Number two on the list was getting pregnant.

There had been a cold knot of terror in her belly ever since she'd used the early pregnancy test that morning — for the third time this week. Positive. All positive.

Three faulty tests in a row were hardly likely, she knew that all too well. So they hadn't been faulty. And she could no longer ignore or pretend to ignore the awful truth.

She was unmarried, going to have a baby, and the father of her child was — he had told her, by way of ending their affair — already married. Happily.

Happily married. Christ.

Men were bastards, every last one of them. Her father had been a bastard, and every man she'd been involved with in her twenty-seven years had been a bastard.

"You're just not lucky with men," her friend and fellow maid at The Lodge, Alison, had offered sympathetically when Ellie had confessed to a heartbreaking "fling" without going into details as to who the man was and where the affair had taken place. "My Charles is a fine man. He has a brother, you know."

Ellie, queasy with morning sickness and a gnawing bitterness, had informed her friend that she never wanted to hear from another man as long as she lived, no matter how fine their brothers were.

Now, as she pushed the noisy vacuum over the carpet of the Ginger Room in the North Wing, Ellie wondered miserably what was going to happen to her. She figured she had, maybe, three or four months before her pregnancy became obvious to everyone. And then she'd be fired, out on her ass with no savings and nobody to turn to for help. With a baby on the way.

If she had the nerve, she'd contact the baby's father. But he was not only wealthy and famous, he was a politician, and Ellie had the uneasy suspicion that he'd know plenty of people who could and would take care of a little problem like a pregnant ex-lover turning up. And it wouldn't be by paying her off, either.