Mistress-of-the-Game - By Tilly Bagshawe Sidney Sheldon Page 0,46

it could never have borne an adult's weight. But Max, crouched like a leprechaun, could support himself comfortably. Reaching up, he wrapped a hand around Keith's ankle.

"Max, thank God! I thought I'd lost you."

"Lost me?" Max laughed: an awful, maniacal strangled sound that made Keith's blood run cold. "You never had me in the first place. Loser."

Keith felt a tug at his feet. Instinctively, he reached out his arms, grasping for support, but there was nothing. Another tug, harder this time. Keith looked down. Max was staring up at him, a twisted smile dancing across his face.

He smiles like Eve.

Keith looked into his son's eyes and saw the deep well of hatred there. The last emotion Keith Webster felt was not fear or even sadness. It was surprise.

I don't understand it. We were getting along so well...

The clouds rushed up to embrace him, soft, white, welcoming.

Then nothing.

It was the night after Keith Webster's funeral. Max lay in his mother's bed in their New York apartment with Eve's arms wrapped around him. The bedroom window was open a crack, allowing the familiar noises of Manhattan to float in from outside: honking traffic, music, shouts, laughter.

Africa had been beautiful. But this was home.

"You were wonderful, darling," Eve whispered in Max's ear. "No one suspected a thing. I'm so proud of you, my big, grown-up boy."

Eve had been going out of her mind with worry, waiting at home for news of an "accident." She'd rehearsed everything with Max so thoroughly, so endlessly. She really believed he was ready. But as the days turned into weeks and still nothing happened, she began to fear that the boy had lost his nerve. Or what if it was worse than that? What if Max had tried and failed? What if Keith now knew everything and was on his way home to exact his revenge?

But Max had not lost his nerve. He had pulled it off in the eleventh hour, staging a fall so natural that there hadn't even been an inquest. Tourists fell from Table Mountain almost every year, idiots fooling around too near the edge. Keith was just another statistic. A number. A nobody.

"You realize that you're the man of the house now?" Eve cooed. "You'll never have to share me again."

Max closed his eyes. He felt the warm silk of Eve's negligee caress his bare back. "Can I sleep in your bed tonight, Mommy?"

Eve sighed sleepily. "All right, darling. Just this once."

Tomorrow morning it would be back to work, for both of them. With Keith gone, it was time to begin the second part of Eve's plan: winning back control of Kruger-Brent. Max would be the linchpin of that strategy, too. But for tonight at least, he'd earned his reward.

Max waited till his mother was deeply asleep. Then he lay awake, smiling, remembering the look of surprise on his father's face as he fell.

You're the man of the house now.

You'll never have to share me again.
Chapter Fourteen

PAOLO COZMICI BARKED IRRITABLY AT HIS BOYFRIEND: "SO? Are you going to tell me what it says?"

The world-famous conductor was having breakfast at his usual table at Le Vaudeville on Rue Vivienne in Paris. An Art Deco hangout popular with locals and tourists alike, Le Vaudeville was Paolo Cozmici's home away from home, a place he came to relax. Henri, the ma?tre d', knew where Paolo Cozmici liked to sit. He knew that Paolo liked the milk for his cafe au lait warm, not hot, that Paolo's pain chocolat should always be light on the pain, heavy on the chocolat; and that Paolo did not expect to have to move to a table near the window in order to chain-smoke his beloved Gauloise cigarettes.

Everybody who knew Paolo Cozmici knew that his Sunday-morning ritual was sacrosanct and unchanging. His boyfriend knew it best of all. And yet the unfathomable boy had arrived for breakfast late, distracted, still dressed in his jogging pants (Paolo deplored jogging pants), and bleating on about some ridiculous letter he'd received from his kid sister back home.

I suppose it serves me right for falling in love with an American, thought Paolo philosophically. Barbarians, all of them, from sea to stinking sea.

"She wants me to come to her sixteenth birthday party next month. Apparently my father's throwing her a big bash at Cedar Hill House."

Paolo blew a disdainful smoke ring in his lover's direction. "Où?"

"It's kind of like a family compound. It's in Maine on a little island called Dark Harbor. You won't have heard of