Deep inside where it didn’t show, Eve winced. That was just so typically Mirabella. Why did it never seem to occur to people, even those closest to her, that when they said things like that to her it might actually hurt?

Though why should it occur to them, when she went to great lengths to make sure they didn’t know?

Now, for example, all she said as she pirouetted back to the mirror for one final check, was, “If it makes you feel any better, all this lace-and-pearl handiwork was probably done in some Third World country sweatshop, so I’m contributing to their economy in my own little way.” She glanced at the place on her left wrist that was customarily occupied by an ugly but practical sports-style watch. “What time is it? Do you know?”

“Quarter after,” Mirabella said without having to check. “Still got forty-five minutes, so you might as well relax.”

“Relax? I can’t even sit down in this dress.” She drew in a breath for which the dress’s tight waist left little room, then abruptly exhaled and asked with a frown, “Where’s Summer?”

“Downstairs in the choir room with the kids. Helen was threatening mutiny over her shoes-something about wearing Marvin the Martian sneakers with her flower girl outfit, I believe.”

“God love her,” Eve murmured in absentminded sympathy. “And Mom and Dad?”

“Probably still at the hotel. Dad’s had some sort of bug, and Mom was going to make him take a nap so he’d be up for the reception. They’ll be here, but at the last minute, if I know them. Troy and Charly are bringing them. Charly’s resting, too.”

“Ah.” Yes… Charly she’d met at Bella’s wedding. The maid of honor. She was the friend from Alabama, married now to Jimmy Joe’s older brother, Troy. Also pregnant, about a month ahead of Bella, which would make her… seven months, or thereabouts.

It was getting hard to keep track of all the babies. The thought made her suddenly feel warm and shivery inside.

Sonny had promised her they’d start a family-soon. After they’d had some time together, just the two of them, getting to know one another, he’d said. She knew he was right. All the books said so. But at her age it was hard to be patient. When had she gotten to be forty-three? Had she left it until too late? She couldn’t be too old…not yet. Not yet.

As always, when her thoughts wandered into those particular paths, her insides had gone warm and mushy, with pulses pumping in all her feminine places. Hormones, she thought, churned up, ready and eager to make a baby, just lacking one vital ingredient-a little guy with a tail and one missing chromosome…

Not surprisingly, perhaps, she felt a sudden desire to see the man whose chromosomes she’d chosen to merge with hers. Of course, whether that would quiet her raging hormones or only stir them to greater excitement, she didn’t know. Or care. When Evie wanted something, she generally wasted little time wondering about consequences. And right now what she wanted was Sonny-her man…

A small, secretive smile played about her lips as she waltzed in her delicate satin pumps and rustling skirts to the dressing room’s one small sofa and retrieved from the untidy pile of clothing, plastic garment bags and makeup and hair supplies the soft-sided portable drink cooler she’d brought with her from her River Street hotel. She was unzipping it when Mirabella came to peek around her arm.

“What’s that? What-” Her sister interrupted herself with a small gasp, part scandalized, part envious. “Oh my God-is that what I think it is?”

Eve nodded. For a few moments there was silence as the sisters gazed at the champagne bottle she cradled reverently in her hands. Not just any champagne bottle. This one bore a legendary label and was worth approximately its weight in gold. Eve hefted it and made a smacking noise with her lips. “Bought it at a charity auction. I was saving it for my wedding night, but…” Her lips curved. “I don’t feel like waiting that long.”

One thing about Bella, she always had been quick on the uptake. It took her about half a second to figure out it wasn’t just the champagne her renegade sister didn’t plan on waiting until the wedding night for. She choked and clapped a hand over her mouth and finally came out with “Evie, you can’t.”

Eve, rooting purposefully around in the pile on the sofa, glanced over her shoulder long enough to inquire, “Why not?”

“Why? Why? Because… you, you-”

But Eve had found what she was looking for and turned with a smile of triumph. “Ah-here we are. Now I’m all set.” A small silver object hit the floor with a thunk and spun and wobbled to the toe of Mirabella’s shoe. “Oops! Would you get that for me? I don’t think I can bend over in this dress.”

Her sister bent to retrieve the cork puller and handed it over. Her cheeks were flushed, but whether with exertion, embarrassment or anger Eve couldn’t begin to guess. With Bella it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. “Are you out of your mind?” Mirabella said in a hoarse, scandalized whisper. “Tradition aside-do you know how long it took me to button you into that dress? And now you want to go and take it off again?” Her voice ended in a squeak of pure outrage.

“Who said anything about taking it off?” Eve said blithely, waving the glasses. Then something occurred to her and she thrust them at her sister. “Here, hold these for me, will you?”

“What are you-you’re not going to open that here?”

Already wielding the cork puller with practiced ease, Eve looked at her in surprise. “Better here, don’t you think, than wait until it’s gotten all shook up?” She murmured a soft “Ah…” as the cork gave with an expensive-sounding pop. She held the bottle up to her nose, closed her eyes and inhaled a fragrance that instantly filled her mind with visions of Parisian cafés and the hot, dusty vineyards of Provence.

“There now-I’m all set.” She turned, brandishing the champagne bottle by its foil-wrapped neck in one hand, the two wineglasses by their stems in the other. “Now, all I need’s mah man. Where is he, dahling, do you know?”

