Minutes later, fully dressed, she left the RV with her head held high and her body humming. The vibrations carried her through the rest of the day.

If the night before had been given over to dalliance, that one was all business. The rest of Mitch’s furniture had arrived and he and Shay sat on a sinfully soft sofa in his library, facing each other instead of the crackling fire, half-buried in scrapbooks and old photographs.

As she explained what she knew of her mother’s life, Shay found herself thrust from one emotional extreme to another, from laughter to tears, from love to anger. Mitch only listened, making no move to touch her.

“Sometimes,” Shay confided pensively as the long evening drew toward a close, “I think she was the most selfish person on earth. Riley loved her so much, and yet…”

She looked at the small recorder between them.

“Yes?” prompted Mitch.

“I think that was the very reason that Rosamond began to lose interest in him. Finally she seemed to feel nothing but contempt. But Riley was such a good man, so decent and solid—it just doesn’t make sense!”

“Since when are legendary movie stars expected to make sense?”

Shay shrugged and then yawned. “Rosamond certainly didn’t.”

“She must have made you angry,” Mitch remarked, snapping off the recorder with a motion of his hand.

The words jarred Shay out of her sleepy stupor. Suddenly she didn’t want to talk about Rosamond anymore, and she didn’t want to talk about herself. “I’d better be going,” she said, moving to rise off the sofa.

Mitch stopped her by taking her arm in a gentle grasp. “She did make you angry, didn’t she?” he persisted quietly.

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

Shay bounded off the couch and this time there was no stopping her. “Who do you think you are?” she snapped. “Sigmund Freud?”

Mitch sat back in that cushy sofa, damn him, and cupped his hands behind his head, not saying so much as a word. Shay was reminded of the scandalous way he’d loved her in the RV earlier and she sat down in a nearby chair, her knees weak.

“Everybody has hang-ups about their mother,” she sputtered when the silence grew too long and too damning. She glared at Mitch, remembering all that Ivy had told her over the past few years. “Or their stepmother.”

Mitch sighed and stared up at the ceiling, still maintaining his attitude of relaxed certainty. “The difference is, my dear, that I can talk about my stepmother. She and I don’t get along because she was my father’s mistress before he and my mother were divorced. In effect, you could say that she took him away from us.”

“My God,” Shay whispered, feeling sympathy even though there was nothing in Mitch’s voice or manner that asked for it.

“It was traumatic at the time,” Mitch said evenly. “But Dad was a good father to me and, eventually, my mother remarried. She’s disgustingly happy.”

“But Ivy’s mother—”