Seidel, Kathleen Gilles Read Online Free PDF

particular shade of lipstick, then remember it was at the bottom of a huge pile of mud. She would want a certain book, she would picture exactly where it sat on the shelf, she would want to run over to the house and pick it up... then she would remember that the house, the shelf, and the book weren't there anymore.
    It was a little like after her father died, and she would think about calling him or dropping by the big Bel Air house. Then she would remember and all the hurt would start up again.
    Of course, losing her house hadn't been nearly as bad as losing her father, but it hadn't been one of life's better experiences. So it certainly wasn't the best time to hear that someone with the face of a Confederate horseman thought that her father's reputation was undeserved.
    The next morning Jill drove to her father's office. This was not the office of his production company, that had been closed after his death. The two people working in this office had managed Cass's investments during his lifetime and now ran the estate for Jill.
    A true Southerner, Cass had believed in land and had plowed every dime he ever made into California real estate. He had two sons by his first marriage, men so much older than Jill that their children were her age, but Cass had provided for them in the punishing settlement made during the bitter divorce from his first wife, Ellen. He did set up some very generous trusts for the grandchildren, whom Ellen had not allowed him to see.
    "I'm not going to leave a thing to the boys," Cass had told Jill. "That's what their mother has been telling me for twenty-five years, and I'm not going to disappoint her. I shall leave something to their children, which will make her hopping mad, but if fortune smiles upon us, she will die before me and be spared the agony of knowing that I am capable of doing the right thing."
    A glint in his eye suggested that making Ellen mad was half the reason he was setting up these trusts.
    So Jill, the only child of his short-lived second marriage, inherited the bulk of his estate. This left her beyond every euphemism of "comfortable" or "independent." She was flat-out rich, way above the ten-to-twenty million dollars of the "moderately wealthy" and solidly in the ranks of the "truly wealthy." She was, on paper at least, a centi-million-aire several times over.
    No one observing Jill's life would have a clue that she had so much money. Like almost every truly wealthy American, except for the late Malcolm Forbes, she lived quietly, having neither a yacht nor a private plane, because having yachts and private planes complicated one's life, breeding worries about staffing and logistics. Only the moderately wealthy bought yachts, planes, and flashy jewels. Only the moderately wealthy needed to show off; the truly wealthy had nothing to prove.
    This money came from her father. From her mother, Melody, Jill inherited her willowy build. She had a dancer's body—tall, with elegant, tapering fingers and a swan's graceful neck. She had narrow shoulders, and her breasts, waist, and hips moved with lithe, flowing curves. Her legs, identical to her mother's, were her best feature, gloriously long with a line of trim strength behind the glowing, tanned skin. Her height was in her legs, the extra inches naturally giving her the look other women achieved by hiking their leotards up to their hipbones or wearing high heels with their swim suits.
    She had her mother's blond hair, which she wore long, sometimes swinging loose, sometimes clipped back at her neck. Facially she resembled neither of her parents. Melody was classically pretty with the even, delicate features of a Greek statue. Jill had a stronger jaw, more definite cheekbones, fuller lips. Her mother's look was delicate, Jill's was engaging. This was consistent with her casual clothes and her informal, friendly manner, both of which disarmed anyone who had gotten his ideas about rich people from the behavior of the merely moderately