“Let’s take a five-minute break,” he suggested, and Cleo almost melted into a puddle of gratitude.

She stretched lavishly and enjoyed a jaw-popping yawn at the same time.

A quick look at her boss told her that while he had suggested a break, he wasn’t taking one himself—his head was once more bent over zoning ordinances and blueprints.

The man really was tireless, a trait that she found both admirable and frustrating at the moment.

She supposed years of international travel and frantic work schedules had inured him somewhat to the effects of a forty-eight-hour-long day, one that had started on a completely different continent.

She padded over to the huge floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked Tokyo in all its sparkling glory.

She had never seen anything remotely close to this spectacular view.

The city was vast, and its lights sprawled as far as the eye could see.

Despite being forty floors removed from the heaving excitement of the city, Cleo could feel it calling to her like a seductive siren.

She turned away from the allure and found herself inadvertently appreciating a spectacular view of a different kind. Big, sexy Dante Damaso as she had never seen him before, ruffled, stubbled, and completely disheveled.

The look suited him and gave him an edge that the normally smooth, urbane man kept hidden beneath layers of intimidating sophistication and flawless tailoring.

It was an image of the man she really preferred not to have in her head, because it made him seem a lot more human—more approachable—than he usually was.

He looked up and happened to catch her eye, and even from across the room, she could see something spark and smolder in his gaze.

It was gone in a flash, and she wondered if her tired brain had tricked her into seeing things.

She wandered over to the exquisite coffee table where she had left her cell phone to charge and checked her messages.

A couple from her brother, Luc, and her best friend, Cal, and one informing her that she could very well have won five hundred grand already! Fantastic.

She allowed herself a moment of pure whimsy—with her “winnings” there’d be no further need to spend her mornings making coffee, watering Dante Damaso’s precious ficus, or sending the polite equivalent of “Thanks for the sex. Let’s never see each other again” notes with flowers to her boss’s random lady friends.

In the nearly four months that she’d been working for him, she’d already sent five notes accompanying equally polite, pretty floral tributes.

It was sickening.

Her nose wrinkled at the thought, and she jumped guiltily when the object of her thoughts called her name curtly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Ready to get back to work?”

Not really.