“I hope I’m around when that happens,” she murmured, then grinned at the thought of a bottomless Nicholas Giovanni.

Until this past spring she hadn’t seen him in nearly ten years. He could have gotten wrinkled and paunchy, but instead he still had the power to make her entire body go up in flames. And maybe, just maybe, she’d seen a flicker of appreciation in his beautiful sex-god eyes.

After several years of a crappy marriage, abandonment by a creep of a husband, and nine months and seventeen days since her last sexual encounter, male admiration-especially that coming from Nic-was a balm to her battered and horny soul.

Not that anything would happen, she reminded herself. If Nic agreed, make that when Nic agreed, they were going to be business partners. There was no way she was going to be foolish enough to mix business and pleasure. Not with a million dollars and her future on the line. No one was that good in bed.

She turned into the entrance to the Marcelli Winery and sighed. Okay, from what she recalled, making love with Nic had been spectacular. Incredible. Life-altering. But not worth a million dollars.

She shifted uncomfortably. All this reminiscing about sex was getting to her. If she’d been a cat, she would have been rubbing herself against the nearest door frame. Not only was she going to have to avoid any sexual contact with Nic, she was going to have to stop thinking about him as anything but her loan officer. Nothing personal. Not again.

Fortunately her resolution coincided with her arrival at the family hacienda. Judging from the number of cars crowding around the rear entrance, the entire family was home.

The three-story Spanish-style home had been built in the late 1920s. Her great-grandfather had found plans for a house designed in the late eighteen hundreds by a Spanish nobleman with ten children, which made for lots of bedrooms. Good thing, she thought as she came to a stop in the shade of an old oak tree and turned off the engine. Currently the permanent residents of the hacienda included her paternal grandparents, her maternal grandmother, her parents, and herself.