LITMIR.BIZ

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a regal pride. It amused him to recall her cold defense of her morals. Which were of no concern to himself, he thought, and promptly shut her out of his mind.

      * * *

      Mamie called Emma to her office a few mornings later as she was sealing the last of several envelopes that contained the neat little notes Emma had typed and printed for her. Mamie had just finished signing them.

      “I would have done that for you,” Emma protested.

      “Of course you would, but I had some time.” She put the envelopes in a neat stack. “You can stamp them and put the address labels on. Here’s the thing, sweetie, I’m going to be away for about two or three months. A sheikh has invited me to stay at his palace and see the sights in Qawi with his family. We’ll watch horse races, attend cultural events all over the Middle East, even spend some time on the Riviera in Monaco and Nice on the way home. Do you want to stay here or go home to your dad?”

      Emma swallowed. “Well...”

      “You’re welcome to stay here,” she said gently, because she knew how Emma’s father treated her. Emma had often lived with another family in Texas, but she’d said that she didn’t want to impose on them. “I know how much you hate to travel. It’s why I’ve never taken you overseas. But you’d be doing me a favor actually, because I wouldn’t have to close up the lake house. What do you think?”

      “I’d love that!”

      Mamie smiled. “I thought you might. Okay. You know what to do. You can drive the speedboat, too, but no speeding,” she added firmly. “You don’t want to make Connor angry. Really, you don’t.”

      Emma frowned at her employer. There was something odd about the way she’d said it.

      Mamie sat down and folded her hands in her lap. “I wasn’t always a famous author,” she began. “I started out as a newspaper reporter on a small weekly paper. From there I moved to entertainment magazines, doing feature stories on famous people.” She grimaced. “One of them was Connor Sinclair. His best friend—who turned out to only be a distant acquaintance—had assured me that he had Connor’s permission to tell me things about his private life. So I quoted the man as my source and ran the story.”

      “This sounds as though it ended unhappily,” Emma said when her companion was very quiet.

      “It did. The man who gave me the quotes was a business rival who hated Connor and saw an opportunity to get even for a business account he lost. Most of what he told me was true, but Connor’s fanatical about his privacy. I didn’t know that until it was too late. Long story short, the magazine fired me to keep him from suing.”

      “Oh, no.”

      “It was a bad time,” Mamie recalled quietly. “I was just divorced, with no money of my own. I depended on that job to keep my bills paid and a roof over my head. I landed another job, with a rival magazine, a couple of weeks later. Luckily for me, that publisher didn’t like Connor and wasn’t going to be forced into putting me on the street for what another magazine printed.”

      “He tried to have you fired from that job, too?” Emma asked, aghast at the man’s taste for vengeance.

      “Yes, he did. So when I tell you to be careful about dealing with him, I’m not kidding,” Mamie concluded. “I would never fire you, no matter what he threatened. But I still work for publishers who can be threatened.”

      “I see your point,” she said quietly. “I won’t make an enemy of him. I’ll make sure I stay out of his way from now on.”

      “Good girl,” Mamie said gently. “You’re very special, Emma. I trust you, which is more than I can say about most people I know. I wanted children, but my husband didn’t.” She smiled sadly. “It’s just as well, the way things turned out.”

      “Why is Mr. Sinclair so bitter?” Emma asked suddenly. “I mean, he never smiles and he’s always upset about something or someone. It just seems odd to me.”

      “He lost his brother, his only sibling, in an accident on this lake. A drunk driver in a boat hit him and his wife in their houseboat and left the scene. They both died.” She swallowed. “Connor spent a fortune, they say, searching for the man’s location for the police. He was prosecuted and sent to prison. He’s still there.”

      “Did the drunk man have family?”

      Mamie nodded. “A wife and a little girl. They lost their home, their income... The child had to go to social services. The mother ended up dead of a drug overdose. It was a tragic story, all the way around.”

      “Life is so hard for children,” Emma murmured, thinking of the poor little girl. Connor Sinclair was vindictive.

      “It is.” Mamie looked around. “Well, I’d better be on my way. Come help me pack, Emma. I have a couple of evening dresses I want to give you. They’re too small for me, and they’ll suit you very well.”

      “I never go anywhere to wear evening dresses.” Emma laughed. “But thank you very much for the thought.”

      Mamie glanced at her. “You should be dating, meeting men, thinking about starting a family.”

      “I haven’t met anyone I felt that way about, except Steven.” She shuddered. “I thought he was the perfect man. Now I’m not sure I’ll trust my judgment about a man ever again.”

      “You’ll get over it in time, honey,” Mamie said, a gentle smile on her face. “There are plenty of handsome, eligible men in the world, and you have a kind heart. You don’t think so right now, but men are going to want you, Emma. That nurturing nature is something most men can’t resist. They don’t care as much for physical beauty as they do for someone who’s willing to sit up with them when they’re sick and feed them cough syrup.” She grinned.

      Emma laughed, as she was meant to. “Well, one day. Maybe.”

      Mamie left in a whirlwind of activity, met by a stretch limousine with a stately driver in a suit and tie. She gave Emma a handful of last-minute chores, a research assignment to complete for her next book and an admonition to be careful about going out after dark. Her parting shot was to stay off the lake in the speedboat until Connor went to his home in the south of France as he did most years just before Christmas.

      Emma promised to be careful, but no more. The speedboat had become her solace. When she was out on the lake, with the wind blowing through her long hair and the spray of the water on her face, she felt alive as she’d never felt before.

      * * *

      She hadn’t told Mamie, but she was still wounded by Steven’s rejection several years later. She’d been too wounded to ever trust another man. She’d felt close to Steven, felt a sense of belonging to someone for the first time in her young life. His rejection had been painful. She’d always been shy, lacked self-confidence. Now she distrusted her own judgment about people. Steven had seemed so perfect. But he had prejudices she hadn’t known about.

      Ideals were worthwhile, certainly, but it had been her father’s choice of vocations that had alienated him. He hadn’t considered that she might not feel as her father did. He simply walked away, without a backward glance.

      For several weeks, she hoped that he might call or write, that he might apologize for making assumptions about her. But he hadn’t. In desperation, she’d written to a former girlfriend in San Antonio, where Steven had moved to, a mutual friend from high school. The friend told her that Steven was involved with a new organization—a radical animal rights group, much larger than the one he’d belonged to when Emma knew him. He and his friend were apparently still living together, too. Neither of them dated anybody. Steven said that he was never going back to Jacobsville, though. That was when Emma finally gave up. She wasn’t going to have that happy ending so beloved by tellers of fairy tales. Not with Steven, anyway. She walked idly through the woods, a stick held loosely in her hand. She touched it to the tops of autumn weeds as she walked, lost in thought.

      She

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