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was of diminished capacity. With all that spouting off he used to do, telling those crazy stories about wizards and magic, it wouldn’t be hard to do. To hear him tell it you’d think the Hawks had descended straight from Merlin.”
    Kendall turned her gaze on Alice, suppressing a shiver. All those lovely, wonderful stories Aaron had told her in those last months, Kendall thought. Those magical tales that made her long for the family she’d never had. Tales that had made her feel like she had as a child, when she’d read a particularly moving story that she wished with all her heart would be true. And this woman would use them to destroy Aaron’s dream.
    “You were right. Aaron did underestimate you.”
    “He always underestimated me.” The woman gave her a baleful look. “Don’t you make the same mistake.”
    Kendall stood quietly for a moment. She felt oddly detached, as if the shock of this afternoon’s revelations had numbed her somehow. It enabled her to ask, with the appearance of only mild curiosity, “Do you really believe I was sleeping with Aaron? A man old enough to be my grandfather?”
    “I knew my husband,” Alice said icily. “He was a man of . . . carnal appetites. He could no more resist a pretty young face at sixty than he could at twenty-five.”
    “And of course it was impossible that a woman could ever resist him,” Kendall retorted with some acidity.
    For an instant, the barest fraction of time, surprise flashed in Alice Hawk’s eyes. Surprise Kendall knew instinctively was at the mere suggestion that a woman, any woman, could have resisted Aaron Hawk. And Kendall realized, with some shock, that Alice had loved Aaron. As much as she was capable of loving anyone other than herself, the woman had loved Aaron.
    And he had despised her.
    Unbidden and unwelcome, a pang of sympathy stirred in her. Sympathy for Alice Hawk, who had been married to a man she loved for forty-two years, and he’d never loved her back. And within a year of their marriage, he’d begun an affair that had lasted seven years. An affair, he had told Kendall, with the only woman he’d ever really loved.
    And suddenly Alice Hawk’s venom was pitiable.
    Or would be, she thought, if it weren’t for the fact that it could very well ruin two innocent lives: her own, and that of Aaron’s son. Again that image flashed in her mind, of a face younger than Aaron Hawk’s, yet with eyes no less fierce with intelligence, no less hard with implacability.
    “And what if Aaron’s son decides on his own to sue for a piece of Aaron’s estate?”
    Whitewood looked uncomfortable. Kendall watched as his gaze flicked to Alice, then away. He shifted in his chair and shot his cuffs yet again. Then it came to her. She looked at Alice.
    “You didn’t expect him, did you?” she said. “You were as surprised as anyone else when he showed up at the funeral.”
    “Who would have thought he would have the gall to show his face back in Sunridge?” Alice snapped.
    Kendall glanced at Whitewood with a new kind of twisted respect. “You pulled all this together in one afternoon? Perhaps you’re smarter than Aaron thought.”
    He called her a name under his breath, a crudity she decided to ignore.
    “So you haven’t had time to work that out yet?” she asked. “What you’ll do if Jason decides to take you on himself?”
    “Jason?” Alice sneered. “You’re on a first-name basis already? Perhaps you’ve already decided to throw your lot in with him. If you have, I warn you, you’ve made a serious mistake.”
    Kendall’s lips curved slightly, into what Aaron had always called her “decision” smile, because, he’d told her, it usually meant she’d made up her mind and the devil take the hindmost.
    And Aaron’s words were in her mind when she said softly, “In this case, I think it’s better the devil I don’t know than the ones I’ve just met here.”
    She turned her back on them and started toward the door.
    “I