“Chandler’s a real prince,” Dan muttered in disgust. He snatched up the manila envelope that lay on the table, and Phoebe’s outrage gave way to a sinking sense of dread.

“My secretary just gave it to me,” Ron said. “I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.”

Dan whipped out the magazine. Phoebe wanted to take it away from him, but she knew that would only postpone the inevitable. A page ripped as he began thumbing through it, searching for the offending photographs.

“Why bother?” she sighed. “You’ve already seen everything I’ve got.”

Ron winced. “It’s true then? You really were together in his hotel room.”

Dan turned on her. “Why don’t you just hire the Goodyear blimp so you can announce it to the whole world?”

Her fingers trembled as she cupped her now cold coffee mug. “It’s not going to happen again, Ron, but you need to know the truth.”

He looked at her like a worried father confronting a well-loved, but ill-behaved child. “I blame myself. It never occurred to me to talk to you about the impropriety of fraternizing with Dan. I should have realized— This, coupled with the photographs, is going to be a public relations nightmare. Didn’t you realize that posing nude for a magazine, even a respectable one like Beau Monde, would embarrass the team?”

“I posed for those photographs in June, a month before I inherited the Stars. With everything that’s happened, I’d forgotten about them.”

Dan still hadn’t found the photographs. He gritted his teeth. “I’m telling you this, Ronald. If we get any calls from Playboy, you’d better tie her down and gag her, because she’ll be buck naked and airbrushed before you know it.”

Abruptly, he stopped flipping and stared. Then he began to curse.

Phoebe hated the need she felt to defend herself. “Those photographs were done by Asha Belchoir, one of the most respected photographers in the world. She also happens to be a friend of mine.”

Dan whapped the page with the back of his hand. “You’re painted!”

Ron reached out. “May I?”

Dan tossed the magazine on the table as if it were a piece of garbage. It landed open, revealing a double page spread of Phoebe reclining in front of Flores’s “Nude #28,” a surrealistic portrait he had done of her not long before his death. Superimposed on Phoebe’s naked body was an exact reproduction of the section of the painting that her reclining form covered. The effect was beautiful, eerie, and erotic.

Ron turned the page to reveal an enlarged photograph of Phoebe’s breast, its nipple puckered beneath a coating of chalk white paint. Her skin had become a surrealistic canvas for miniature blue silhouettes of other breasts executed in Flores’s characteristic style.