“In the case of forfeit of an Official Dare,” Cecilia intoned, “the Daree shall be forced to perform the Fallback Dare, which shall consist of phoning her current crush, and confessing all feelings she might have to such crush.”

She pictured that phone call in her mind.

Hello, Jake? This is your boss, Cecilia. I think you’re really, really sexy, and I want you to know that even though you are my assistant and I’m just about old enough to be your mother, I have smoky sex dreams about you almost every night.

Donna Birdsell

Donna Birdsell lives near Philadelphia, where she absolutely doesn’t get any of her ideas from her perfectly normal family, friends and neighbors.

She’s addicted to reality television and chocolate, loves a good snowstorm and cooks to relax.

She spent many years writing press releases, newsletters and marketing brochures until a pregnancy complication kept her home from the office. She needed something to keep her busy, so she started her very first novel.

Five years later her dream of becoming a published fiction author came true when The Painted Rose, her first historical romance, was released.

She is excited about writing for Harlequin NEXT. You can reach Donna through her Web site at www.DonnaBirdsell.com.

Madam of the House

Donna Birdsell

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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From the Author

Dear Reader,

I’m an ’80s junkie.

What can I say? The music, the fashion, the valley-girl vocabulary. Totally awesome!

I was in high school in the ’80s, and the decade brings back fond memories of big hair, big shoulders, big belts and big dates.

It also brings back fond memories of hanging out with my girlfriends, gossiping, doing our nails in study hall, debating who was the cutest boy in Spanish class and which guy from The Breakfast Club would probably be the best kisser. (I always voted for Emilio Estevez.)

I got many letters from readers who said the first Truth or Dare book, Suburban Secrets, brought back lots of good memories for them, too. I hope this book does the same. I also hope it brings a brief, thoughtful moment about why we, as a society, view older-woman/younger-man relationships with relative disdain.

Most of all, though, I hope it makes you laugh.

Come visit my Web site at www.DonnaBirdsell.com, where you can take an ’80s quiz, e-mail me, or share your own memories by posting a message to my blog.

Best wishes,

Donna Birdsell

P.S. Many thanks to Susan Yannessa for her help with the real estate particulars. Of course, any mistakes are purely my own!

For Laina.

You should write a book.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 1

“Kid,” Monty had told her, a half-smoked Cuban cigar dangling between his teeth—the permanent accessory accompanied all of Monty’s words of wisdom—“the best piece of advice I can give you is this—personal availability is the key to making sales. When you get a call from a potential buyer, drop everything.”

Cecilia Katz, known in southeastern Pennsylvania real estate circles as The Madam of the Million-Dollar Deal, had come to realize that everything in life could somehow relate back to the tenets imparted to her by her late mentor, Montgomery Frye.

Monty Frye was a firm believer that real estate equaled life. That if you didn’t put your whole heart and soul into a sale, you weren’t worth the paper your license was printed on. That if you weren’t willing to forsake all else to meet a client for a showing, you may as well be selling time-shares in the Poconos.

So when the muffled strains of “Viva Las Vegas” echoed through the silence of St. John’s Episcopal Church, distracting Monty’s mourners from one of the most uninspired eulogies Cecilia had ever sat through, she didn’t hesitate to answer her cell phone.

She dug through her purse, finding it wedged between a half-eaten PowerBar and an electronic lockbox she needed to put on the door of a house she’d just been contracted to sell.

“This is Cecilia,” she whispered into the phone.

The elderly woman beside her gave her an acid look.

“Hang on.” Cecilia hunkered into a crouch, working her way to the far end of the pew while, at the pulpit, a puffy-eyed golf buddy extolled the virtues of Monty’s tee shot.

She hurried up the side aisle of the church, through the vestibule and out the red, arched front door into a blinding October morning.

“Okay. What’s up?” She lit her first cigarette of the day, sucking the smoke deep into her lungs. Her exhale doubled as a sigh of relief.

“Marcia Hagstrom wants to look at the Grove place again.” The voice of Jake Eamon, her assistant, cut in and out over the crappy connection.

