Imogen had never truly been able to understand how her beloved father had fallen in love with a woman as cold and manipulative as Lisa. It hurt, unbearably, to hear Lisa speaking about Dracco as though a special closeness existed between them, especially when Imogen was so desperately in love with him herself! In fact…’ She had stopped, giving Imogen a small, secret little smile that had made her heart thump heavily against her ribs. Then her stepmother had continued triumphantly, ’Dracco considers that your father was very fortunate to be married to me. Lisa had preened herself openly, making Imogen’s stomach churn with sickening misery and anguish. ‘And Dracco agrees with me that you made life very difficult for your father all these years by constantly harping on about your mother, trying to make him feel guilty because he fell in love with me.’ ‘Oh, yes, we all know that you think your precious mother was a saint.’ Imogen had seen the furious look of hostility in Lisa’s hard blue eyes. Otherwise, I know she would have wanted to entertain Daddy’s clients for him.’

Even so, she had not been able to stop herself from pointing out quietly, ‘Mummy was ill. Instinctively Imogen had wanted to leap to her mother’s defence, but she had sufficient experience of Lisa to know better than to do so. She had given the openly dismissive, almost contemptuous shrug with which Imogen had become teeth-grittingly familiar whenever Lisa spoke about her late mother. Unfortunately your mother never seemed to realise just how vitally important being a good hostess was.’ ‘He says he can see how much more business the company has been attracting since I became your father’s hostess. ‘Dracco has asked me to be on hand to help him entertain the clients,’ Lisa had said at the time of her shock announcement about the house. Since then Lisa had declared her intention to sell the pretty country house where Imogen had grown up and to buy herself a modern apartment in the small market town where they lived. They were in Imogen’s bedroom, or at least the bedroom that had been Imogen’s until after her father’s death. Imogen flinched as the full venom of her stepmother Lisa’s words hit her. ‘SO YOU’RE going to go through with it? You’re going to go ahead and marry Dracco, even though he doesn’t love you?’

The Blackmail Baby by Penny Jordan