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  Secrets

  BOOKS BYJUDEDEVERAUX

  The Velvet Promise

  Highland Velvet

  Velvet Song

  Velvet Angel

  Sweetbriar

  Counterfeit Lady

  Lost Lady

  River Lady

  Twin of Fire

  Twin of Ice

  The Temptress

  The Raider

  The Princess

  The Awakening

  The Maiden

  The Taming

  The Conquest

  A Knight in Shining Armor

  Holly

  Wishes

  Mountain Laurel

  The Duchess

  Eternity

  Sweet Liar

  The Invitation

  Remembrance

  The Heiress

  Legend

  An Angel for Emily

  The Blessing

  High Tide

  Temptation

  The Summerhouse

  The Mulberry Tree

  Forever…

  Wild Orchids

  Forever and Always

  First Impressions

  Carolina Isle

  Someone to Love

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Deveraux, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ATRIABOOKSand colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Deveraux, Jude.

  Secrets / Jude Deveraux.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E9273S43 2007

  813'.54—dc22

  2007026300

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6495-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6495-0

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Secrets

  Prologue

  CASSIE HAD HEARDthat drowning was the easiest form of death. She had no idea how anyone could know that, since whoever said it had lived, but as she drifted down in the deep end of the pool, she decided they were right. She could feel her long hair floating upward, and all weight left her twelve-year-old body. She wasn’t trying to kill herself. No, she was just waiting for him to rescue her. But dying was interesting to think about. What if this really were the end? Smiling, she let her body relax into her thoughts. Never again would she have to hear her mother declare how easy Cassie’s life had been while her mother’s had been so difficult. “We stopped a war!” her mother, Margaret Madden, loved to say, referring to Vietnam. “No one else in history has ever done that!” Until she was ten, Cassie believed that her mother had single-handedly made the president of the United States remove the troops from the war that was never declared to be a war.

  But when Cassie was ten, an old college friend of her mother had visited them, and when she’d heard Margaret bawling out her daughter, the friend started laughing. “Maggie,” she said, and Cassie looked up in wonder because no one ever dared to call her mother “Maggie.” “You never left your classes and you told us all that we were idiots to sit around on the grass smoking pot and protesting.”

  Needless to say, that was the end of that friendship, but it had been an enlightening experience for Cassie. That was when she found out that not every word that came out of her mother’s mouth was the truth. She learned that just because someone delivered a statement with force and volume, didn’t make it a fact. From that time on, she began to see her mother for what she was: a bully and a tyrant who believed that there was only one way to do anything, and that was the way she had done everything. To her mind, if her daughter wanted to grow up to be a successful person, then she had to conduct herself exactly as Margaret Madden had. That meant going to a top school, getting the best grades, then working her way up to the head of some mega corporation.

  One time Cassie asked, “What about a husband and children?”

  “Don’t get me started,” Margaret said, then said nothing else. But she had piqued Cassie’s curiosity, so she began to secretly listen in on her mother’s conversations. Most of the discussions revealed nothing of interest, but one day Cassie had the horror of hearing her mother say that her daughter had been conceived from a one-night stand with a man she hardly knew while she was on a business trip to Hong Kong. “Defective condom,” Margaret had said without a hint of sentimentality. She was so disciplined that she hadn’t realized she was pregnant until she was nearly five months along and it was too late for an abortion. Margaret said she’d done her best to ignore the pregnancy, and that she’d meant to turn the baby over to a childless colleague, but then her boss—the person she most admired—had said he was glad Margaret was going to be raising a child. It made her seem more human. When he gave her a sterling silver rattle from Tiffany, she decided to keep the kid.

  As she did with all things, Margaret planned it carefully. She bought a house in upstate New York, hired a live-in housekeeper and a nanny, then turned the child over to them while she stayed in the city and clawed her way to the top.

  Cassie saw her mother only on alternate weekends, and had spent most of her life terrified of her.

  It was when her mother had been invited to a weeklong seminar at Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, that Cassie’s life changed. She knew about her mother’s career because Margaret Madden thought it was her duty to inform her daughter how to get ahead in the world. Margaret loved to tell how she had been raised in a middle-class household full of “morons” but that she had “risen above” them. She’d put herself through college, studying business administration, then got a job as a junior manager with a big office supply chain. In her sixth year there, the company was bought by a fledgling computer business, and Margaret was one of only three upper-employees kept. Within four years she was at the top of that company.

  By the time she’d been out of college for fifteen years, she’d been in five corporations and had moved near the head of each one. She was creative and dedicated, and every waking second of her life was given to the company where she worked.

  The trip to Williamsburg was to be pivotal. The company where she was second in command was about to be bought by an enormous conglomerate, and at the end of the week she was either going to be jobless or made executive vice president.

  The only problem had been that Cassie’s latest nanny had broken her ankle and the housekeeper was on vacation, so there was no one to take care of the child. Margaret had used the inconvenience to her advantage when she’d called her boss and said she so rarely got to see her beloved daughter, could she please take the child with her? The man had been pleasantly impressed and agreed readily.

  Cassie and her mother were given one of the many pretty, two-bedroom guest condos, and Cassie had been left on