Phyllis felt a snarl of a smile on her face, and quickly rearranged her features into their usual, placid, slightly bored expression. It didn’t do to let the mask slip; she’d learned that the hard way. The image she presented to the world was her armour, and an attractive young ‘lady’ could always expect certain things from men and society in general that a working-class guttersnipe never could. Always keep the harridan hidden, she reminded herself.

She walked to the window and looked out over the B&B’s small town garden, which lay buried under a layer of snow.

Bloody snow – when would it go? she wondered resentfully. It was really getting on her wick! Every time you went out, it froze your bloody nose and fingers and toes into icicles.

She sighed and turned away from the window. She was still thinking about Millie Vander – only now she was smiling a very different kind of smile.

All right, so things with Terry had turned into a busted flush, but that didn’t mean all was necessarily lost, did it?

A woman who didn’t like to question an obvious interloper at her own party simply because she didn’t want to make a fuss or cause an embarrassment, was almost certainly the same sort of woman who would pay handsomely not to have her dirty linen aired in public, wasn’t she?

And a woman without a backbone but with plenty of money was just what Phyllis needed right now. In fact, it was almost poetic irony, when you came to think about it. To think – Terry had planned to marry into money, and now that money was going to find its way to her.

She’d just have to think about the best way of going about things; that was all. Attractive middle-aged widows with plenty of money might seem an easy target, but sometimes … Well, you just never knew.

And she’d seen the look in Millicent Vander’s eye when she’d caught Phyllis and Terry having their little ‘chat’ in the deserted hallway just before midnight. Of course, he’d been furious with her, and the hold he’d had on her arm had been anything but lover-like, but Millicent hadn’t realised that. And she certainly hadn’t been close enough to hear that the words he’d been hissing in her ear were threats, and not sweet nothings!

No, their hostess had seen only two flush-faced people, locked together in a close and electrically charged embrace, and had jumped to the most likely conclusion. The sort of conclusion that most women, worried about their fading looks and their advancing age, would jump to on seeing ‘their’ man with a younger woman.

And the look in the society matron’s eye had been wild, hot and venomous.