LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      RUSH hour was over, but traffic was still heavy along the major streets, and it was moving slowly because of the dusting of snow which had fallen during the day. Delainey tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and held on to her patience. Normally she was unruffled by bad driving conditions, whether caused by weather or hesitant drivers or accidents stopping the normal flow of cars. In fact, she’d been stuck in so many traffic jams in her life that if she hadn’t learned to keep calm she figured she’d have been dead of a heart attack long since.

      But tonight was different. Tonight she was on her way home.

      Finally she was able to make her turn off the boulevard and between the massive brick gateposts of the White Oaks complex. The main drive stretched out before her, twisting through a strand of mature oak trees, their branches bare now in the chill of late autumn. From the far end of the drive peeked the facade of a rambling old redbrick mansion, once a private home but now the clubhouse for the whole of White Oaks. Here and there, smaller lanes branched off the main drive, each winding through the hilly estate and ending at a cluster of modern town houses.

      The third drive to the left, Delainey reminded herself. The first time she’d come here, she’d gotten thoroughly lost because all the little lanes seemed to look alike. And though there were signposts at each intersection, they were small and discreetly lettered.

      Unobtrusive—and very effective at putting across the message that if you didn’t know where you were going, you didn’t belong at White Oaks. Strangers and salesmen beware.

      She was surprised to see the moving van still parked in front of her town house. The engine was running, the back doors were open, and a ramp was still in place—but as far as she could see the van was empty. The movers’ work must be done by now. Still, it would be nice to be able to take a look around the town house before the men left, in case she wanted something heavy shifted to a different location.

      Not that she had anything terribly heavy, really. To tell the truth, Delainey was surprised the movers had used a full-size moving van when practically everything she owned would have fit on a pickup truck.

      She parked behind the van and sat for a moment staring at the complex. Each of the separate buildings on the estate contained four individual town houses. The buildings were surrounded by woods, widely scattered, and set at angles so they were all but invisible to each other. Within each building, every unit faced a different direction. The effect was that each town house felt set apart, as if it were entirely alone on the grand estate.

      From where Delainey sat, she could see just the front of her own town house and the side of the one next door. The two others in the building might as well not have existed at all.

      The careful planning and construction was a great deal of the reason why White Oaks had been such a success ever since a development company had bought a huge, deserted and obsolete old mansion in the middle of nowhere and turned the estate into a community. It also didn’t hurt, Delainey admitted, that the city had grown unexpectedly fast in that direction, and now the square mile occupied by White Oaks was smack in the middle of the action, while remaining set apart and parklike because of its sheer size. It was exclusive, private, protected, and close to work—exactly the sort of place that up-and-coming people liked to live. People like Delainey.

      The mere thought made her stomach give a strange little quiver. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself in those terms—as the sort of person who moved

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