ith his hand on the iron gate, Philip stood looking at the picturesque little villa Caroline Edwards Bancroft had lived in for nearly thirty years. Perched high on a rocky hill, it overlooked the sparkling harbor far below, where his ship had put into port early that morning. Flowers bloomed riotously in neatly tended beds and pots, basking in the late afternoon sunlight. An aura of beauty and tranquillity pervaded the place, and he found it nearly impossible to imagine his frivolous film-star ex-wife living happily in such relative seclusion as this. The house had been given to her by Dominic Arturo, the Italian she'd had an affair with before they were married, he knew, and now he assumed she must have gone through every cent of her divorce settlement, or she wouldn't be living there. The large block of stock she owned in Bancroft & Company paid dividends, but she was legally prohibited from selling or transferring it to anyone other than himself. Beyond that, all she could do with her stock was exercise her right to vote her shares, and she always voted in accordance with whatever the board of directors recommended. That much Philip knew, because he'd made it a point over the years to watch how she voted. Now, as he stood looking at the house, he assumed she must have been trying to live on the dividends alone, because nothing short of poverty could have induced his party-loving wife to live like this.

He took his hand away from the black iron gate. He hadn't intended to go there, until that foolish woman at the captain's table had asked if he planned to visit his ex-wife. Once she'd put the idea into his head, he'd found it hard to ignore. He was older now, and he didn't know how long he had to live. Suddenly it had seemed like a good idea to make peace with the woman he'd once loved. She'd been an adulteress and he'd retaliated by keeping her away from her own daughter and forcing her to agree never to come near Meredith or him again. At the time it had seemed like justice. Now that he was facing death without warning, it seemed a little... harsh. Perhaps. However, having seen the way Caroline had been living made him decide against entering the courtyard and knocking on the front door. Curiously, his reason for that was one of pity: He knew how vain she was, and he knew that her ego would take a terrible blow if he saw her living like this. On those occasions when he'd thought of Caroline during the last three decades, he'd always imagined her living in high style, looking as beautiful as ever, and participating in the same social whirl she'd adored before they were married. The woman who lived here must surely have turned into a hag and a hermit, with nothing to do but wile away the years watching ships put into port or shopping in the tiny nearby village.

His shoulders drooping with a strange kind of despair for long-forgotten dreams and shattered lives, Philip turned toward the little path that wound around the side of the hill toward the port below. "You've come a long way, just to turn back, Philip," an unforgettable voice said.

His head jerked around, and he saw her then, standing perfectly still beneath a tree on the hillside to his far left, a basket of flowers over her arm.

She started toward him, her gait long and graceful, her blond hair hidden beneath a peasant scarf that somehow looked good on her. She wasn't wearing any makeup, he realized as she came closer, and she looked much older, and—in some ways—lovelier. The restlessness in her face was gone now; in its place was a calm serenity she'd never possessed in her youth. Oddly, she reminded him more of Meredith now than when she was Meredith's age. And she still had fantastic legs.

He stared at her, feeling his unreliable heart beating a little faster than normal, and he couldn't think of what to say, which made him feel gauche, which in turn made him angry with himself. "You look older," he announced bluntly.

She replied with a soft laugh and no rancor at all, "How nice of you to say so."

"I just happened to be in the neighborhood—" He nodded toward his ship in the harbor, realized how inane his words sounded, and scowled at her because she appeared to be laughing at his discomfiture.

"What takes you away from the store?" she said, putting her hand on the gate but not opening it.

"I've taken a leave of absence. Bad heart."

"I know you've been ill. I still read the Chicago newspapers."

"May I come in?" Philip said without meaning to, and then he remembered that there were always men around her. "Or are you expecting company?" he added with unhidden sarcasm.

"It's good to know that while everything and everyone else in the world seems to change," she remarked dryly, "you and you alone remain the same—as jealous and suspicious as ever. She opened the gate, and he followed her up the path, already regretting that he'd come.

The floors of the villa were stone, covered with bright patches of carpet and huge urns of flowers from her garden. She nodded to a chair in the small room that doubled as living room and parlor. "Would you like a drink?" He nodded, but instead of sitting down, he walked over to the big window, looking out at the harbor. He stayed there until he was forced to turn and accept the glass of wine she held out to him. "Are you doing—all right?" he asked lamely.

"Very well, thank you."

"I'm amazed Arturo couldn't have given you something better than this. This place is little more than a cottage." She said nothing, and that goaded Philip into mentioning her last lover, the one who had caused their divorce. "Spearson never amounted to anything, did you know that, Caroline? He's still trying to eke out a living by training horses and giving riding lessons."

