CHAPTER ONE

      SHE FELT LIKE GLASS, stretched so tightly that a gentle tap could shatter her forever.

      Clutching her wrap tight in her fingers, Clio Norwood looked around for her fiancé, Jackson.

      Ashley, his secretary, who had arrived unannounced and interrupted their meeting with a client Jackson was determined to add to his cap, was nowhere to be seen either. Something distasteful hovered in the back of Clio’s mind, as if waiting to strike.

      With the small get-together of the ultrarich in full swing atop the Empire State Building, Manhattan glittered around them.

      Usually, the vibrant, unrelenting pulse of the city that had become home to Clio over the past decade filled her with unending spirit for life. It had kept her going even when she had been struggling after graduation from Columbia University. And had helped her swallow her failures and her naive, broken expectations of making it by herself in the city that never slept.

      But tonight, even New York couldn’t puncture the bubble of dread that had begun to pervade her of late.

      Jackson had returned last night after three weeks from an overseas trip and had been in a stinker of a mood as he liked to call it, because he had missed out on some real estate deal.

      They had barely exchanged a word all day today as she had been at work. When she had returned to the posh flat they had been living in for the past year, he had commanded her to get ready for this party tonight.

      Commanded and not asked, much less requested. A pattern that was becoming more and more obvious to Clio. Still, she knew the stress of his business, understood the driving need to make one’s mark in the world, so she had given in.

      Even if she was still bone tired from the out-of-season flu she had had a week ago.

      Tonight, Jackson needed her help to convince Mrs. Alcott, an old friend of her parents’, to hire him as her personal investment banker. With