Elena Westbrook POV
I sat in my penthouse office overlooking downtown Sacramento, reading the business proposal that Bernard Fredrick had sent me after our dinner at Chez Laurent. The financial projections were impressive, but what interested me more was the man himself.
Bernard was handsome in a desperate kind of way, like a drowning man trying to convince everyone he was just taking a swim. During our dinner, he had told me the most tragic story about his "crazy ex-wife" who had somehow manipulated the legal system to steal his construction company from him.
"She was always jealous of my success," Bernard had said, his voice full of pain and frustration. "When I divorced her for being lazy and unambitious, she found some way to turn my business partners against me and force me out of
