LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Two letters sat on his desk, both unopened, both marked Personal and Confidential. One was typed, the return address familiar to him. The second was addressed in handwriting, the feminine script of one not yet mature. He did not recognize that name or the return address. His hand hovered, and then he chose, hope and dread mixed within him.

      Moments later, Winston Jacob King put down the typed letter and pinched the bridge of his nose between bony fingers. He felt shocked, all over again, though the letter only confirmed what his doctor had told him earlier in the week.

      Dying.

      He shouldn’t be shocked. He was eighty-three years old. Had he really thought he was going to live forever?

      The short answer? Yes.

      Jake got up from behind his desk. A fire roared in the hearth, though it was a mild day. He was always cold, now.

      He crossed the room, which was furnished in an eclectic mix of antiques. A thick Persian rug covered the aged oak floor, and Degas, Pissaro, Monet hung on the walls. But he noticed none of what it had taken him a lifetime to collect. Instead, he looked out the huge bay window.

      His Southampton estate, Kingsway, lay before him. Tulips and daffodils splashed the spring beds with color. A gardener pruned the rosebushes. Beyond him were lush pastures and a Hanoverian mare, muscled and shiny, grazing contentedly while her foal frolicked.

      The doctor had said he might have a year left, if they managed everything perfectly.

      For some reason, as Jake looked out over his fields, a line from that haunting Johnny Cash song, played in his head.

      “My empire of dirt,” Jake murmured out loud. Once upon a time it had made him so proud that he—a man who had begun as a mechanic from the backwoods—had accomplished all this. In a recent issue of Success Magazine, Jake’s company, Auto Kingdom, had been called the Costco of the automobile aficionado. Ridiculous, since he predated Costco by forty years.

      Jake did not feel afraid of dying. No, what he felt was a sharp sense of sadness for his children, his three daughters. None were married, and he longed for the miracle of a grandchild.

      “That’s what you get for marrying so late in life,” he berated himself. He’d been fifty-seven when his first daughter was born.

      He went to the wall that was hung, window to window and ceiling to floor, with photographs of his princesses. His true treasures.

      The wall documented the lives of his three daughters. Wasn’t it just yesterday he had stood in front of the hospital, beaming so proudly, with Brandgwen, his firstborn, in his arms? Wasn’t it just a moment ago that Jessica had sat on that fat Welsh pony? Didn’t only a breath separate him from the day he’d stood in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower with his baby Chelsea’s small hand in his?

      He felt such a rush of tenderness looking at their faces, the stamp of their personalities surviving the march of time. Brandy always looking faintly mischievous and lovely as a leprechaun, Jessica, looking studious, her green eyes huge behind those glasses, and his baby, Chelsea, twenty-two already, gorgeous and self-assured, always posing.

      Brave, brainy and beautiful, his three daughters. Long ago, playing on his name and the American public’s yearning for royalty, the press had dubbed his daughters princesses, and it had stuck for all these years.

      The photographs showed lifestyles that might have been envied by real royalty. His throat ached as he looked at all his efforts to make them happy. The wall documented his daughters, at various ages, jumping their ponies, riding gondolas on the canals in Venice, skiing the slopes of the Alps. It documented the cars, the lavish birthday parties, the trinkets, the diamond tiaras, the gowns.

      Oh, yes, Jake had gone into overdrive trying to insure the happiness of his daughters, after the scandalous death of his very young and very beautiful wife, more than twenty years ago.

      There was no picture of Marcie on this wall. She had died when Brandy, their oldest daughter, had been six.

      Brandy did not have her mother’s looks—her face had always been impish rather than gorgeous. Dark sapphire-blue eyes were her only inheritance from her mother. She had hair as his own had once been—brown, thick, and just wavy enough to make it impossible to tame. Who knew where the freckles had come from? She had never outgrown them. She had been, to her mother’s distress, happiest in overalls down at the stables. Brandy had a reckless streak in her, and it glittered in her eyes. The press had dubbed her the tomboy princess.

      She was twenty-six, now, still as lithe as a young boy. And still a thrill seeker. Her bravery was legend. The King fortune had allowed her to pursue one adrenaline rush after another, and he had indulged her.

      A mistake. Her latest “hobby” was BASE jumping. Her last jump had been from the top of the highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls in Venezuela, every heart-stopping moment of it recorded by her faithful press. She’d always been like that, reckless.

      But in light of his own news, he seemed to be seeing Brandy differently. She risked everything—except her heart.

      Behind the dancing darkness of her eyes he could see the wariness in her.

      Well, why wouldn’t she be wary of love? She would have some memory of her mother’s colossal indifference to her, the storminess of her parents’ relationship.

      He shifted his attention from Brandy to his other daughters, and with newfound depth, he felt the cruel weight of failure.

      For all his efforts, were any of his princesses really happy? Not one of his daughters seemed to have a goal, a dream, a quest. Not one of them seemed to understand that love was everything.

      Jessie, Jessica, his second daughter. She had hurtled through high school and entered university at seventeen. She was twenty-four now, and he had lost track of what degree she was working on. She talked of things he did not understand. Jessie seemed to be intellectual and disconnected. Despite having some kind of boyfriend—a fuddy-duddy professor who seemed about as exciting as day-old porridge—Jake saw heartbreaking loneliness in the lovely green of her astonishing eyes. Eyes hidden behind hideous glasses, and her gorgeous wheat-colored hair tucked into a prim bun that made her look like a spinster.

      And then there was his baby, Chelsea. Ah, she was the darling of the press. Her picture was in some paper or magazine every time he went by a newsstand. She was the most like Marcie in looks, her beauty absolutely breathtaking. Her eyes were hazel, an exact mix of Marcie’s blue and his own brown. Her hair floated nearly to her waist in a shiny wave of platinum blond. Her features were perfect, her mouth wide and generous.

      She had her own staff—a hairstylist and a dresser who were so important to her she traveled with them. She kept such a high profile she had to have a bodyguard. Jake had indulged her, too, her every whim satisfied.

      And yet he had the disconcerting feeling, when he was around Chelsea, that she wasn’t able to see real beauty, that her world had become so superficial it had blinded her to what was real and good and genuine.

      Jake kissed his fingertips and touched the images of his daughters’ cheeks. His heart swelled within his chest, feeling as if it would break

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