Jake was manning her phone at Belkin-Frye Real Estate while Cecilia and most of the other agents from the office attended the funeral for her unfortunate mentor, who had dropped dead of a heart attack during negotiations on an eight-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath estate home on the Main Line.

Cecilia hadn’t been shocked at the news, but she had been saddened by it. Monty had been her chaperone into the world of real estate, her adviser, her friend and—when she’d finally hit her stride—her stiffest competition. He was now, of course, stiffer than ever.

Still, she felt absolutely no guilt over the fact that she’d left in the middle of the service to take a call. Monty would have done the same—especially these days, when sales were hard to come by.

“You’re kidding me,” Cecilia said, dragging on the cigarette. “She wants to look at it again?”

“Says she’s bringing her husband, but they need to do it right away. Maybe she’s really serious this time.”

Yeah, thought Cecilia, and maybe when I get home I’ll find George Clooney waiting for me in the bedroom in a tuxedo, with a bottle of Cristal and a dozen roses.

She crushed out the cigarette beneath the toe of her ridiculously expensive black patent-leather pump. “All right. Let’s hope the third time’s a charm. Tell them I’ll meet them at the house in—” she checked her watch “—twenty-five minutes.”

She headed for the Carmona Red Porsche Cayenne her husband had surprised her with two years ago, when times were better. Much better.

Now Ben was gone, and when she looked at the pricey SUV, all she could see were the seventeen payments she still owed.

She slid onto the black leather of the driver’s seat and rested her head on the steering wheel. She wasn’t a religious person—she’d pretty much ditched the strict Catholicism she’d been raised on when she married a nonpracticing Jew—but she figured as long as she was this close to a church, it couldn’t hurt to pray.

“Dear God,” she said into the silence of the car. “It’s been fourteen years since my last confession. I have a lot to answer for, I know. And I will, soon. I promise. But right now I need a favor.” She took a deep breath. “I really, really need to make this sale. I would appreciate it. And I’ll try to keep the sinning to a minimum. Thank you.”

She made the sign of the cross, lit another cigarette and pulled out of the lot.

“See you, Monty.”

If there was real estate in the afterlife, Monty probably already had his license.

AFTER TWO LAPS through the 8,000-square-foot house and twenty minutes camping out in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet, Cecilia still couldn’t get a read on Grant Hagstrom. Apparently, neither could his wife.

“So? What do you think, darling?” Marcia linked her arm through her husband’s.

Cecilia held her breath.

Grant Hagstrom frowned, the wrinkles on his forehead creating a relief map of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. “It’s a little ostentatious for my taste.”

This from a man with an electric-pink tie and a diamond pinky ring the size of a Frisbee.

Marcia’s surgically altered smile grew painfully tight. “Ms. Katz, may I speak to my husband alone, please?”

“Of course.”

Cecilia left them in the closet and went downstairs to the massive kitchen, where miles of sandalwood cabinets had undoubtedly required the clear-cut logging of at least an acre of Peruvian rainforest.

She sighed. The house really was ostentatious.

From the kitchen she could see the great room, which featured, as her entry in the Multiple Listing Service touted, “Gorgeous Twin Stone Fireplaces!” at either end, and “Fabulous Exposed Oak Beams!” across the ceiling.

Ostentatious, perhaps. But it was a great place. One of a kind.

The couple who owned the house had thrown some legendary parties, complete with helicopter rides, live elephants, fire eaters and—during one unseasonably warm Christmas—imported snow.

Don Grove was a semiretired music company executive who liked to show his clients a good time. Rumor had it the cops had been called out more than once to break up cat-fights between warring pop divas.

But the Groves had decided to move permanently to their home in London, and Cecilia had been trying to unload the house for nearly nine months. True, a place like this didn’t sell overnight. But she hadn’t earned her reputation as a closer by sitting on her high heels.

Last year she’d sold more than forty-two million dollars’ worth of prime suburban Philadelphia real estate. She’d been in the Platinum Club at Belkin-Frye five years running. This was her forte.

She’d never had this much trouble selling a house before. And she had never needed to sell a house more. If the Hagstroms bought this place it would mean a huge commission, with her as both the listing agent and the selling agent. Six percent of three-point-two million dollars. Minus Belkin-Frye’s twenty-percent cut of that commission, of course.

