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they would enjoy a cozy evening together. Tomorrow her mother and stepfather would be driving up from Manhattan to spend Thanksgiving Day with them, and the rest of the holiday weekend. She was looking forward to it, just as she knew Chloe was.
    Derek Rayner had been knighted by the queen some years before, and he and her mother were now Sir Derek and Lady Rayner. As had been predicted long ago, he was now the greatest classical actor on the English stage, and at sixty-eight a living legend.
    He had been good to her mother and to her and her children.
    Derek and her mother were childless, and so he played the role of father and grandfather to the hilt.
    But his love for them all was very genuine, and he adored Chloe.
    34 / Barbara Taylor Bradford
    Her son Miles was driving to Connecticut with the Rayners. He was her favorite son, if the truth be known, although she always tried to hide this fact from the others. She loathed playing favorites amongst her children.
    Miles was a talented artist and a brilliant set designer. Currently he was living in New York, where he was designing the stage sets for a Broadway play.
    Unlike his brother Nigel and his twin, Gideon, he had never shown any desire to go into Jardine’s, although with his artist’s eye he had always appreciated the beauty of the jewels and the other objects of art Jardine’s made.
    Despite his lack of interest in working in the family business, his grandfather had insisted he become a director since he was a major shareholder in the company. He had done so immediately.
    Jardine’s was his inheritance, and it had always been an important part of his life; his mother had seen to that.
    It was Gideon who was the true jeweler in the family; Stevie had recognized that when he was a child. He was a talented, indeed gifted, lapidary, and he had inherited his father’s love of stones, most especially diamonds. Like Ralph, he was an expert when it came to cutting stones, and as one of the chief lapidaries at Jardine’s, he was involved in the creation of the exquisite jewels that the Crown Jewellers had been renowned for over the centuries.
    Nigel, ever the businessman, and the spitting Power of a Woman / 35
    image of Bruce in so many different ways, ran the business end of the company, under her direction.
    But Nigel wanted it all for himself.
    Stevie was well aware of this these days. There were even moments when she thought her eldest son was plotting her departure from the company, planning her fall from grace.
    Now she expelled a long sigh as she strolled back to the fireplace. She stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her thoughts focused on Nigel.
    She had no real evidence to go on; it was just plain old gut instinct that told her that her son was against her. For a long time now she had seen Nigel for what he was…very much the way Bruce had been when he was a younger man—cold, calculating, controlling, and very ambitious.
    There was nothing wrong with ambition as long as it was focused in the right direction. She was the first to admit this. But it was somewhat ridiculous of her son to be ambitious at her expense. After all, the business would be his one day. He would share it with his brothers equally, of course, but he would be running it as the eldest of the three and the undoubted business brain.
    She wished she could shake off the worrying suspicion that Nigel wanted her to trip up in order for him to justify taking over from her in London. And indeed, New York as well.
    “Fat chance of that,” she muttered. Bruce would never permit it. Her father-in-law was eighty-two now, and semiretired after some terrible attacks of 36 / Barbara Taylor Bradford
    gout, which had plagued him for years. But he was as alert as ever, not a bit senile, and very spry when he was free of his crippling ailment. She was very well aware that he cared about her, even though he did not show it very often.
    Furthermore, and perhaps more to the point, he trusted her implicitly