It was a long, hard-fought battle for Judge Kristen Catherine Bryant to be appointed by the President of the United States to a judgeship on the DC Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. She endured Congressional interrogations, press and news media interviews, speaking engagements, and grips and grins with intestinal fortitude and no little amount of patience and guile. That was all now behind her. She had a month to decompress before she had to move from Chicago, Illinois, to Washington, DC, to assume her new post.

A little vacation to a private Polynesian Island, where no one knew her, was the perfect getaway. What she didn’t want was to share her two-bedroom, two-bath luxury suite with a complete stranger; a man she had never met. Especially dangerous was what this liaison would do to her sterling reputation if a whiff of this got to the media and the scandal that would ensue. Her highly-coveted judgeship could be over before it started.

International attorney Thomas Ashton Marshall, III, was highly sought after when big clients wanted to win. His Marshall and Marshall, Portland, Oregon, law offices were a place he rarely visited as were the courts in the US. After winning his most recent case and learning that an appeal had been filed, the media never let up dogging his tracks. He sought a little privacy and to rest and relax at the Plaza de Masquerada, the place of masks, where his identity never needs to be revealed. What happens at the Plaza stays at the Plaza. That is until he was forced to spend nearly a month with his unintentional suitemate and then a week of passion before she disappears. He refused to give up looking for the woman he only knew as KC. Cinderella she wasn’t, but if the shoe fit....

Judge Bryant would never forget Ash even in the face of her former fiancé’s sudden and unexpected hidden agenda for wanting them back together. That was bad enough, but on her first day on the bench as a newly appointed federal judge, the bottom dropped out of her world when her former fiancé stood for the plaintiff and her secret lover stood for the defense in her courtroom.