Prologue

      Rachel Webster kept a smile in place as she fell through one-hundred feet of space. Then the private jet leveled as it flew between blue storm clouds that rose like mountains on either side of the plane, hiding the canopy of trees below.

      A tiny hand squeezed Rachel’s, and she looked down at her one-year-old niece.

      “Don’t like shake,” Angelica said.

      “It’s the big clouds around us that make the plane jiggle. We’ll be past them soon,” Rachel replied cheerfully, while the child gazed at her with wide, solemn eyes. Rachel was determined to do whatever she could to calm her little niece and offset the nervousness of the child’s mother. When they’d hit the turbulence, Angelica had cried and wanted into Rachel’s lap, and Raffaela had insisted that’s where she should be. Rachel had simply buckled Angelica in with her and held her tightly.

      “Dammit, I hate storms,” Raffaela snapped.

      Rachel glanced across the aisle at her twin sister. Raffaela’s three-year-old, Sophie, was climbing onto her mother’s lap.

      “Raffaela, buckle Sophie into her seat,” Rachel said.

      “Sit down, Sophie.” Raffaela reached up to smooth her own glossy auburn hair, looped and pinned on top of her head in an intricate twist. The eight-carat diamond on her hand glinted in the light along with a smaller diamond ring on her little finger. The bloodred ruby pendant gleamed malevolently at her throat.

      Sophie tugged at the pendant. “I want Aunt Rachel to wear it,” she begged.

      Raffaela unfastened the necklace and handed it to the girl. “Now go sit with your aunt,” she said.

      Sophie scampered across the aisle. Rachel caught her up and buckled her into the seat next to her. “You need to stay buckled up.”

      “Put this on,” the child pleaded as the plane bounced.

      “Okay,” Rachel said, wanting to keep Sophie safely buckled. Shifting her straight hair to one side, she took the ruby pendant Sophie held out to her and fastened it around her neck.

      Rachel thought of home. Even though she lived at Raffaela’s home in Bolivia a good part of the year now, she still called Houston home, and in three years, when both the girls were in boarding school, she would return to get a doctorate and hopefully a teaching position at the university. Until then, she had agreed to be nanny for her two nieces.

      “Dammit, I think we should turn around and go back!” Raffaela cried.

      “I’ll talk to Jose.” In the seat in front of Rachel, Burr Brogan unbuckled his seat belt and stood, unfolding his six-foot seven-inch frame carefully as he went forward to talk to the small dark-haired pilot, Jose Escajedo. Raffaela’s Bolivian husband, Hector Granillo, had hired Jose years earlier, and Rachel knew Hector had great confidence in the pilot’s flying ability.

      Just