You're a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the Bear whispered as Dallie lined up a short putt on

the sixteenth green. It lipped the edge of the cup and scooted off to the side.

Johnny Miller gave Dallie a sympathetic look, then sank his own putt for a par. Two holes later when Dallie hit his drive on eighteen, his four-shot lead had been reduced to a tie with Miller.

Your old man told you you'd never amount to much, the Bear said as Dallie's drive sliced viciously to

the right. Why didn 't you listen?

The worse Daliie played, the more he joked with the crowd. "Now, where did that miserable golf shot come from?" he called over to them, scratching his head in mock bewilderment. And then he pointed

to a plump, matronly woman standing near the ropes. "Ma'am, maybe you'd better put down your

purse and come on over here so you can hit the next one for me."

He bogeyed the final hole and Johnny Miller birdied it. After the players had signed their scorecards, the tournament chairman presented Miller with the first-place trophy and a check for thirty thousand dollars. Dallie shook his hand, gave Miller a few congratulatory pats on the shoulder,and then went over to joke with the crowd some more.

"This is what I get for letting Skeet hold my jaws open last night and pour all that beer down my throat. My old grandmother could have played better out there today with a garden rake and roller skates."

Dallie Beaudine had spent a childhood dodging his father's fists, and he knew better than to let anybody see when he was hurting.

Chapter 4

Francesca stood in the center of a pool of discarded evening gowns and studied her reflection in the wall of mirrors built into one end of her bedroom, now decorated with pastel-striped silk walls, matching

Louis XV chairs, and an early Matisse. Like an architect engrossed in a blueprint, she searched her twenty-year-old face for gremlin-induced imperfections that might have mischievously appeared since she last looked in the mirror. Her small straight nose was dusted with a translucent powder priced at twelve pounds a box, her eyelids frosted with smoky shadow, and her lashes, individually separated with a tiny tortoiseshell comb, had been coated with exactly four applications of imported German mascara. She lowered her critical gaze down over her tiny frame to the graceful curve of her breasts, then inspected the neat indentation of her waist before moving on to her legs, beautifully clad in a pair of lacquer green suede slacks complemented perfectly by an ivory silk blouse from Piero De Monzi. She had just been named one of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain for 1975. Although she would never have been so crass as to say it aloud, she secretly wondered why the magazine had bothered with nine others. Francesca's delicate features were more classically beautiful than either her mother's or grandmother's, and much more changeable. Her slanted green eyes could grow as chill and distant as a cat's when she was displeased, or as saucy as a Soho barmaid's if her mood shifted. When she realized how much attention it brought her, she began to emphasize her resemblance to Vivien Leigh and let her chestnut hair grow into a curly, shoulder-length cloud, occasionally even pulling it back from her small face with hair slides to make the likeness more pronounced.

As she contemplated her reflection, it didn't occur to her that she was shallow and vain, that many of the people she considered her friends could barely tolerate her. Men loved her, and that was all that mattered. She was so outrageously beautiful, so utterly charming when she put her energy to it, that only the most self-protective of males could resist her. Men found being with Francesca rather like taking an addictive drug, and even after the relationship had ended, many discovered themselves coming back for a damaging second hit.

Like her mother, she spoke in hyperbole and put her words into invisible italics, making even the most mundane occurrence sound like a grand adventure. She was rumored to be a sorceress in bed, although the specifics of who had actually penetrated the lovely Francesca's enchanting vagina had grown a bit muddy over time. She kissed wonderfully, that was for certain, leaning into a man's chest, curling up in his arms like a sensuous kitten, sometimes licking at his mouth with the very tip of her small pink tongue.

Francesca never stopped to consider that men adored her because she was generally at her best with them. They didn't have to suffer her attacks of thoughtlessness, her perpetual tardiness, or her piques when she didn't get her way. Men made her bloom. At least for a while… until she grew bored. Then she became impossible.

As she applied a slick of coral gloss to her lips, she couldn't help but smile at the memory of her most spectacular conquest, although she was absolutely distraught that he hadn't taken their parting better. Still, what could she have done? Several months of playing second fiddle to all his official responsibilities had brought the chill light of reality to those deliciously warm visions of royal immortality she'd been entertaining-glass-enclosed carriages, cathedral doors flinging open, trumpets playing-visions not entirely unthinkable for a girl who'd been raised in the bedroom of a princess.

When she'd finally come to her senses about their relationship and realized she didn't want to live her life at the beck and call of the British Empire, she'd tried to make her break with him as clean as possible. But he'd still taken it rather badly. She could see him now as he'd looked that night-immaculately tailored, exquisitely barbered, expensively shod. How on earth could she have known that a man who bore no wrinkles on the outside might bear a few insecurities on the inside? She remembered the evening two months earlier when she had ended her relationship with the most eligible bachelor in Great Britain.

They had just finished dinner in the privacy of his apartments, and his face had seemed young and curiously vulnerable as the candlelight softened its aristocratic planes. She gazed at him across the damask tablecloth set with sterling two hundred years old and china rimmed in twenty-four-karat gold, trying to let him understand by the earnestness of her expression that this was all much more difficult for her than it could possibly be for him.

"I see," he said, after she'd given her reasons, as kindly as possible, for not continuing their friendship. And then, once more, "I see."

