“I always will.”
His arms closed around her, and he sighed. “Have you ever noticed how close heaven seems when you look up at the stars?”
She smiled against the rough hair over warm, pulsating muscles. “I know how close it feels,” she murmured, nuzzling his chest.
“Yes,” he said gently, pressing his hand to her stomach as he folded her against his side. “So do I.” He kissed her forehead with aching tenderness. “So do I, my darling.”
Above them, a silvery drift of clouds passed over the waning moon. And back in the villa, a gravelly parrot voice was crooning the opening bars of Brahms’s “Lullaby.”
* * *
To gain her rightful inheritance, Gaby Dupont takes a job with attorney Nicholas Chandler. She’s shocked when sparks fly with the infuriating lawyer, but Gaby risk her legacy for forever love?
Read on for a sneak preview of Notorious, by New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer
Notorious
by Diana Palmer
GABY DUPONT GLANCED again at the paper in her hand. She hesitated to do this, but her grandmother had pleaded with her. They needed to know something about this noted Chicago criminal attorney, Nicholas Chandler, and his very famous law firm, Chandler, Morse and Souillard. Gaby was the only one of the family who lived permanently in Chicago, where he did. If her grandmother hadn’t been so upset, and so insistent, perhaps Gaby could have found another solution. But this might be her best option.
She pushed the doorbell and stood nervously waiting for someone to open the door. This apartment was in a swanky area of Chicago, overlooking the lake. It was as expensive as the place where Gaby lived. She knew this man by reputation, and also because the law firm he headed had represented her grandfather in a criminal action that still made her sick at her stomach to remember. There was an appeal being threatened in the case, and Gaby’s grandmother wanted to know if this attorney was going to consider representing her ex-husband again. She needed to know. So did Gaby.
Gaby had done masquerades before, mostly in an attempt to avoid a greedy cousin who was stalking her relentlessly for some property willed to her by a mutual great-aunt, which she wasn’t willing to give him. She’d never understood the passion some people had for the almighty dollar. Gaby would have been happy poor. It was attitude, she considered, more than what happened to you. But poverty was something she’d never known.
Gaby was twenty-four and she didn’t want to get married. Her grandfather, Charles Dupont, had sold her like a prize mare without her knowledge when she was sixteen. Her innocence had a monetary value and without Gaby’s knowledge-or his wife’s-he’d arranged a private party and took Gaby into a room with a foreign businessman to whom he owed a lot of money, and three of the businessman’s friends. Gaby was to be his payoff, since Madame Dupont had refused to pay his gambling debts.
The man was strong and Gaby couldn’t get away from him. But Gaby’s screams had brought her grandmother running. Two men at the party, Madame’s chauffeur and bodyguard, had busted the lock on the door and saved the half-naked teenager from further assault at the hands of her grandfather’s colleague. One of the men had taken photos with his cell phone just as Madame Dupont went in the door and saw what had been done to her only grandchild. The photos were used in a criminal complaint. There were a few assorted bruises and lacerations on the foreign businessman before the assaulting parties managed to escape, just before the police arrived. Gaby’s grandfather, the perpetrator of the cowardly assault, had been left to face the music.
Gaby had been transported to the hospital, her grandfather to jail. Gaby’s grandmother had filed for divorce the very next day, leaving her immoral husband penniless and furious at his changed circumstances. Sadly, Gaby’s assailant was a foreign diplomat, and he used his diplomatic immunity to escape any charges. His three friends vanished like smoke. Gaby’s grandmother had been furious, but her attorney had been forced to relinquish the criminal charges against the diplomat. Gaby’s grandfather, however, had been arrested and tried and convicted. Thanks to a friend, an influential and rather shady judge, his sentence had been lessened and the penalty also reduced. Now, a mutual acquaintance had told Madame that Charles Dupont, who’d lost his law license, was planning to demand a retrial due to new evidence so that he could get