What a relief to be home.

Mallory Trent stepped out of the elevator on the fifty-third floor of the HamiltonBuilding in the Chicago Loop and gazed lovingly at the brass plaque beside the massive walnut double doors. It read Sensuous, Inc., and below that, Legal Department. After the horrible experience she'd just escaped, that plaque looked like a Welcome, Mallory sign on the pearly gates of Heaven.

The horrible experience had taken place on St. John'sIsland in the Caribbean. Five days on St. John's might be viewed as a vacation by some people. Some people might even have stayed the full seven days they'd originally planned to. Apparently some people enjoyed sunburn, scorpion sightings and sand grating between their toes. She wasn't one of those people. She was happier at work. Let the icy winds blow across Lake Michigan. She didn't care. She had a PalmPilot to keep her warm. She could pick up mangoes and pineapples at her local specialty market. And she had Sensuous, the cosmetics company whose offices filled the top five floors of the building and was her Heaven on earth.

"Hi, Cassie," she said to the first of her colleagues she passed in the hall.

Cassie, a smooth-skinned, pretty woman with soft, curly black hair who could open sealed boxes with her razor-sharp tongue, stared at her with wide, startled dark eyes. "You're finally back," she said in a whisper. "Bill's about to have a stroke."

"But I wasn't supposed to be back until-" Mallory said.

"Later," Cassie said, hurrying on. "Got to find out if he's in the building."

"Who? Bill? I imagine he's…" But she was talking to thin air, and approaching her from Cassie's direction was Ned Caldwell, another of the junior members of the legal team that provided in-house counsel to Sensuous. Ned was Cassie's opposite, a bespectacled man who spoke slowly and thought deeply. He saw her, slowed and moved toward her with an increasingly funereal expression.