He’d been made a fool of. The young, sexy actress had only been after him for his money. The money the Spreckles family had made after years of selling quality chocolates around the world. His grandparents had started the business at the stove of their tiny apartment in the Bronx. His father had built up the company, and Conrad and his brother had taken it global. The Spreckles name was synonymous with gourmet chocolates no one in the universe could resist.

Conrad took another sip of his drink and stared at the television. The station he was watching was covering the blackout. He expected Lorraine to come through the door at any minute. What else could she do? New York City was in chaos. When he saw her face on the screen, he jumped out of his chair and ran closer to his sixty-inch flat-screen TV. There she was in high definition, looking as beautiful as ever.

“I was just in a play—” she cooed.

“That little—” he spat. She was checking in to that exorbitantly expensive hotel! With his money! She didn’t look like a woman whose husband had just told her he had filed for divorce. Conrad grabbed the vodka bottle and refilled his glass.

I’m going to get my revenge! he thought. She is going to be sorry. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to figure out something.

The phone rang. The second he picked it up he realized he’d made a mistake. Penny, sitting in her generator-cooled house, was on the line.

“Hello, dear,” she said sweetly. “If you’re not watching, you must turn on the news…”

7

A t the wheel of her Lexus, Regan drove carefully through the darkened streets of Manhattan. Heading uptown on Tenth Avenue, she was half listening to the radio reports on the blackout. Her mind kept going back to what had just happened at the apartment. To think that someone had been in there when she arrived. Someone with a stun gun. I was lucky, she thought. Really lucky.

Who could it have been? Regan wondered as she drove. Could it have been someone from the construction crew? She didn’t think so but she did find one of the guys a bit surly and unfriendly. That doesn’t make him a criminal, she reminded herself. Well, whoever it was must have been thrilled that the blackout struck and they could make their escape without being seen and possibly identified. They won’t be nearly as thrilled when they realize they dropped their weapon.

Jack had taken the stun gun with him to have it tested for prints and see if they could trace the owner.

Regan sighed. Her mother had been concerned that she was moving into a nondoorman building. “I’m not worried about when you’re with Jack…It’s just when you go up to the apartment alone.”

As if on cue, Regan’s cell phone, which she’d programmed into the car radio, started to ring. Nora Regan Reilly, best-selling suspense writer, and Regan’s father, Luke, owner of three funeral homes in New Jersey, were in Los Angeles to meet with a producer about a television deal for several of Nora’s books. Regan pushed the OK button and answered. Her mother’s voice came through the car’s speakers.