Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

       Chapter One

       T he midafternoon sun filtered through sheer white draperies that hung at a half-dozen nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in the corner bedroom on the third floor of the Chandler mansion.

      The June heat barely registered in the electronically filtered, air-conditioned atmosphere that was busily sucking dust motes out of the air as quickly as the sun could highlight them.

      Dark cherry furniture, all genuine antiques, was scattered around the room; a grouping of chairs and a small, overstuffed ivory couch placed in front of the marble fireplace. A high, four-poster bed was angled into one corner and backed by a living forest of potted plants, a tall, Oriental screen tucked into the greenery.

      Three crystal chandeliers hung from the high, stuccoed ceiling. There was a vanity table that definitely lived up to its name, displaying enough mirrors and pretty cut-glass bottles with expensive labels to keep Snow White’s stepmama too busy to look for poison apples.

      There were original oil paintings on the walls of the bedroom, even on the walls of the huge bathroom that held a marble tub that had been brought over from France forty years earlier, so enormous it probably could have been floated across the Atlantic with a three-man crew aboard.

      There was a separate dressing room, a separate showering room, both a built-in sauna and a mini beauty salon. The four-in-one walk-in closet—one large section for each season—was larger than most living rooms.

      The remainder of the apartment, for this was only a small part of it, took up half of the third floor: a living room, formal dining room, full kitchen, a large guest bedroom and maid’s quarters.

      It comprised only one half of one floor of a three-million-dollar mansion. But, hey, be it ever so humble, it was home.

      Back to the bedroom…dragging the eye from the huge poster bed, the fireplace mantel that had once resided in the Earl of Coventry’s summer house on the isle of Jersey, the massive chandeliers…and to the trio of women gathered near the tall, three-sided mirror Madame Pompadour herself had once preened in front of before the ball.

      One woman was seated on a straight-back Chippendale chair that had been moved across the carpet solely for the purpose of holding her body as she held sway over the situation. In other words, it would take no more than two seconds to play and win the game of “who’s the boss?” if anyone were to ask.

      The woman was a deceptive seventy; the sort that looks fifty, laughs like forty and can’t believe she isn’t still thirty. A tiny woman, no more than three inches over five feet, she probably didn’t outweigh the chair she sat on as if it were a throne. Her perfectly coiffed light brown hair was piled high on her head above a long neck and a chin that was only slightly soft—three face-lifts, one eye job and a forehead lift just last year.

      The manicured fingers of her right hand clasped a crystal sherry glass, half full. Her day dress was a soft blue silk paisley and she