Ages are as The Proviso opens. The story spans August 2004 – January 2009.
SEBASTIAN TAIGHT, 38. Corporate restructurer and/or raider, “King Midas” terrifies a good swath of businesses around the country. He is never seen out in anything but a suit and never smiles. He has a reputation for following the rules, but he interprets them liberally. One does not call King Midas to fix one’s company unless things are dire, because one never knows if he’ll gut and rebuild, or gut and part it out like a junker car. How he decides is a secret not even Congress can drag out of him.EILIS LOGAN, 38. CEO of a human resources company with a very dark past and an unfortunate connection to King Midas’s uncle—the one he’s currently dragging through Wall Street. She’s just come off the battlefield victorious, albeit limping, over the CFO who almost destroyed her, and, after three years of being protected and championed by King Midas’s cousin Knox, he stabs her in the back by putting her company in receivership and, worse, making King Midas her trustee.While Sebastian has led a life of intellectual excess and hedonism, he’s getting restless for the one thing he can’t seem to get—a woman who can dig past his misanthropic reputation, pretty face, and fat bank account to his soul. While Ivy League chic is his preferred look, he’s such a disaster with women that the only way he can get laid is by going out in cut-off jeans shorts (“a Parisian peacock”), when his looks do his talking for him. Further, he has a very unusual night job that few people know about and he wants to keep it that way.When King Midas walks into her company, Eilis is equal parts terrified and blind-sided. Because she’s only heard the horror stories, she visualized him as an aged Quasimodo with a god complex. What she gets is a bad-tempered supermodel with a hair trigger who holds her company’s future in his unpredictable hands. The only thing she can do is carry on as she has for years, hiding her looks behind frumpy Chanel and pancake makeup, and her personality behind exquisitely polite Miss Logan.Sebastian knows he’s looking at perfection the second he meets excruciatingly proper Miss Logan because he can see through camouflage. This micromanaging cat herder has his full and complete attention on many levels. He didn’t want to take this receivership but Knox gave him That Look. Suddenly he is very happy to be there and decides to stay for a while. If only she’d take off that disguise and turn into the blonde bombshell businessbitch in a little black dress he knows she can be.An accomplished hobby gardener, Eilis is deliciously disheveled before turning her worms (pets), mowing her lawn, and preparing for the winter’s down season. Gardening is her only real escape from her dark past, a lifetime of secrets she’s never spoken aloud to anyone, a vault full of secrets she intends to keep. Her only goal is to save her company and her employees, then find Ford—painter of nudes and profligate lover—to set her free from her past.Once Sebastian finds out who his rival for Eilis’s affections is, his restructure of her company becomes a minefield he doesn’t know how to navigate. He has two impossible choices: Tell her his secret and blow up any possible future or not tell her and blow up any possible future. He can see no way out of the trap he built for himself years ago to run from his father’s misguided philosophies and expectations.Eilis realizes King Midas isn’t what everyone says he is, but it takes her a while to peel back the layers on that onion and starts to see him for who he really is. Thing is, she has her own layers she doesn’t want Sebastian to see—and the fact that he could see through her disguise immediately makes her extra vigilant in keeping her life hidden from him. It’s difficult, though: Sebastian has a keen eye and can smell bullshit from three states away.
