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particularly loud and ugly sexual incident out on the island. She thought of it as rape. Hell, it had been rape. Yes, they’d had sex before and yes, they’d been making out, but on this day she’d told him she didn’t feel like taking things any further. She’d gotten up and tried to leave. He’d gotten pissed off. Called her a cock-­teaser. Grabbed her. Thrown her down on the bed, pulled her legs apart and pushed into her. She’d said she was going to tell her father but he knew she wouldn’t, since the Moseleys and the Whitbys were best friends and, at the time, she and Will had been having regular sex for over a year. She didn’t want Daddy to know about that.
    Perhaps Julia had invited him. Jules lusted for Will like a cat lusted for cream. Somehow she didn’t get it that making her desire so obvious made her less desirable to him. So much so that Will rarely gave her a second look. Except on those few occasions when he felt particularly horny and Jules allowed herself to be used to satisfy his immediate needs.
    Still, it was possible that her father had issued the invitation. He made no secret of the fact that he thought Moseley—­two years out of Penfield, two years into Yale and the only son of one of the other richest families in Maine—­was exactly the kind of man one of his daughters should marry.
    Daddy, no doubt, would think of such a marriage as a kind of business deal. R.W. Moseley and Company, the private bank Will’s family owned, had been looking after Whitby money for well over one hundred years and were major underwriters and investors in Whitby Engineering & Development (symbol WED on the New York Stock Exchange). Moseley weds Whitby. In Daddy’s mind not so much a marriage as a merger. Or possibly an acquisition. Either way a royal affair. Hell, if Daddy thought he could pull it off, he’d probably try to talk the Brits into renting him Westminster Abbey for the occasion. And maybe even the Queen’s golden coach. Failing that, he’d no doubt settle for St. Luke’s, the Episcopal cathedral on State Street where Whitbys had been christened, married and mourned since shortly after the Civil War. The wedding of the year, to be followed, no doubt, by the reception of the year in front of the cottage on the island.
    Aimée snorted. She had no intention of marrying anyone anytime soon. She had her own life to live, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to dedicate it to some hot little frat boy who wanted nothing more than to drink as much booze and screw as many women as he could in the shortest possible time.
    When Emily Welles finished her citizenship speech, she was followed by three middle-­aged former jocks who were being inducted into the Penfield Academy Athletic Hall of Fame. Aimée tuned them out and thought instead about tonight’s party. She reviewed the guest list in her mind. All her fellow graduates, plus some of Aimée’s and Jules’s other friends. Parents of graduates, some of whom were friends of the Whitbys, others who probably just wanted a chance to poke around a cottage that had been featured in three separate issues of Maine Home and Design. Checking out the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
    Most of the faculty would attend with spouses. Except for Lord Byron, who, they’d agreed, would find a way to leave Gina at home. There would also be politicians. Governor Kevin Hardesty and his wife. Maine’s First District congressman. And Senator Ann Colman, Vice Chairwoman of the Senate Armed Ser­vices Committee, who would be flying up from Washington. Daddy had instructed Charles Kraft to keep an eye on Colman and make sure she was happy. A natural assignment. Kraft liked keeping women happy. Even fifty-­something female senators.
    A few of Daddy’s lobbyists would be present to keep the politicians stoked and stroked. Plus one Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who lived up in Camden and whose books Aimée liked and an aging Hollywood star who had a house down in