To Irene Goodman and Joan Marlow Golan,

       whom I’d never vote off the island.

      BARBARA BOSWELL

      loves writing about families. “I guess family has been a big influence on my writing,” she says. “I particularly enjoy writing about how my characters’ family relationships affect them.”

      When Barbara isn’t writing and reading, she’s spending time with her own family—her husband, three daughters and three cats, whom she concedes are the true bosses of their home! She has lived in Europe, but now makes her home in Pennsylvania. She collects miniatures and holiday ornaments, tries to avoid exercise and has somehow found the time to write over twenty category romances.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      One

      “Everybody ready to shoot another day in paradise?”

      Tynan Hale, chief cameraman for the reality game show Victorious, assembled his crew for their daily briefing before heading from their camp across the island to the contestants’ camp.

      “Paradise? Come on, Ty, no need to sugarcoat things for us. We all know what we’re really shooting is the seventh circle of hell,” kidded Reggie Ellis, a junior cameraman.

      The crew snickered appreciatively. Ty grinned, too, though he guessed he probably shouldn’t encourage such irreverence toward the show and its contestants.

      The Powers That Be—the network suits, the show’s creator, the sponsors, virtually everybody connected with Victorious—viewed their project with a seriousness usually reserved for nuclear weapons. No jokes or humor there.

      Ty found the job of trailing around contestants on an island, hour after hour, filming their every word and action, to be sometimes interesting and/or irritating and/or dull, but hardly a matter of the gravest concern.

      No wonder he would never be a member of The Powers That Be. Not only was his attitude all wrong, his family already had been there, done that.

      And failed spectacularly. The family downfall had been such a public sensation that not a day went by without Ty Hale pausing to relish his current anonymity.

      He paused to relish it now, while he and the crew loaded their equipment onto the boat to take them to the Victorious contestants’ camp. Here he was, Ty Hale, chief cameraman, good at his job but essentially a nonentity. It wasn’t the standard dream come true, especially in the entertainment industry, but it was certainly his.

      And it was the name Hale that made it all possible. Changing his surname seven years ago—unofficially, though not legally, because that would’ve drawn attention to it—was the smartest move he’d ever made.

      If anyone in the media were to know that he was actually Tynan Howe, son of the notorious former congressman Addison Howe, a member of the infamous Howe clan…

      It wouldn’t happen, Ty assured himself, for possibly the millionth time. The contestants were the attraction and sole focus of fan and media attention. Nobody knew the names of the camera and editing crews, nobody was interested enough to learn who they were. Why should they? To the fans of Victorious, he was as invisible as his camera.

      And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

      Every morning, as close to dawn as possible, the Victorious crew arrived by boat on the side of the island where the contestants dwelled in their makeshift camp. There was a shorter, more direct route through the jungle forest, but it was never used by the crew. That might’ve tipped off the contestants, who weren’t permitted to know how close they really were to the amenities of civilization in the crew’s camp. Plus, lugging all the equipment on foot via jungle pathways was impractical.

      Ty eyed the contestants’ camp, a familiar sight to him after filming it all this time. It would’ve been considered a squalid setting if it weren’t located on a gorgeous island in the Pacific—and if the inhabitants weren’t in a voluntary contest to win a million dollars.

      Those factors turned “squalid” into something else entirely, Ty had remarked—innocuously enough, he’d thought—to the show’s executive producer, Clark Garrett, who had coldly ordered him to “can the laughter.”

      So much for small talk with the brass, Ty told his crew later. He hadn’t even been trying for laughs.

      But though he mocked it, Ty did