Unbelievably, she smiled at that and, turning, she poured herself a glass of wine. In silence she took a sip, her big blue eyes studying him over the rim. Caught off guard and feeling stupid and churlish, Philip returned her gaze unflinchingly.

"Surely you aren't finished?" she said quietly after a long moment. "You must have dozens more of my imagined indiscretions and infidelities to throw in my face. Evidently, they still bother you after thirty years."

Taking a long breath, Philip tipped his head back and sighed. "I'm sorry," he said truthfully. "I don't know why I started in on you like that. What you do is none of my business."

She smiled, that same serene, unruffled smile he found so unsettling. "You started in on me," she said, "because you're still completely unaware of the truth."

"What truth?" he asked sarcastically.

"Dennis Spearson didn't break up our marriage, Philip, and neither did Dominic. You did." Anger sparked in his eyes and she shook her head, her voice gentle. "You couldn't help it You're like a frightened little boy who's scared to death that someone is going to take something or someone away from you, and who can't bear the fear and uncertainty of it happening. And so, rather than sitting around and impotently waiting for it to happen, you take matters into your own hands and force it to happen—so that you can get the pain over with. You begin by putting restrictions on the people you love— restrictions that they can't bear, and when they finally break one, you feel betrayed and furious. Then you avenge yourself on them—on the same people who you forced to hurt you, and because you're not a boy, but a man with money and power, your revenge against imaginary trespassers is terrible. Your father did virtually the same thing to you."

"Where did you acquire that piece of psychological garbage—from some shrink you had an affair with?" he demanded scathingly.

"I acquired it from a lot of books I read to try to figure you out," she replied, her gaze level.

"And that's what you want me to believe happened to our marriage? That you were innocent and I was irrationally jealous and possessive?" he asked, draining his glass.

"I'll be happy to tell you the whole truth if you think you're well enough to handle it."

Philip frowned at her, taken aback by her unshakable calm and the gentle beauty of her smile. She had been glamorous in her twenties; in her fifties she had faint lines at her eyes and some lines on her forehead; her face had acquired character and it made her strangely more appealing. And quite disarming.

"Give the truth a try," he suggested dryly.

"Okay," she said, walking closer to him. "Let's see if you're old enough and sensible enough now to believe it when you hear it. I have a feeling you will believe it."

Philip had pretty much decided to the contrary already. "Why is that?"

"Because," she answered, leaning her left shoulder against the window, "you're going to realize that I have

absolutely nothing to gain or to lose by admitting it all to you, do I?"

She waited, forcing him to admit that much. "No, I suppose not."

"Then, here is the truth," she said calmly. "When we met, I was utterly dazzled by you. You weren't a Hollywood phony; you weren't like any of the men I'd known before. You had breeding and class and style. I fell in love with you on our second date, Philip." She watched shock and then disbelief flicker across his face at that, but she continued with quiet determination. "I was so much in love and so filled with insecurity and inferiority that I could hardly breathe when we were together, for fear I'd make a mistake. Instead of telling you the truth about my background and the men I'd slept with, I told you the same fiction about my origins that the studio publicity office had invented for me. I told you I grew up in an orphanage, and that I'd had one tiny little affair when I was a foolish teenager."

When he didn't say anything, she drew an unsteady breath and said, "The truth is that my mother was a whore who had no idea who my father was, and that I ran away when I was sixteen. I took a bus to Los Angeles and got a job in a cheap diner, where this jerk who worked as a messenger for a film company discovered me. I auditioned for him on the couch in his boss's office that night. Two weeks later I met his boss and got auditioned again—the same way. I couldn't act, but I was photogenic, so the boss got me an appointment at a modeling agency, and I started making money doing magazine ads. I went to acting school, and eventually I got some bit parts in movies after I auditioned for them in someone's bed, of course. Later I got some better parts, and then I met you."

Caroline waited for him to react, but all he did was shrug and say coldly, "I know all that, Caroline. I had you investigated a year before I actually filed for divorce. You aren't telling me anything I didn't find out or assume on my own."

"No, but I'm about to. By the time I met you, I'd gotten some pride and confidence, and I no longer slept with men because I was desperate or too weak to say no."

"You did it because you liked it!" he spat out. "And not with one but with hundreds of them!"

"Not nearly hundreds," she corrected him with a sad smile, "but many of them. It was just—just something you did. It was part of the business, like shaking hands is to men in your business."

She heard his snort of contempt and ignored it. "And then I met you, and I fell in love, and for the first time in my life I felt shame—shame for all the things I'd been and done. And so I tried to change my past by reinventing it to suit your standards. Which, of course, was a hopeless endeavor."

