Sidney Sheldon’s Mistress of the Game

One day I’ll make that bastard pay for what he’s done.

Eve Blackwell was many things, but she was not stupid. She knew that the trees and bushes around St Stephen’s Church were alive with photographers, and she knew why: they all wanted a picture of her hideously ravaged face.

Well they could go to hell, the lot of them. From behind, you could still make out Eve’s perfect, womanly figure. But her front side was completely concealed. No lens on earth could penetrate the thick, hand-woven lace of her veil. Eve had made sure of it.

Once a great beauty like her sister, in recent years Eve Blackwell had become a virtual recluse in her Manhattan penthouse, terrified of showing her monstrously scarred face to the world. Indeed, she had not been seen in public for two years. The last time was at her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party at Cedar Hill House, the Blackwell family’s private Camelot, just yards from where the old woman was now being laid to rest.

Kate Blackwell was the lucky one. She’d gone to join her beloved ghosts: Jamie, Margaret, Banda, David, the spirits of Kruger-Brent’s long and violent African past. But there was to be no such rest for Eve. With rumors already flying about her pregnancy – Eve and Alexandra Blackwell were both expecting, but the family had refused to confirm this to the press – Eve was well aware that the price on her head had doubled. There wasn’t a tabloid editor in America who wouldn’t sell his soul for a half decent picture of The Beast of the Blackwells with child.

And to think, they call me a monster …

‘Lord, hear your people, who cry out to you in their need …’

Eve watched silently as Kate Blackwell’s coffin was lowered into the freshly dug grave. Brad Rogers, Kate’s number two at Kruger-Brent for three decades, stifled a sob. Now a very old man himself, his hair as white and thin as the dusting of February snow beneath his feet, Brad Rogers had been all but broken by Kate’s death. Secretly he had loved her for years. But it was a love she could never return.

How tiny she is! thought Eve in wonder, as the pathetic wooden box disappeared into the bowels of the earth. Kate Blackwell, who had loomed so large in life, fêted by presidents and kings. How insignificant she was, in the end.

Not much of a feast for the worms of your beloved Dark Harbor, are you Granny?

For years Kate Blackwell had been Eve’s nemesis. She’d done everything in her power to prevent her wicked granddaughter from achieving her life’s ambition – taking control of the family firm, the mighty Kruger-Brent.

But now Kate Blackwell was gone.

‘Eternal rest grant to her, oh Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her.’

Good riddance, you vengeful old bitch. I hope you rot in hell.

‘May she rest in peace.’

Danny Corretti looked miserably at the negatives in front of him. His back was still killing him after this morning, and now he felt a migraine coming on.

‘D’you get anything?’

His friend tried to sound hopeful. But he already knew the answer.

None of them had got the two-hundred-thousand-dollar picture.

Eve Blackwell had outsmarted them all.

2 (#ulink_9fabfbaa-0960-5c70-b4f7-2bd2010f63a6)

In the maternity unit at New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center, Staff Nurse Gaynor Matthews watched the handsome, middle-aged father take his newborn child in his arms for the first time.

He was gazing at the baby girl, oblivious to everything around him. Nurse Matthews thought: He’s thinking how beautiful she is.

Nurse Matthews was pleasantly plump, with a round, open face and a ready smile that accentuated the twin fans of lines around her eyes. A midwife for more than a decade, she’d seen this moment played out thousands of times – hundreds of them in this very room – but she never tired of it. Besotted dads, their eyes lighting up with love, the purest love they would ever know. Moments like these made midwifery worthwhile. Worth the grinding hours. Worth the crappy pay. Worth the patronizing male obstetricians who thought of themselves as gods just because they had a medical degree and a penis.

Worth the rare moments of tragedy.

The father gently caressed his baby’s cheek. He was a beautiful man, Nurse Matthews decided. Tall, dark, broad shouldered, a classic jock. Just the way she liked them.

She blushed. What on earth was she doing? She had no right to think such things. Not at a time like this.

The father thought: Jesus Christ. She’s so like her mother.

It was true. The little girl’s skin was the same delicate, translucent peach as the girl he’d fallen in love with all those years ago. Her big, inquisitive eyes were the same pale gray, like dawn mist rolling off the ocean. Even her dimpled chin was her mother in miniature. For a split second, the father’s heart leaped at the sight of her, an involuntary smile playing around his lips.

His daughter. Their daughter. So tiny. So perfect.

Then he looked down at the blood on his hands.

And screamed.

Alex had been so excited that morning, when Peter drove her to the hospital.

‘Can you believe that in a few short hours she’ll be here?’

She was still in her pajamas, her long blonde hair tangled after a fitful night’s sleep, but he didn’t think she’d ever looked more luminous. She wore a grin wider than the Lincoln tunnel, and if she was nervous, she didn’t show it.

‘We’re finally going to meet her!’

‘Or him.’ He reached over to the passenger seat and squeezed his wife’s hand.

‘Uh uh. No way. It’s a girl. I know it.’

She’d woken up around six with fairly mild contractions, and insisted on waiting a further two hours before she would let him drive her to Mount Sinai. Two hours in which Peter Templeton had walked up and down the stairs of their West Village brownstone sixteen times, made four unwanted cups of coffee, burned three slices of toast, and yelled at his son Robert for not being ready for school on time, before being reminded by the housekeeper that it was in fact mid July, and school had been out for the last five weeks.

Even at the hospital Peter flapped around uselessly like a mother hen.

‘Can I get you anything? A hot towel?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Water?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Crushed ice cubes?’

‘Peter …’

‘What about that meditation music you’re always playing? That’s calming, right? I could run to the car and get the tape?’

Alex laughed. She was astonishingly calm.

‘I think you need it more than I do. Honestly darling, you must try to relax. I’m having a baby. Women do this every day. I’ll be fine.’

I’ll be fine.