She could make up a lot of ground with that chunk of change. She hadn’t pulled in a check like that for more than a year. The real estate market had been leveling off, and demand for these types of homes—costly showpieces that required a fortune in upkeep—had dwindled. Unfortunately for her, they were the bulk of her business. She’d become a seller of “exclusive” properties.

She gnawed on a fake fingernail, watching as the Hagstroms emerged onto the flagstone terrace by the pool. Through a set of French doors, she could see Marcia’s preternaturally smooth face, the red slash of her mouth forming the suggestion of a frown. Grant’s back was toward the window, his bulk shifting beneath his wife’s glare. Or what would have been a glare, had recent Botox treatments not made all forms of facial expression temporarily impossible.

“Come on, Marcia. Work it,” Cecilia whispered. And then she closed her eyes and prayed again.

Wow. Twice in one day.

God wasn’t going to know what to do with herself.

JAKE MET CECILIA at the reception desk, looking like he just stepped off the pages of a Neiman Marcus mailer in a moss-green sport jacket and gold striped tie. With his dark hair and money-green eyes, he drew slavering looks from every female in the office—and a few men, too.

Jake walked Cecilia back to her office. “So?”

Cecilia plunked her bag down on her desk and collapsed into the leather executive chair. “They passed.”

Jake shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. They’re the only ones who’ve even looked at the place in three months.”

Jake came up behind her and kneaded the knots in her shoulders with the strong, gentle touch of one who had worked his way through college as a masseur. “I have faith in you. If you can’t sell that house, nobody can.”

Cecilia sighed and closed her eyes, ignoring the butterflies in her stomach that sprang to life whenever Jake touched her. He was her assistant, for crying out loud. Her very young, very impressionable assistant. And she was, if not actually at least technically, still married.

But Jake had a knack for making her feel good.

Beneath his buttoned-down good looks beat the heart of a true flower child. His meditation/yoga/karma kind of attitude infused an air of calm into her hectic life and gave her momentary glimpses of what life might be like if she weren’t so driven.

And although his eternal optimism drove her crazy, he made up for it by being so much fun to look at.

Jake ended the massage, letting his hands linger a bit too long on her shoulders. Or was that just her imagination?

Or maybe a little wishful thinking? Her mind whispered.

Oh, boy. She was sinning again, wasn’t she?

She raised her eyes heavenward. “Sorry!”

“Sorry for what?” Jake asked.

“Not you. Never mind.” She scooted her chair up to her desk and shuffled some papers around. “Any other calls while I was out?”

“I don’t know what’s on your voice mail, but I only got one. Some woman named Dannie. I left the slip on your desk.”

“Dannie?” Cecilia dug through the piles on her desk. It had to be Dannie Peters—now Dannie Treat—her best friend from high school. Or one of them, anyway.

She and Dannie, Grace Poleiski and Roseanna Richardson had all run around together. They’d been inseparable, cutting classes, smoking in the girls’ room and doing each others’ nails in study hall.

She retrieved the pink message slip and checked the number. Yep, it was her. She picked up the phone and punched in Dannie’s number with the eraser end of a pencil.

“Hello?” As it always did, Dannie’s familiar voice sucked Cecilia directly back to 1984, when her legs were skinny and her hair was big, and her main concern was whether or not she’d let her current boyfriend get to second at the movies on Friday night.

“Hey, Dannie.”

“Cecilia!”

“What’s up? I haven’t heard from you in while. You doing okay?”

Cecilia heard shrieking in the background, and then Dannie’s muffled voice. “Richard Andrew Treat. Get the Tinkertoy out of your sister’s nose right now. And don’t give me that look.” Heavy sigh into the phone. “Sorry. Boys.”

“Say no more.” Cecilia’s own son was pretty mellow, but she remembered how her brothers could have brought a Marine drill sergeant to tears when they were kids. “What’s going on?”

“We’re having a last-minute girls’ night out,” Dannie said. “I talked to Roseanna yesterday, and we both agreed we could use a little fun. How about you?”

