Her photograph captured not the mother Dani had known and loved and lost, but the woman Lilli Chandler Pembroke had longed to become: vivacious, sexy, independent-someone else. She had a completely different look from Mattie Witt thirty years earlier. Lilli was all Chandler, slender, fair, patrician, pretty but not exotic. She’d believed her destiny was to be the proper heiress, always gracious and elegant, never taking a wrong-a daring-step.

Until her father-in-law had cast her in his comeback movie.

Lilli’s searing performance had helped catapult Casino into the commercial and artistic success Nick Pembroke, who hadn’t done much since Mattie Witt’s defection from his life and work, had needed. Naturally he’d squandered it. No one had expected him to do anything else.

All Dani’s instincts urged her to leap out of the line and keep going, keep walking.

Twenty-five years.

Blood pounded in her ears, but she didn’t move.

She remembered herself at nine, waiting for her mother to come home. She’d sat on a wicker swing on the front porch of the Chandler cottage in her raspberry-smeared white dress, plucking a basket of petunias bald-headed until finally her white-faced father-Mattie Witt and Nick Pembroke’s only son-had come for her. She made him put the raspberries she was saving for her mother into the refrigerator. They’d molded there, untouched.

Dani stayed in the line. She didn’t look like the women on the posters. With her black eyes and short black hair, her strong features and straight, athletic figure-and her supposed recklessness-she was usually compared not to the southern Witts or the blue-blooded Chandlers but to three generations of Pembroke scoundrels.