knew the ruse might be over, but she thought, with a sickening
sense of dread that made her tremble as she threw herself into
the vehicle, that the most wretched, unfathomable part of her
life was just starting, and she had no idea what her future
looked like.
Chapter 12
r /> Giana
Fuck.
Giana had been called everything from influential to
elegant. She was the queen of Chicago development, a titan in
her own right. She’d been handed the family empire and she’d
grown it tenfold straight out of college when no one expected
she was anything more than a beautiful face and an empty
head. She’d tackled the worst problems—flaky investors,
funding gone awry, delays, permits, development headaches,
bylaws, city officials, her own board members not wanting to
follow the lead of a twenty-one-year-old green at the gills, and
a woman on top of all of that. She’d handled it all and she’d
come out not just on top but thriving there.
She might not have been conventional—she was young,
female, and she was open about being a lesbian—but people
had learned to respect her because she’d proved herself smart
and more than capable.
She’d kept a careful handle on her personal life, running it
much tighter than she ran her business. She’d kept her desires
and proclivities tempered, her identity a secret for the most
part. Masks and hoods were great things, and so were
darkened clubs where she could have been anyone and the
pleasure was always mutual. She kept things at her house,
things that were a carefully guarded secret, but she only ever