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time to get used to her parents being apart before asking her to accept someone else in her father’s life. Not that she and Vivienne didn’t meet, because they did, but the troubled child’s fear of someone stealing her beloved daddy’s affections had made her hostile to Vivienne in a way that had caused several rows between her and her father. However, Vivienne had remained determined to work at it, and Miles wouldn’t be dissuaded from envisaging a future with a new wife, and perhaps even a new family that would give Kelsey the siblings she’d always lacked.
    Quite what Kelsey might have thought of her father’s plans they’d never found out, because one Saturday evening, while they were in Devon and Kelsey was spending the weekend with a friend, Miles had received a call from his deputy editor warning him that
The News on Sunday
, clearly short of a story that weekend, was going to make a splash of his relationship with Vivienne.
    Miles had been furious. Since he and Jacqueline were no longer together he could hardly be accused of cheating, so there was no doubt in his mind that the story was being run out of malice. The editor of
The News on Sunday
detested Miles with a Wagnerian fervour. Not that the animosity had shown in the article, far from it. Gareth Critchley was much too clever for that. He’d merely congratulated Miles on finding true love at last, because no one could have deserved it more after all he’d been through with his tragically disturbed wife. Then Critchley had sat back to watch the fallout that only he, Miles and a handful of others had known would follow.
    It hadn’t taken long, because within days Jacqueline was back from the States, by which time Vivienne and Miles were in London, and the scenes that followed would remain with Vivienne for ever. There had been no way she and Miles could have stayed together after that, for Jacqueline had shown them then, in the worst way imaginable, how far she was prepared to go to keep them apart.
    Now, a little over two years later, just as Vivienne was starting to feel she might be able to get on with her life, Miles was calling to tell her Jacqueline had disappeared.
    ‘OK, boss, if you don’t want to answer the phone I will,’ Kayla declared, plonking a steaming mug of coffee on the desk, and like the chirpily efficient assistant she was, she snatched up the nearest receiver, saying, ‘Kane and Jackson, the one and only Kayla speaking. Oh hi, Alice. Yes, she’s still here.’
    Vivienne picked up the phone. ‘Before we go any further,’ she said to Alice, ‘Miles has just called.’
    At that Kayla’s head came up and Alice fell silent.
    ‘So what did he say?’ Alice finally managed.
    ‘Apparently Jacqueline’s disappeared. No one’s seen or heard from her for about three weeks.’
    ‘Oh my God,’ Alice groaned.
    ‘Shit,’ Kayla murmured.
    ‘This goes to the top of the agenda when I get there,’ Alice stated. ‘Whatever else is going on in our world, nothing takes precedence over this.’
    An hour later Alice was pacing up and down the office, a hand buried in her wavy, golden hair, a deep frown darkening her softly freckled features.
    ‘So no one actually knows if she came to London?’ she said, referring to Jacqueline. ‘I mean, she could have waited for Miles to drive away from the station, then hopped into a taxi and gone anywhere?
If
what he’s telling us is true.’
    Vivienne started. ‘Why on earth would he lie?’ she challenged.
    Alice looked at her incredulously, then slightly tempering her instinctive response to such naivety, she said, ‘Try to remember, you’re the one who’s in love with him. The rest of us aren’t clouded by rose-tinted specs, or delusions of romance that—’
    ‘Don’t be mean,’ Kayla interrupted. ‘She didn’t ask to fall in love—’
    ‘Kayla, when you’ve got a grip on reality that doesn’t involve Hollywood, you can speak,’ Alice snapped, ‘until then, please leave it