As if she’d read his mind, London pushed through the crowd and grabbed hold of his leg. He turned to tell her to get lost, but by that time she’d discovered his glass pushed deep into the potting soil.

“Leave that alone!” he whispered in a harsh voice. She glanced up sharply, a naughty twinkle in her eyes. God, if he could just step out on the balcony and grab a smoke-another vice of which his father and stepmother disapproved, though Kat was never without her gold cigarette case and Witt enjoyed his share of cigars smuggled in from Havana.

She dropped the glass back into the dirt. “Hide me from Mommy!” With a wicked little giggle, she ducked behind his legs.

“Hey, don’t get me involved in your stupid games.”

“Shh. She’s coming!” London hissed.

Great. Just what he needed.

“London?” Katherine’s husky voice drifted over the slow strains of a ballad.

Behind him, London tried to smother a giggle.

“London, where are you? Come on now…it’s time for bed. Oh, there you are!” Katherine sidestepped a group of men, her practiced smile well in place. Waving her fingers as she passed, she tracked down her wayward daughter with the precision of a bloodhound.

“No!” London cried as her mother approached.

“Come on, sweetheart, it’s nearly ten.”

“Don’t care!”

“You’d better do what she says,” Zachary offered, his gaze flicking slightly to his stepmother’s. He knew what the old man saw in his young wife. Katherine Danvers was probably the sexiest woman Zachary had ever met. At seventeen he understood about unbridled sexual desire. Hot and thundering, it could roar through a man’s body and turn his brain to mush.

“Come on.” Katherine leaned down to pick up her daughter. The silk stretched across her shapely rump and her breasts seemed to bulge a bit, as if they might fall out of her plunging neckline.