asked Dario to buy back these earrings for him. From a reclusive Japanese billionaire on his remote estate in Hawaii.

      In person.

      Dario actually snorted at the memory as he threw his bag into the back of the Range Rover and shrugged out of his jacket, too. He didn’t know how he’d managed not to do exactly that to his grandfather’s face when the old man had summoned Dario to his side earlier this month and made his outlandish request. But who refused an old man what he’d claimed was his dying wish?

      “Email me those specs, Marnie,” he told his secretary before she could ask what that noise was. Bless that woman. She was infinitely more dependable than anyone else he knew, including every last member of his overly dramatic and periodically demanding family. He made a mental note to give her another richly deserved bonus, simply because she was not one of the pain-in-the-ass Di Siones he shared his blood with, if little else. “Give me a minute to switch to hands-free and then start rolling the calls.”

      He didn’t wait for Marnie to respond. He rolled his sleeves up, hoping that would cut some of the tropical humidity. He dug out his earpiece and activated it, then climbed behind the wheel of the sparkling, brand-new Range Rover. He started it up, punching the address he needed into the GPS and heading out of the small airport as the first call came in.

      But even as he listened to one of his vice presidents lay out a potentially tricky situation with the brand-new phone they’d just released over the weekend, he was thinking about his grandfather and the so-called lost love of his very long life.

      Lost loves, in Dario’s experience, were lost for a damned good reason. Usually because they hadn’t been worthy of all that much love in the first place.

      Or possibly—and this was his pet theory— because love was a great big lie people told themselves and everyone else to justify their own terrible and usually painfully dramatic behavior.

      And lost loves certainly didn’t need to be found again, once the truth about them came out the way it always did. Better to leave the past where it lay, so it could fester on its own without infecting the present, or so Dario had always believed.

      It had been difficult not to share his thoughts on that with his grandfather when Giovanni had told Dario that same old mushy story about love and secrets and blah-blah-blah. He’d shared it in one form or another all his life. Then he’d sent Dario off on this idiotic errand that anyone—literally, anyone, including the overzealous recent college grads working in Dario’s mailroom—could have performed. But then, Dario was used to biting his tongue when it came to the foolish emotions other people liked to pretend were perfectly reasonable. Reasonable and rational and more than that, necessary. Whatever.

      There was never any point in saying so, he knew. Quite apart from the fact that Dario wasn’t about to quarrel with the elderly grandfather who’d taken him and his siblings in after his parents had died, he’d also come to realize that the more he shared his opinion on subjects like these, the more people lined up to tell him how cynical he was. As if that was an indictment of his character, or should allow them to dismiss his opinion out of hand. Or as if it should be a matter of deep concern to him, that weird fetish he had for realism.

      He’d stopped bothering years ago. Six years ago, in fact.

      And the truth was, he cared so little either way that it was easier to simply do as he was asked—in this case, fly across the planet to buy back a pair of earrings that could easily have been sent by courier had there not been so much sentiment attached to them, apparently—than to explain why he thought the entire enterprise was ridiculous. He was vaguely aware that the old man had been sending all the Di Sione siblings off on these pointless quests for what he called his Lost Mistresses, but Dario had been far too busy with this latest product launch to pay that much attention to round nine hundred and thirty-seven of the Di Sione family melodrama.

      Surely they’d had a lifetime’s worth already. He’d been sick of it at eight years old, when his hedonistic and undependable parents had died in a horrible, utterly avoidable car crash and the paparazzi had descended upon them all like a swarm. His feelings on the subject hadn’t improved much since.

      There was a part of Dario—not hidden very deeply, he could admit—that would have been perfectly happy if he never heard from another one of his relatives again. A part of him that expected that, once the old man passed on, that would happen naturally enough. He was looking forward to it. He would retreat into his work, happily,

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