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time had touched him. The handsome face was lined, almost gaunt. He was much thinner than I remembered. His glossy black hair was threaded with white, his once smooth, youthful skin lined, the eager fire in his eyes transmuted to icy resolve.
    “Henrie O.” And it was the familiar deep, compelling voice.
    He took my hands in his, a strong, warm, vibrant grip. We looked at each other.
    I knew what he saw. A slender, intense woman whose fire for life has not been quenched, a woman who still loves to laugh but who knows the world is bathed in tears.
    “You came,” he said simply.
    “Yes.” I kept my voice easy. I didn’t want to admit how difficult this journey had been;
    “Because—”
    I cut him off. “Let’s not look back, Chase.”
    A quick frown drew his brows down, then it was gone, like a cloud slipping by a summer sun. He dropped my hands. “All right. If that’s the way you want it.”
    “It’s the way it has to be.”
    I was prepared to turn on my heel and leave.
    He knew it. “But you came. Goddammit, you came.” He pounded a fist into his open palm. A grin of triumph curved his mobile mouth, and it was oh, so familiar, the old, reckless, daredevil Chase, on top of the world. “I feel like there’s no way I can lose, Henrie. Not now. Not with you here.” He took my elbow and propelled me to a chair near the fireplace. He remained standing. Yanking a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, he pulled one free, stuck it in his mouth, lit it.
    So he still smoked. All of us smoked when we were young. Those were the years when Lucky Green went to war, and smoking was common and quite acceptable. I managed to quit thirty-some years ago. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. Iwas sorry to see that he hadn’t. I heard almost immediately that rattly smoker’s cough.
    Dark shadows marked the hollows beneath his eyes. But most worrisome of all was the feverish quickness of his movements. That frantic edge contrasted sharply with the somnolent richness of his study: cypress paneling, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three walls, antique French parquet flooring, a Georgian mantel over the fireplace, Georgian tables and armchairs, Impressionist drawings, and a jewel-like collection of nineteenth-century music boxes.
    He paced in front of the fireplace, then impatiently tossed the cigarette onto unlit logs piled on the hearth and turned toward me.
    “Henrie—”
    “Chase, you have eighty-three million in interest on loans due in thirty-five days. If you can’t meet that payment, it will throw your entire empire—holding companies, conglomerates, and all—into bankruptcy. The word in New York and London is there’s no way you can come up with the money.” Lavinia had found out a lot in less than a day.
    His face froze in shock. Then anger crackled in his eyes with the same violence as fire licking at the edge of a forest. “So that’s the word that’s out. Listen, Henrie O, I’m going to beat the bastards. You can count on that. God, it makes me mad, the way they’ll suck up to your face and sharpen their knives behind your back. But they’re going to eat their words. Prescott Communications isn’t going down. I’ll die first. I’ve never failed—and I won’t fail now.”
    There was no mistaking the total conviction in hiswords. This was a Chase I knew well, single-minded, ruthless, absolutely certain of success.
    “No, Henrie O, I’d give anything if that was the problem. Money, hell, I can always get money. I’ve got new financing in the wings. That’s going to be all right.” With a wave of his hand he indicated that eighty-three million dollars of debt wasn’t worth talking about. “That’s no problem—if I live long enough to swing it.”
    “Live long enough? Chase, are you ill?” That could explain the thinness, the haunted look in his eyes, the quick mood swings.
    He managed a tight grin, but there was hurt in his eyes, hurt and an unwillingness to believe, and a