“Count me in. Where?”

“Philly. A bar in Center City called Caligula. They have an eighties night there that’s supposed to be a riot.”

“Sounds great. What time?”

“How about eight-thirty? We’ll get a jump on the young’uns.”

“Remember when our nights out didn’t even start until eleven?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember.”

Cecilia heard an awful screeching noise on the other end, then Dannie yelling, “Richard! Matchbox cars do not belong in the garbage disposal!” Dannie came back on the line, breathless. “Cecilia, I have to run. But I’ll see you tonight?”

“Absolutely.”

Cecilia placed the phone in the cradle and smiled. It would be great to see her old friends again. Especially Dannie, who’d been going through a rough time lately.

Her husband had died suddenly eight months before, on a business trip off the coast of Mexico, leaving Dannie with four kids under the age of six.

Cecilia sighed. Life hadn’t gone the way either of them had imagined it would when they were filling out their M.A.S.H. books and conferring with their Magic 8 Balls in study hall.

CHAPTER 2

Not every property is a winner. The outside might be mint, but the inside could look like crap in a blender.

Monty could have been talking about Ben. Mint on the outside, crap in a blender on the inside.

It was still strange, though, after four months, to come home and not see him sitting in sweatpants and a T-shirt at the computer. He’d be watching a stock ticker scroll across the bottom of the screen, the blue-gray light illuminating the dark stubble on his chin, Coke cans and junk-food wrappers littering the floor around him.

There had never been a “Hi, honey. How was your day?” Or, “You look exhausted. Should I cook dinner?”

Maybe a “Banco de Chile is down two points, but it’s going to rally. I can feel it.” Or “I just bought five hundred shares of Sara Lee at rock bottom.”

In reality, Ben’s self-proclaimed skill at predicting stock performance sucked. Big time. Before Cecilia had discovered that, though, he’d managed to lose more than sixty thousand dollars of their joint savings day-trading on the Internet.

She kicked her shoes off near the door and pressed the button on the answering machine sitting on the hall table.

“Ms. Katz. This is Melvin Weber from the Catalina School again.” A dry, clipped male voice emanated from the machine. Cecilia’s stomach did a little flip. “I’m calling to remind you that we haven’t received payment for this semester. Please let us know when we can expect it.”

“Ugh.” Cecilia exhaled. She stared at the blinking light on the machine. Seven more messages, most of them undoubtedly similar to the one she just heard.

Unable to listen without some sort of fortification, she shed her jacket, unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and grabbed a bag of M&M’s from the pantry.

As she munched on a handful, she leafed through the pile of mail she’d brought in.

Bills.

Visa. American Express. Lord and Taylor. Boxwood Country Club.

She was still paying off charges from a year ago. Most of them were Ben’s, but she’d done her share of frivolous spending when she’d believed there would be no end to the cash flow.

She picked up an envelope from Cyber-Trade, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t addressed to her. If Ben was going to continue to have his mail sent to the house, it was fair game. She ran a fingernail under the edge and slid the statement out.

He’d lost another six thousand dollars? Where was he getting the money? He’d cleaned out their joint accounts long ago.

She picked up the phone and dialed Ben’s mother’s house. Ben answered on the first ring.

“I just opened your statement from Cyber-Trade by accident.”

Silence.

“Where are you getting this kind of money, Ben?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it? I’m sitting here busting my butt, trying to pay off the debts you left me with, and you’re losing another six thousand dollars?”

“I had some money in savings at work. I never closed out the account when they laid me off, so they mailed me a check last week.”

“Then you should have sent it to me, to pay some bills.”

“But I’m going to make a killing, Cece. I have a really hot lead on an IPO—”

“Ben, stop,” she said. She rubbed a spot on her forehead that had all the markings of an impending tension headache. “Ever since you lost your job, you’ve done nothing but sit in front of the computer. I know it’s hard to get back out there, but you have to try.”

“I’m not ready yet.”

“Well, when do you think you’ll be ready? We’ve got bills piled up to the ceiling, and I can’t handle them anymore.”

