The Virgin's Shock Baby. Heidi Rice

up until this moment, she had thought she’d succeeded. With her second objective at least. Katie, unfortunately, appeared to be almost as wild as their mother, despite Megan’s best efforts to tame her rebellious temperament.

      Megan, though, had concentrated on making her father proud. She’d got a first at Cambridge two years ahead of her peers in computer science. And then an MBA at Harvard Business School specialising in e-commerce. To prove herself worthy, not just to her father but to her colleagues at Whittaker’s, she’d refused his offer of a vanity position and had instead started on the ground floor of the building in Midtown. After six months in the mailroom, she’d applied for an internship in the tech department. It had taken her three years to work her way up the ladder from there, rung by torturous rung. Her recent promotion had put her in charge of the company’s small three-person e-commerce department, finally proving once and for all that her mother’s shameful behaviour had no bearing on who she was. Until this moment.

      How could her father even consider asking her to seduce De Rossi? Did he expect her to have sex with the man, too?

      ‘I can’t do it,’ she said.

      ‘Why the hell not?’

      Because I’m about as far from being De Rossi’s ideal woman as Daffy Duck is from Jessica Rabbit.

      ‘Because it wouldn’t be ethical,’ she managed, recoiling from the hot flash of memory from the only time she’d ever met De Rossi in the flesh.

      He’d certainly made an impression.

      She’d heard of him, but the gossip hadn’t prepared her for the staggeringly handsome man who had arrived at the Met Ball with supermodel Giselle Monroe hanging off his arm like the latest fashion accessory. The brute force of his powerful body had barely been contained by the expertly tailored designer suit, and his bold heated gaze had raked over her when they’d been introduced by her father. The knowledge in his ice-blue eyes had disturbed her on a purely visceral level. And set off a thousand tiny explosions of sensation over every inch of exposed skin.

      She’d been careful to avoid De Rossi for the rest of the evening, because she’d known instinctively the man was not just tall, dark and handsome, but also extremely dangerous—to her peace of mind.

      ‘Don’t be naïve.’ Her father flicked a chilling glare at her. ‘There are no ethics in business. Not when it comes to the bottom line. De Rossi certainly doesn’t have any, so we can’t afford to have any either.’

      ‘But how did you even persuade him to take me to the ball?’ Megan said, becoming desperate herself.

      ‘It’s a charity ball. He’s paying for a table. You’re going to be Whittaker’s representative there. I asked him to escort you as a courtesy to me; he’s a member of my club.’

      So she had officially become a pity date—which would have been mortifying, if her father’s ulterior motive wasn’t a thousand times worse.

      ‘De Rossi’s only weakness that I could find is for beautiful women,’ her father continued in the same deceptively pragmatic tone. As if he were talking sense, instead of insanity. ‘Not that it’s exactly a weakness. He’s never been foolish enough to marry one of them, unlike me. And he never keeps them longer than a few months. But he’s between women at the moment, according to Annalise, who keeps up with this nonsense,’ he said, mentioning his mistress. ‘And he never has one out of his bed for long. Which gives you all the opportunity you need. He’ll be on the hunt and I’m putting you in his path. All you need to do is get his attention.’ The dispassionate statement had shame burning the back of Megan’s neck. ‘Get an invite to his penthouse on Central Park West,’ her father continued. ‘Once he takes you there, you can get access to his computer and his files. Computers are your forte, are they not?’

      That he’d thought this scenario through in such detail wasn’t helping the chill spreading through Megan’s abdomen—or the flush of awareness flaming across her scalp. ‘But anything he has on there will be password protected,’ she said, trying to be practical.

      ‘I have his passwords.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘It’s not important. The important thing is to get access to his computer before he changes them. Which means acting quickly and concisely.’

      And setting her up as some kind of Mata Hari? The idea would almost be funny if it weren’t so appalling.

      ‘You can’t ask me to do this,’ said Megan. She’d always strived so hard to please her father, to prove herself worthy of his trust. There weren’t many things she wouldn’t do for him, but this request scared her on so many levels. ‘You wouldn’t ask me to, if I were your son,’ she added, trying to appeal to her father’s sense of justice. He wasn’t a bad man, he was fair and, in his own gruff, distant way, he loved her and Katie. Obviously he was so stressed he had completely lost his grip on reality. But he had to be under a huge amount of pressure, if De Rossi was sniffing about the company.

      She knew enough about De Rossi’s business practices from the financial press to know that once his conglomerate got their hooks into your stock you were as good as dead in the water. He was famous for asset stripping. If he really was planning a hostile takeover, he could reduce Whittaker’s to rubble in weeks, a legacy company destroyed in a heartbeat simply to feed his insatiable appetite for wealth at any cost. But her father’s solution was beyond desperate, not to mention illegal, and doomed to failure. She had to make him see that, and find another way.

      ‘If I had a son and De Rossi was gay, that would be an option.’ Instead of looking persuaded, the tic in her father’s cheek went ballistic. ‘As neither is the case, it’s a moot point.’

      The blush seared her skin, the knot in her stomach tightening into a hollow ball of anxiety. It was no good, she was going to be forced to state the obvious.

      ‘De Rossi might as well be gay for all the interest he’s likely to take in me. He dates supermodels.’

      And I’m hardly supermodel material.

      At five-foot-five, and with the lush curves she had inherited from her mother, Megan had felt like an over-endowed pixie next to the slim, stunning woman who had fawned over De Rossi at the Met Ball.

      But Megan’s lack of appeal to men had always felt like a boon. She didn’t want to become any man’s decorative accessory. Especially not a man like De Rossi, who even on their brief acquaintance she suspected was as ruthless with women as he was in his business dealings.

      She could control those mini explosions. They were nothing more than a biological reaction.

      ‘Don’t sell yourself short.’ Her father huffed, looking exasperated now as well as desperate. ‘You have enough of your mother’s charms to attract him if you put your mind to it.’

      ‘But I—’

      ‘If you don’t do it, there’s only one other person I can ask.’

      Megan’s panic downgraded. Thank goodness, he had someone else he could ask. She would not have to even attempt something that was bound to humiliate and degrade her, and was extremely unlikely to be successful. ‘Who?’

      ‘Your sister, Katie.’

      The panic went from ten to ninety in a nanosecond.

      ‘But Katie’s only nineteen,’ she cried, shocked. ‘And she’s in art school.’

      After an endless string of school expulsions and acting out against their father’s authority, Katie had finally found her passion as a talented and brilliant artist. And she didn’t give a fig about Whittaker’s.

      ‘An art school I pay for,’ her father remarked, the dispassionate expression chilling Megan to the bone. Katie and her father had been at loggerheads for years—ever since the sisters had moved to New York after their mother’s death. It had taken Megan months to persuade their father to pay for the exclusive academy that had only offered Katie