"Hopeless," he agreed shortly.

Her eyes were soft as they looked into his, her voice ringing with quiet sincerity. "You're right. But what I could—and did—change was the present. Philip, no man touched me but you from the day we met."

"I don't believe you," he snapped.

But Caroline only smiled wider and shook her head. "You have to believe me—because you already agreed that I have absolutely nothing to gain by lying to you. What possible reason could I have to humble myself like this? It's the sad truth," she continued, "that I actually thought I could atone for my past by cleaning up my present. Meredith is your daughter, Philip. I know you used to think she was either Dominic's or Dennis Spearson's, but all Dennis ever gave me was riding lessons. I wanted to fit in with your crowd, and all the women knew how to ride, so I was sneaking out to Spearson's for lessons."

"That was the lie you told at the time."

"No, my love," she said without thinking, "that was the truth. I won't pretend that I didn't have an affair with Dominic Arturo before I met you. He gave me this house as a way to atone for that stupid, drunken pass that you caught him making at me."

"It wasn't a pass," Philip hissed, "he was in our bed when I came home a day early from a business trip."

"I wasn't in it with him!" she retorted. "And he was out cold."

"No, you weren't in it with him," he agreed sarcastically. "You had snuck off to Spearson's, leaving a house full of guests, all of whom were gossiping about your absence."

To his shock, she laughed at that—a sad, whimsical laugh—and confidingly asked, "Isn't it ironic that I never got caught up in any of the lies about my past? I mean, everyone in the world believed that fairy tale about my being an orphan, and the affairs I did have before we were married never came out." She shook her head, making her heavy, shoulder-length hair shimmer in the waning sunlight. "I got away unscathed when I was guilty, but when I was truly innocent, you convicted me on circumstantial evidence. Is that poetic justice, do you think?"

Philip was utterly at a loss for words, unable to believe her, unable to completely doubt her. It wasn't so much the things she'd told him that made him believe she'd been innocent, it was her attitude toward it all—the serene acceptance of her fate, the lack of rancor, the frankness and honesty in those eyes of hers. Her next question made his head jerk toward her in surprise. "Do you know why I married you, Philip?"

"Presumably you wanted the financial security and social prestige I could offer."

She chuckled at that and shook her head. "You underrate yourself. I already told you I was dazzled by your looks and breeding, and I was in love with you, but I'd never have married you if it hadn't been for one more thing."

"What was that?" Philip asked in spite of himself.

"I believed," she confessed somberly, "I honestly believed that I had something to offer you too— something you needed. Do you know what it was?"

"I can't imagine."

"I thought I could teach you how to laugh and enjoy life."

Silence hung over the room for a long moment, then she looked at him from beneath her thick lashes and there was a funny catch in her voice as she asked softly, "Did you ever learn how to laugh, darling?"

"Don't call me that!" Philip almost shouted, but his chest felt tight with emotions he didn't want to feel— hadn't felt in decades—and he slammed his empty glass down on a table. "I should be going."

She nodded. "Regrets are an awful burden. The sooner you leave, the sooner you'll be able to convince yourself you were actually right thirty years ago. But if you stay, who knows what would happen?"

"Nothing would happen," he said, referring to going to bed with her, startled then that the idea would even occur to him.

"Good-bye," she said quietly. "I'd ask you to give my love to Meredith, but you won't, will you?"

"No."

"She doesn't need it," Caroline said with a winsome smile. "From everything I've been reading, she's remarkable and wonderful. And," she added with pride, "whether you like it or not, there's a part of me in her. She," Caroline informed him, "knows how to laugh."

Philip stared at her in blank confusion. "What do you mean, from what you've been reading? What are you talking about?"

Caroline tipped her head toward the pile of Chicago newspapers and gave a throaty chuckle. "I was referring to the way she's handling being married to Matthew Farrell and engaged to Parker Reynolds—"

"How the hell do you know about that?" Philip exploded, his face turning cold and pale.

"It's all over the papers," Caroline began, then she faltered, watching him stalk over to the newspapers and yank them up. His entire body seemed to vibrate with fury as he clutched the paper that broke the news of the arrest of Stanislaus Spyzhalski, and he glared at the pictures of Meredith, Matt, and Parker on the front page.

He threw that one down and yanked up the next one, which contained excerpts from their joint news conference with a picture of Farrell grinning at her. Another newspaper was opened to an article about a bomb scare in the New Orleans store, and it slid from his fingers. "He warned me what he'd do eleven years ago," he said in a strangled whisper, more to himself than to her. "He warned me, and he's doing it!" He looked up at Caroline, his eyes alive with fury. "Where's the nearest telephone?"