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  “Two,” he said. “We’ll probably be charged with two murders.” He picked up the TV remote control. “You want to watch a movie? Or we can have my cousin bring us any video we want.”

  “No!” she shouted. “I don’t want to watch any movie. I want to—”

  “I think you should calm down,” Ace said patiently; then he went to the table and poured her another glass of champagne. “Here, drink this. Eat some chocolate. And there’s cheesecake topped with fresh raspberries. You have to calm down. There’s no other way than to give it up,” he said softly. “You’ve seen it out there. Someone tried to kill you. He, or she, was shooting at you, not at me, at you. At least in jail you might be safe from murder.”

  She downed the champagne in one drink, and Ace refilled her glass. And when she had the third glassful in her, she began to relax. At least her feeling of panic was subsiding.

  “Come on,” he said, as he held out a plate full of luscious desserts. “Let’s go lie down and relax. We’re going to need rest for tomorrow.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” she asked; then, to her horror, she giggled.

  “Do you want me to?” he asked seriously.

  “I just bet you’re the life of the party, Ace Montgomery. Tell me, why are you called Ace if your real name is Paul?” she said as she followed him into the bedroom.

  “I was first in my class—Ace,” he said without smiling as he put the plate on the single, huge bed that took up a good portion of the room. “I should have asked for two beds,” he said.

  “Why? We’ve slept together before and in a much smaller bed than this one.”

  “Maybe you slept,” Ace muttered, then picked up the remote control. He stretched out on the bed, but he was so far away from Fiona that they might as well have been in separate rooms.

  She was eating cheesecake, and all the champagne seemed to quiet something inside her. And seemed to clarify her mind.

  “The public seems to have judged me and found me guilty, so even if I do stand trial for a crime I didn’t commit, I’ll still be found guilty,” she said quietly. “Maybe I should try to fight this thing.”

  Ace changed channels on the TV. “And maybe you could be shot. Did you forget the person who’s pursuing you?”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I’d rather die than spend the rest of my life in jail.”

  Ace made no answer to that, and if he hadn’t been so still, she would have thought he wasn’t listening.

  “Don’t you see? Unless I clear my name, I’ll never have a life. Even if I beat the charges through a trial, I’ll still be tainted and I’ll never get another job in the toy industry.”

  She waited for him to respond, but he kept his eyes straight ahead. But she could see that his shirt was moving quickly over his heart. He’s working to stay calm, she thought. He’s trying to keep himself still so I can say what’s on my mind.

  “But if I clear my name, that’s a different story,” she said softly, leaning toward him.

  “And how do you do that?” Ace asked just as softly. The volume on the TV was so low that she could barely hear it. “The police and the lawyers plus half a dozen detectives haven’t been able to find out anything that could come close to clearing us.”

  “That’s because you and I have to find out what we know.” She took another breath. “Separate us and we’ll never find out the truth.”

  Ace turned to face her, and his eyes were intense. “What if we find out really horrible things about your father?”

  “What if we find out really horrible things about your uncle?” she shot back at him. “I think he’s involved in this too.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Or what if I find out some of the secrets you’re so carefully hiding from me?”

  “You mean like your secret that Kimberly is a doll?”

  Fiona threw up her hands and lay back on the bed. “Is that supposed to be a revelation? It’s shocking that you didn’t know who she was. Do you know about anything at all except birds? I guess if I’d ever made Kimberly an ornithologist, you’d know all about her. Or maybe I should just put wings on Kimberly herself.”

  “Not a bad idea. You could make a bird doll to replace the alligator you destroyed. A sort of crocodoll.”

  Fiona’s growing anger immediately left her, and she laughed. “You can’t imagine how much it would cost to manufacture a top quality fashion doll, then launch her. You’d have to be as rich as Bill Gates to do something like that.”

  He took time to reply to that, as though he was thinking about her statement. “You mean like Disney drawing a few cartoons, then franchising replicas of the characters?”

  “Disney, Star Wars …” She looked at him. “And Raphael.”

  “And we’re back to the beginning. It’s what got us into all this in the first place.”

  “But what’s going to get us out?” Fiona asked quietly. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

  “The lawyers will. They’ll investigate, and there are detectives trying to solve this thing. And my cousin—”

  Fiona could no longer stay still. She got off the bed and walked to the foot, to stand between him and the TV. “Why do you trust those people so much? It’s your life involved too. For all that the papers seem to have disregarded you in this—after all, you’re not famous, you didn’t create a doll like Kimberly—but you are involved in this.”

  “What choice is there?” Ace said, moving his head to try to look around her, as though he was much more interested in the TV than in what she was saying. “We can’t continue as we are. You can’t stand living in cabins that don’t have hot-and-cold running water, and you break down at every little revelation. You’re too soft to stand it on the outside.”

  So many words went through Fiona’s head that she couldn’t get them all out. “Soft?” she said, and her quiet tone was louder than a shout. “I am soft? I raised myself, you … you … Everything I am I did myself, without any help from anybody.”

  She put her hands on her hips and began to pace back and forth at the end of the bed. “Do you know how I got started with Kimberly? I created her, that’s how. When I got out of college, I had no connections, nothing; I might as well have been an orphan. And I was not going to use my friends as ladder rungs. ‘That poor little Burkenhalter girl,’ is what I was called. But I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.”

  Turning, she glared at him as he was stretched out on the bed, his ankles crossed, one arm behind his head, the remote in his other hand, and gazing up at her, a bland expression on his face. Soft! she thought.

  She resumed her pacing. “After a couple of years of dead-end jobs, I got a job as a personal assistant to an executive at Davidson Toys. I thought I was going to help create, but she just wanted me to fetch her coffee and pick up her dry cleaning. I was little more than a maid, and paid about as much as one.”

  Turning, she raised her arm and pointed at him. “But I didn’t let that get me down. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open, and one day I heard—” Fiona had to take a deep breath before she could say the man’s name.

  Her voice lowered and she calmed down. “I heard James Tonbridge Garrett say that he’d give the earth for a B clone.” Fiona glared at Ace. “I do hope you know who that is.”

  Ace nodded, his face still showing no emotion.

  “I didn’t sleep for three days and nights,” she said, over her anger now. Turning, she looked toward the curtained window. “I thought about nothing but making … not just a new toy but a whole new concept in the doll world. I created a doll with a story, a story that changed twice a year as she learned and grew as a person.”

  She looked back at Ace. “I hired an artist to draw my ideas, then pushed my way into Garrett’s office one Monday morning and presented the whole concept to him.”

  Ace didn’t say anything for a while, just lay there looking at her.“I see. You’re great in the business world. As long as the surroundings are clea