Chloe was not a poor liar who I overlooked out of infatuation.

She was an extraordinary one, a professional, and she had studied me the way I once studied acquisition targets, learning my history and my wounds and my needs until she could give me the thing I most wanted and least expected to find.

A widower’s heart is a specific and knowable thing, and she knew it.

She knew that a powerful, guarded man, burned by people who wanted his money, would be disarmed not by beauty or flattery, which he received constantly and distrusted, but by the appearance of someone who wanted him rather than his fortune.

So that is what she performed.