Actually, he didn’t. As he got a better view of Sonia, Craig decided that the neck of the dress annoyed him-there wasn’t any. Sonia had a beautiful throat, long and white, her delicate collarbones framing the hollow that always pulsed when she was excited. So vulnerable, that ivory flesh. And just above the silky green fabric, anyone could see the rise of her breasts.

She laughed suddenly, her springy black curls dancing around her cheeks. Three men from the press surrounded her, but Craig could still catch the sparkle of her animated aquamarine eyes from two dozen feet away.

Now that he thought about it, the whole dress annoyed him. The gown was just a little too much like a game of show-and-tell. The way the sneaky little slit showed off her legs every time she took a step, for instance. And no, not another soul in the room could conceivably tell from the design of the dress that she was braless, but Craig knew. He happened to have…been there when she was dressing.

“You’ve got the money,” former senator Rafe Bradford continued, “and, more important, you’ve got the power. People listen to you, Craig. Why, in my day, I’d have sold my soul to get the kind of public support you already have.”

Craig snagged a glass of champagne for the older man from a passing waiter. He didn’t bother to contradict anything Bradford said, although privately Craig knew he’d prefer digging ditches to a political career any day. But the ex-senator had once been a friend of his family’s, and the man was old and lonely.

“Everyone in this room knows you were the principal adviser to the Senate subcommittee on shale oil…”

The sash on that damn dress drew in her waist, accenting its tiny proportions. And Sonia had a way with her eyes that captivated everyone, including the press. Craig’s mouth twitched as he watched her effortlessly charm Andrew Roth, the most cynical of national news commentators. Roth had called this national conference defining the new relationship between energy and ecology a scam; he claimed the “relationship” was a contradiction in terms and always would be. Sonia was setting him straight. Roth’s bald head was bobbing up and down…