"You do understand?" She tilted her head to one side so that her hair fell away from her face, letting the light catch the twin rhinestone slivers that dangled from her earlobes, flickering like a chain of stars

against a chestnut sky.

His blunt response shocked her. "Actually, no." Pushing himself back from the table, he stood abruptly.

"I don't understand at all." He looked down at the floor and then up again at her. "I must confess I've rather fallen for you, Francesca, and you gave me every reason to believe that you cared for me."

"I do," she replied earnestly. "Of course I do."

"But not enough to put up with all that goes along with me."

The combination of stubborn pride and hurt she heard in his voice made her feel horribly guilty. Weren't the royals supposed to hide their emotions, no matter how trying the circumstances? "It is rather a lot," she reminded him.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" There was a trace of bitterness in his laugh. "Foolish of me to have believed you cared enough to put up with it."

Now, in the privacy of her bedroom, Francesca frowned briefly at her reflection in the mirror. Since her own heart had never been affected by anyone, it always came as something of a surprise to her when

one of the men with whom she was involved reacted so strongly when they parted.

Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. She recapped her pot of lip gloss and tried to restore

her spirits by humming a British dance hall tune from the 1930s about a man who danced with a girl

who had danced with the Prince of Wales.

"I'm leaving now, darling," Chloe said, appearing in the doorway as she adjusted the brim of a cream

felt bowler over her dark hair, cut short and curly. "If Helmut calls, tell him I'll be back by one."

"If Helmut calls, I'll tell him you bloody well died." Francesca splayed her hand on her hip, her cinnamon brown fingernails looking like small sculptured almonds as she tapped them impatiently against her green suede slacks.

Chloe fastened the neck clasp of her mink. "Now, darling…"

Francesca felt a pang of remorse as she noticed how tired her mother looked, but she repressed it, reminding herself that Chloe's self-destructiveness with men had grown worse in recent months and it

was her duty as a daughter to point it out. "He's a gigolo, Mummy. Everyone knows it. A phony German prince who's making an absolute fool of you." She reached past the scented Porthault hangers in her closet to the rack holding the gold fish-scale belt she'd bought at David Webb the last time she was in New York. After securing the clasp at her waist, she returned her attention to Chloe. "I'm worried about you, Mummy. There are circles under your eyes, and you look tired all the time. You've also been impossible to live with. Only yesterday you brought home the beige Givenchy kimono for me instead of the silver one I asked you to get."

Chloe sighed. "I'm sorry, darling. I-I've had things on my mind, and I haven't been sleeping well. I'll pick up the silver kimono for you when I'm out today."

Francesca's pleasure in hearing that she would get the proper kimono didn't quite overshadow her concern for Chloe. As gently as possible, she tried to make Chloe understand how serious all this was. "You're forty, Mummy. You need to start taking better care of yourself. Gracious, you haven't had a facial in weeks."

To her dismay, she saw that she'd hurt Chloe's feelings. Rushing over, she gave her mother a quick conciliatory hug, careful not to smear the delicate taupe shading beneath her cheekbones. "Never mind," she said. "I adore you. And you're still the most beautiful mother in London."

"Which reminds me-one mother in this house is enough. You are taking your birth control pills, aren't you, darling?"

Francesca groaned. "Not this again…"

Chloe withdrew a pair of gloves from an ostrich-skin Chanel handbag and began tugging them on.

"I can't bear the thought of your becoming pregnant when you're still so young. Pregnancy is so dangerous."

Francesca flicked her hair behind her shoulders and turned back to the mirror. "All the more reason

not to forget, isn't it," she said lightly.

"Just be careful, darling."

"Have you ever known me to lose control of any situation invoiving men?"

"Thank God, no." Chloe pushed her thumbs beneath the collar of her mink and lifted the fur until it brushed the bottom of her jaw. "If only I'd been more like you when I was twenty." She gave a wry chuckle. "Who am I fooling? If only I were more like you right now." Blowing a kiss in the air, she

waved good-bye with her handbag and disappeared down the hallway.

Francesca wrinkled her nose in the mirror, then jerked out the comb she had just arranged in her hair

and stalked over to her window. As she stared down into the garden, the unwelcome memory of her old encounter with Evan Varian came back to her, and she shivered. Although she knew sex couldn't be that dreadful for most women, her experience with Evan three years ago had made her lose much of her desire for further experimentation, even with men who attracted her. Still, Evan's taunt about her frigidity had hung in the dusty corners of her consciousness, leaping out at the strangest times to plague her. Finally, last summer, she'd gathered her courage and permitted a handsome young Swedish sculptor she'd met in Marrakech to take her to bed.

She frowned as she remembered how awful it had been. She knew there had to be more to sex than having someone heaving away over her body, pawing at her most private parts with sweat dripping from his armpits all over her. The only feeling the experience had produced inside her had been a terrible anxiety. She hated the vulnerability, the unnerving sense that she had relinquished control. Where was

the mystical closeness the poets wrote about? Why wasn't she able to feel close to anybody?

From watching Chloe's relationships with men, Francesca had learned at an early age that sex was a marketable commodity like any other. She knew that sooner or later she wouid have to permit a man to make love to her again. But she was determined not to do so until she felt completely in control of the situation and the rewards were high enough to justify the anxiety. Exactly what those rewards might be, she didn't quite know. Not money, certainly. Money was simply there, not something one even thought about. Not social position, since that had been very much assured her at birth. But something… the elusive something that was missing from her life.