“That isn’t all my fault, you know. I’m not the one with a closet full of five-hundred-dollar shoes. And you’re the one who wanted Brian in that private school. It’s costing us a damn fortune.”

“You mean it’s costing me a damn fortune,” she snapped. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “He’s got problems, Ben. He needs help.”

“The kid would be fine if you’d just leave him alone. Give him some time.”

Ben steadfastly refused to acknowledge the complexity of their son’s difficulties. It didn’t help that all three developmental pediatricians she’d gone to had given them different diagnoses. One put Brian on the autistic scale. Another called it a language delay. The third said he’d catch up with the other children, eventually.

When Brian was a toddler, Ben had insisted his social issues were merely shyness, his speech difficulties just “a boy thing.” But as Brian got older, Ben handled the problems by simply ignoring them.

Cecilia, on the other hand, had always taken an aggressive approach. When the school district refused to provide therapy for him because there was no clear diagnosis of his difficulties she discovered the Catalina School.

It had been a godsend. It was a place where her son could get intensive daily therapy and live with other children who had the same types of problems, and it was close enough to visit every weekend.

Although Brian’s first few weeks away had almost killed her, their son had adjusted beautifully to the boarding school and was improving every day.

“Brian is getting a fantastic education at the Catalina School,” she said to Ben. “But that kind of individualized attention doesn’t come cheap.”

“That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Money.” Ben’s tone was bitter.

“In this case, yes. When it can pay for the best education for our son, it does.”

“Why is everything about Brian? Ten years it’s been all about him. I needed a little attention, too, you know. I could have used some sympathy.”

Cecilia squeezed her eyes closed. “I was there for you, Ben. I tried to be understanding. I know what you’re going through is hard, but you’ve got to pull it together.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I want you to see someone,” she said. “A psychologist or a psychiatrist or something. I really think you have an addiction.”

“An addiction?”

“Yes, a day-trading addiction. It’s like gambling. How much do you have to lose to stop?”

“You’re always blowing things out of proportion,” he argued.

“You don’t think losing almost seventy thousand dollars qualifies as a problem?” She could feel a tiny vein pulsing in her forehead.

“It takes money to make money.”

How many times had she heard that? Enough to know that he’d never change his mantra.

She rubbed the vein in her forehead and forced herself to calm down. “Whatever. Just send me some money before you blow it all on your IPO, okay?”

“Great. Thanks for the vote of confidence.” The dial tone hummed in her ear.

He’d hung up on her. Again.

She grabbed a glass of wine and walked out on the deck, lighting a cigarette and staring out over the lawn.

The green of the seventh hole of Boxwood Country Club, the golf course her development was built around, winked like an emerald through the trees. In one corner of the yard sat a little patch of hard, brown dirt.

Brian’s garden, his project for the past summer.

Unfortunately, he’d planted it in a section of the yard that got about thirteen minutes of mild morning sunlight, and never managed to grow more than a single daffodil and a couple of small, rubbery carrots.

They’d eaten the carrots one night with dinner, and she’d never seen her son so proud.

She smiled. He was allowed to come home for the long Columbus Day weekend, and she had lots of things planned. A trip to the aquarium in Camden, and maybe the Franklin Institute. He loved exploring the giant replica of the human heart there, and putting his hand on the static generator so his hair stood on end.

Someday, she hoped, he’d be living with her again, and they could do fun things all the time, not just on long weekends and during the summer.

She blinked against the stinging behind her eyes— Cecilia Katz did not cry—and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray she kept on the deck.

At least she had a night out with the girls to look forward to.

The last time they’d gone out, they’d ended up in Atlantic City at three in the morning, playing craps with a busload of senior citizens from the Pleasant Park Rest Home in Jersey City.

One hot roller, an octogenarian named Myra, walked away with a stack of twenty-five-dollar chips as long as her liver-spotted arm. But Cecilia and her friends hadn’t been so lucky. They’d cleaned all the change out of the bottoms of their purses, maxed out their debit cards, and had to pay the tolls on the way home with a credit card.

But damn, it had been fun.

She needed another night like that. Desperately.

“Let’s face it, Cecilia,” she said out loud. “You need a lot of things desperately.”

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