by Sara Daniel
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Sara Daniel
www.SaraDaniel.com
Also from Decadent Publishing
www.decadentpublishing.com
One Night with Her Husband
Chapter One
A quarter million stolen credit card numbers was the best news Adrian Torres had heard in seven years.
“You want to lead the team to San Diego to repair Sunburst’s image?”
“Yes, sir.” Adrian didn’t flinch under his boss’s skeptical stare. “If you’ve read my proposal, you know I have a solid plan to reinstate their reputation as one of the most venerable, trusted names in the upscale hotel industry.”
He’d spent hours perfecting the plan, so he could be Marcia’s knight in shining armor. Business success mattered more to her than anything he could do on a personal level to convince her their marriage deserved another shot.
Mr. Gladstone rubbed his hand through his thick gray hair. “Sunburst is an important account, one I courted personally. You haven’t proven yourself with a campaign for a client half this size yet, let alone one in this much turmoil. Why should I trust you to lead the charge?”
Adrian leaned forward. Regardless of the sweat dripping down his back, he’d be damned if he’d show his uncertainty to the older man. If he couldn’t convince someone he’d worked side by side with for the past six months to have faith in him, he wouldn’t have a chance with the woman he hadn’t seen in seven years.
“Excuse my bluntness, sir, but my career didn’t start the day you hired me. I turned down a partner position with my former employer, where I successfully revamped the reputations of accounts larger than Sunburst Hotels. I can remove the tarnish from their image, and, if you look at my plan, you’ll agree.”
“You’re a cocky bastard, aren’t you?”
“Sure of myself, sir.” With the business portion. He only hoped his confidence would translate to his personal life, where he needed it most. “I won’t let you down.”
Gladstone nodded once. “You’re leading the team to San Diego, using your PR plan as a guide. If you succeed in saving Sunburst’s reputation, the account is yours. If you fail, you’re fired.”
Failure was not an option, and it had nothing to do with Adrian’s career.
***
With her boss taking leave to be at his wife’s side for the birth of their first child, Marcia’s sole responsibility was to keep the company humming along on autopilot. But at the precise moment Luciana went into labor, hackers had broken through Sunburst Hotels’s firewalls and stolen sensitive account information, including credit card numbers and addresses of past and present hotel guests.
By the time Blake texted, it’s a boy! Marcia had hired the best Internet security firm in the country to patch the breach. Over the past three days, she’d hovered over the tech team, ensuring their system would never be compromised again.
Crisis over.
If only.
Instead, the real crisis had just begun. The media hit them harder than the plethora of retailers who’d been in and out of the news with the same compromised security. No one wanted to share their credit card information with a company whose trustworthy reputation had been reduced to a joke and a disgusted shake of the head. Their corporate promise of a worry-free night’s sleep had become the opposite, the hotel lobbies across the country resembled ghost towns, and the marketing VP and publicity director had both quit.
“The Gladstone PR people are getting settled in the conference room,” her secretary informed her.
“Thanks, Cindy.” Marcia headed toward her last hope to save Sunburst Hotels. The promotion to Vice President of Operations she’d been working toward for over a year had disintegrated, as had her marriage seven years earlier when she’d made a career her first priority.
Leading her team into the conference room, she marched with her head held high, refusing to let her uncertainty show. Three people sat on one side of the table, all of them appearing to fall into the same category as the team following her—far too young and inexperienced to trust with her company’s future. She needed their boss, the much older Mr. Gladstone with his familiar, thick gray hair to infuse her with the confidence she could no longer continue to fake.
But the man was nowhere to be found. The only other person in the room had dark-brown hair that curled around his ears, a trait she’d always found adorable but that did nothing to calm her growing panic. Accented by a dark suit coat, his shoulders appeared broader.
Dear God, with all the stress, she’d lost her mind. She couldn’t have found a worse time to start hallucinating about her past-relationship mistakes.
Her laptop slipped from her hands and clattered onto the table.
Her husband lifted his head from his iPad, and his fathomless brown eyes met hers. “Might want to be more careful with that.”
Okay, so she hadn’t lost her mind. Yet. Not the least bit comforted, Marcia stared at him, the faint Hispanic lilt in his tone coiling tendrils of heat through her middle. What was he doing here? Why now?
If only she’d been more careful with her marriage. But she hadn’t, and she couldn’t deal with the past and couldn’t change the reality. The reality of him in her conference room amidst her colleagues, though, made no sense. The only thing she knew for sure was the most handsome man she’d ever met had become more gorgeous than ever.
Meanwhile, she— Oh shit.
Her appearance had definitely changed, too, and not for the better.