J.D. walked over and took the beer Jasper held out to him. “Does this mean we’re talking business?”

Jasper grinned. He had the bold smile of a man completely at ease with the power he held. He glanced down at his beer, then took in the beautiful tree-lined scenery of the eighth hole. “Tell you what. Wait till the fifteenth hole. Then we’ll talk.”

Following Jasper’s lead, J.D. soaked in the warmth of the blue-sky summer day while admiring the view of the river that flowed just beyond the green. He tipped his bottle at Jasper. “Make it the seventeenth.”

Jasper chuckled. “A man after my own heart. But are you sure you want to wait? I heard the back nine of this course brings a man to his knees.”

“Maybe a lesser man, Jasper.”

Jasper laughed heartily at this. “I like your style, Jameson.”

Grinning, J.D. took a sip of his beer. So far, his afternoon with the Gibson’s team had been going very well. He was comfortable here, in his element—which undoubtedly was one of the reasons Ben had chosen him for this assignment. J.D. had grown up around men like Jasper all his life and was familiar with the “good-ole boy” routine. He understood the lingo, the game, the role he was supposed to play. Ben wanted to do a little showing off—that’s why he had specifically asked J.D. to bring the Gibson’s team to this course. He was trying to impress them, but didn’t want to look like he was trying to impress them. The fact that J.D. just so happened to have a membership at one of the most exclusive clubs in the country was the perfect way to accomplish this.

The only blemish on the afternoon was the nagging feeling he got whenever a vision of Payton sitting back at the office popped into his head. He kept trying to brush these feelings aside. Why should he feel guilty that she had been left out? After all, he was just doing his job, what Ben had asked him to do. And, had the shoe been on the other foot, he was quite certain Payton would’ve had no problem leaving him behind.

There was another image J.D. had a hard time shaking: the look Payton had given him when he’d told her that the club didn’t allow women. For the briefest moment, he’d seen something in her eyes he hadn’t seen before. A slight crack, a falter in her usual armor of confidence. For some reason, it had bothered him, seeing that.

Realizing that one of the Gibson’s lawyers was asking him a question about the course, J.D. pushed all thoughts of Payton from his mind. He couldn’t be distracted right now. He needed to be on, to be charming and professional. And, no less important, he needed to mentally prepare for the upcoming ninth hole—a ruthless par four that was one of the narrowest holes he had ever played.

Besides, as he knew full well, Payton Kendall could take care of herself.

PAYTON SAT AT the bar, waiting. She had agreed to meet J.D. and the Gibson’s team at Japonais restaurant at seven thirty. She was familiar with the restaurant, as was pretty much every other single woman in Chicago over the age of twenty-five. Trendy and expensive with a modern, ambient-lit decor, it was one of the most popular locales in the city for a first date.

Not that she’d had all that many first dates lately. It took time to meet people. It took time to date them, to get to know them, to figure out whether you liked them and whether they liked you. And time was something she didn’t have a lot of these days. So unless the mythical Perfect Guy fell out of the sky and landed smack-dab on her doorstep, dating was something she needed to put on hold until after she made partner.

Payton swirled her wineglass as she sat at the bar, thinking back to the last first date she’d had, with an investment banker she’d met at a local wine tasting. It had been at this very restaurant, in fact. Her date had polished off eight of the restaurant’s Mukune sakes by ten. By ten fifteen he’d fallen over in his chair while standing up to go to the bathroom and by ten fifteen and fifteen seconds—when Payton ran over to help—he’d slurringly confessed that he was having “a bidge of trupple” weaning off of his manic-depressive medication.

Nice.

“And these are the guys who are out there,” she had later groaned to Laney. Her friend had no such troubles, having of course married her frat-boy college sweetheart.

It was as a result of that disastrous last first date that Payton had vowed to temporarily cease all dips into the dating pool. At least until her professional life was in order, that is. It was kind of funny, and maybe a tad pathetic: she had realized earlier that evening as she’d been getting dressed that it was the first time in weeks she’d worn something other than a suit outside of her apartment. Not wanting to look too formal—or as if she was trying too hard to impress the Gibson’s reps—she’d ditched her standard suit jacket and gone instead with a fitted button-down shirt, pencil-thin skirt, and heels.

Having by now polished off her drink, Payton checked her watch and saw that her dinner companions were twenty minutes late. Truth be told, she was a bit worried about this dinner with the Gibson’s reps. She had done plenty of pitch meetings before, and she was sure J.D. had, too, but because their practices rarely overlapped, she and J.D. had never done one together. Alone together. These meetings required a certain finesse and cohesiveness between the lawyers doing the pitching—they needed to present a united front.

Unity.

Cohesiveness.

These were not exactly qualities that she and J.D. possessed together. Hence the slight jitters of apprehension she felt that got worse with every moment she sat alone at the bar.

When five more minutes passed, Payton reached into her purse for her cell phone. She figured she should check her voice mail, just to make sure J.D. hadn’t left a message. She was mid-dial when she looked up—

—and saw J.D. standing in front of her.

For a second, Payton was struck by the fact that something about him looked different. She realized that like her, he had dressed more informally for the evening. Instead of his customary suit and tie, he wore an open-necked black pin-striped shirt and perfectly tailored charcoal gray pants.

It was strange, because for whatever reason, what popped into her head at that very moment were Laney’s words from the other day about how good-looking J.D. was. Payton had seen J.D. pretty much five days a week for the past eight years, but right then she found herself looking him over more closely. She tried to see him the way a stranger might. Someone who hadn’t ever actually spoken to him or anything.

He was tall (as previously mentioned, all the better to look down on people), he had light brown hair with warm golden streaks (probably highlights), his build was lean (undoubtedly from all that tennis or whatever else he played at his I’m-so-cool sexist country club), and he had blue eyes that, um . . .

. . . Well, fine. There wasn’t really anything negative Payton could say about J.D.’s eyes. Speaking in a purely objective sense, she kind of liked them. They were a brilliant, bright blue. Such a shame they had to be wasted on him.

Having finished her assessment, Payton supposed that, if pressed, in that upper-crusty, Ralph Lauren-y, sweater-thrown-over-the-shoulders, have-you-met-my-polo-pony kind of way, J.D. was pretty damn good-looking.

Misinterpreting her look, J.D. cocked his head and pointed to her phone. “Oh, I’m sorry, Payton—I didn’t mean to interrupt you in the middle of your important business,” he said with just that right tinge of mocking.

Deciding it was better to go about with the business as usual of ignoring J.D., Payton turned her attention to the group of men he had arrived with. She immediately recognized Jasper from the pictures of him she had found on the Internet while researching his company and the lawsuit.