That attempt at whimsy was lost on Mirabella, who had an unpredictable sense of humor at the best of times. She flushed furiously and bit out, “The men are supposed to be dressing in the parlor-and by the way, who are those guys, anyway? They look more like bodyguards than groomsmen. Anyway, that’s across the garden. Follow the walkway that goes alongside the rectory-door’s at the far end. And I swear, if you mess up that dress-”

Eve interrupted her sister’s scolding with laughter; never had she felt so deliciously wicked. “Will you stop worrying about my dress? How do you suppose they got along in olden times, with all those corsets, laces and petticoats? Didn’t you ever see the movie, Tom Jones?” She waltzed toward the door.

“Eve, you are impossible!”

“So I’ve been told!”

Her exit line was spoiled somewhat by the closed door and the fact that both her hands were full, but she shifted the champagne bottle to the crook of her arm and managed to get herself through the door without spilling or dropping anything. In the dim, empty hallway with the high stone walls of the church soaring around her, she paused to get her bearings.

Best if she bypassed the sanctuary, narthex and front entrance,. she supposed. She could hear organ music coming from the sanctuary-the organist was practicing, it sounded like-and from somewhere nearby the sounds of muffled voices, the scuff of footsteps. She turned right, doing her best to tiptoe in her high-heeled shoes and voluminous skirts, laughter and mischief tickling her nose like an incipient sneeze. Even as a child, Eve had taken impish delight in being naughty.

Outside in the garden she paused again. Like most Southern gardens, this one was deeply shaded by huge live oaks and magnolia trees. In the springtime it would be a breathtaking riot of azaleas, rhododendrons and flowering dogwood, but now, in early autumn, it was an Eden of cool, quiet greens. On the other side, through the dark lace of foliage, she could see late-afternoon sun shimmering on the stone walls and leaded windows of the rectory. The air was warm, and alive with the songs of birds. In that pause, in that one brief moment, she thought how happy, how lucky she was and how right she’d been to have chosen this time and this place for her wedding.

It wasn’t unusual for Eve to take such moments to reflect on her good fortune. She was a happy person by nature, and besides that, she’d witnessed enough of the world’s misfortunes to know how richly she herself had been blessed. First with a safe, if somewhat boring and conventional childhood, followed by a relatively angst-free adolescence, thanks to parents who’d managed somehow to nurture without smothering, during which she’d been allowed-even encouraged-to dream big dreams. And thanks to a career she’d blundered into through roughly equal parts charm, talent, perseverance and luck, she’d had most of those dreams fulfilled. She’d wanted to travel the world, have marvelous adventures… explore oceans and mountaintops, fly an airplane, ride a camel! And she’d done all those things, plus so many more, she couldn’t have listed them all if she tried. And now the icing on the cake: just when her biological clock had begun chiming its wake-up call, she’d met the perfect man.

Oh, yes… they were going to make beautiful babies, she and Sonny. How could they not? Not only was her fiancé tall, strong and healthy; handsome as all get-out and rich as Croesus-not that that mattered to Eve, since she’d done quite well in the financial department herself-but he was witty and loaded with charisma. Plus, he treated Eve the way she expected to be treated, which was very well indeed. And he wasn’t too bad in the sack, either.

A warm little shiver of anticipation rippled through her as she hiked up the skirts of her bridal gown with one hand and hurried through the garden.

Really-how could she be so lucky? So far, life had been good to her-so good that when restless little doubts and vague uncertainties did creep into her thoughts, she instantly felt guilty and ungrateful, and banished them with almost superstitious assurances to whichever Fates might be listening that she didn’t mean it! How could she, who had so much to be thankful for? How dared she still feel that there must be something… more? That something of vital importance was missing from her life-if only she could figure out what it was!

But… there were no such clouds upon her spirits now as she ran lightly down the shaded paths of the lovely old garden that separated the church from the rectory, a bride on her way to a wholly improper and deliciously naughty prenuptial tryst with her groom. She felt sexy and mischievous, and as full of effervescence as the champagne bottle she carried in her hand. Through the live oaks and banks of azaleas she flitted, the skirts of her gown lifting and floating like the wings of a giant butterfly, the promise of laughter on every breath.


The flash of movement on the video monitor caught Special FBI Agent Jake Redfield’s attention.

“What’s this?” he muttered aloud to himself as he leaned forward to adjust the zoom. A moment later he sat back with a flat “Ah!” of recognition, and although the blushing bride was not the party he was supposed to be watching, for a few moments he allowed himself to track her progress through the church gardens just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Though it wasn’t anything like enjoyment he felt when he thought about the likes of Sonny Cisneros with a woman like that. What was it, he wondered, that made a slimeball like Cisneros so damned attractive to women? Was it the money? The power? Except that this woman-Eve Waskowitz-didn’t strike him as the type to be susceptible to any of those things. Or maybe he just didn’t want to think so.

Watching her like this-though he was well aware that no one looking at him would ever guess it-made him feel like smiling. Reed slender she was, buoyant as a ballerina but without the dancer’s studied grace. There was something artless about her, something wild and carefree, almost spritelike, that made it hard to believe she could be as old as he knew her to be. According to his information, about to turn forty-three. On All Saint’s Day, which seemed fitting, in some obscure way.

But what in the hell was the lovely Miss Waskowitz, soon to be Mrs. Cisneros, doing flitting about in the church gardens little more than half an hour before she was scheduled to become the wife of one of the most powerful crime bosses west of the Mississippi? And as much as he’d have liked to indulge his curiosity in regards to that question, Jake doubted it had any relevance to the reason he was spending taxpayers’ money sitting in front of a Savannah church in a surveillance van.