“Mother’s right,” Quentin, who’d been standing mutely beside her, added.

Jared shot his cousin an annoyed look. “You don’t believe that rationalization, do you? I doubt a single reporter here would care if Thomas Blackburn himself had come tonight. They just want free drinks and a chance to rub elbows with the Winstons and Sloans, although I don’t think I’ll really ever understand why.”

With a pained look on his handsome face, Quentin started to backtrack, but Annette put up a hand and he broke off. Jared sighed, not surprised. In Quentin’s place, he’d move as far from Boston as he could. Saigon was far, but Quentin was still working for his mother there-and he hadn’t said a word about not coming home. Annette had given him a year, and Jared was sure that’d be all Quentin took. Before her husband’s death, Annette’s parenting had been nonchalant, allowing her son a generous amount of freedom. All that was sharply curtailed when Benjamin Reed didn’t make it home from Vietnam. Jared didn’t think Annette loved her son any more than she had when Benjamin was alive. She was just more determined to control him, although, perversely, whenever she succeeded she was disappointed in him, more convinced he was a weakling. Jared had quit trying to figure the two of them out years ago, but he did feel sorry for his cousin. No matter what he did, Quentin would never please his mother.

Annette maintained her regal calm. “Be angry if you want,” she told her nephew. “Just get that girl out of my house.”

Which was what he did.

To her credit, Rebecca knew exactly what was going on. “I’m being booted, huh?”

She was trying to sound as if she didn’t give a damn, but Jared could see the flash of anger-and humiliation-in her eyes and red-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said tightly.

She polished off the last of her champagne. “Don’t be.”

But he was. He’d been a fool to think his aunt would have tolerated a Blackburn in her house, and if Rebecca was going to be polite and not tell him so, her grandfather had no such compunction. They took their frustrations down to West Cedar Street, but after Thomas Blackburn politely told Jared it was good to see him, he waved off their complaints without sympathy.

“What on earth did you expect?” he asked them.

Rebecca kicked off her thin-strapped shoes and paced on the worn carpet in her stocking feet. “Am I going to be damned forever for something I didn’t even do?”

It was a rhetorical question not meant to be answered, but Thomas said, “Probably,” and disappeared into the kitchen.

Jared stood awkwardly in the middle of the dimly lit parlor, a fire going to take the chill off the raw spring night. He didn’t know if he ought to leave or stick around. He was half-Winston and had to be an annoying physical reminder of the Blackburns’ loss of prestige. For centuries, their moral and intellectual rectitude had kept them within the circles of power, even to the point of having presidents consult them on any number of topics. They had been the conscience of Beacon Hill, a shining example of “doing the right thing.” They hadn’t needed money to maintain their particular kind of authority. Jared could remember when Thomas Blackburn’s name had evoked respect and his opinions had made people think, listen, change their minds.

An ambush in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta had changed all that, and even if it was something the Blackburns could get used to, it wasn’t anything Annette Winston Reed was likely to let them-or anyone else-forget. She wasn’t a forgiving woman on the best of days, and her husband was dead because of Thomas Blackburn. If she hadn’t stolen their moral authority from them, she was content not to let them earn it back.

But Jared hoped Rebecca would take his friendship with her grandfather as a cue that he didn’t share his aunt’s relentless hatred, nor her vindictiveness. Because Jared didn’t want to leave the shabby West Cedar Street house.

He wanted, he admitted to himself, to get to know Rebecca again. When they were kids, she was the big sister to a passel of brothers and had sought Jared out just because he was five years older. She had never idolized him; that wasn’t R. J. Blackburn’s style. Sometimes she’d fight and kick and yell and act like a little sister asserting her independence, and then sometimes she’d find a common ground with him that was more mature than the bond she’d share with her younger brothers-something Jared could see now. At the time, more often than not, he’d viewed her as bossy as hell and a royal pest.

“I’m choking in this dress,” she said, unclasping the hook-and-eye at the nape of her neck. She fastened her gaze on Jared. “You can go on back to the party, you know. I’ll be fine here.”

“That’d be the height of rudeness, wouldn’t it? Going back to a party my date’s been kicked out of. What do you take me for, R.J.?”

“Those are your people-”

“I won’t damn my aunt for being what she is,” he said carefully, “but I won’t defend her, either. I don’t agree with what she just did to you. If I did, I’d never have taken you there tonight in the first place.”

Turning her back to him, Rebecca fingered a small brass Buddha atop the marble mantel of the cold fireplace. “I believe you.”

Jared said nothing. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t believe him.

“Did Quentin want me out, as well?”

“I don’t think so-”

“I know, it’s hard to tell.” She faced him again, hinted a smile. “I hadn’t seen him since we left for Florida. I didn’t have a chance to say hello to him tonight, but that’s probably just as well.” Her almost-smile broadened into a real one that was filled with energy and irreverence. “He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?”

Jared laughed. “Yeah, you want his phone number? Maybe he could take you out and give his mother heart failure.”

“That’d do it, wouldn’t it?” Rebecca laughed, as well.

Thomas returned with a big bowl of crisp tortilla chips and a batch of his homemade salsa, hot enough to make Jared’s and Rebecca’s eyes tear. The old man seemed unaffected. He told them he didn’t want to hear another word about the goings-on at the Winston house on Mt. Vernon and suggested they play “that game of yours, Rebecca.”

She grinned, totally recovered from her humiliation at the hands of Annette Winston Reed. “That’s because he always wins. My grandfather,” she told Jared, “has the most incredible junk mind.”

So, as it turned out, did Jared.

A handful of Thomas’s foreign students joined them, and they played until midnight, when he finally threw them out. Jared drove Rebecca back to campus in his rented car and dropped her off at her dormitory, offering to walk her to the door.

“I’ll be fine. It’s pretty late. Sofi, Alex, Lenny and half the floor’re probably waiting up for me.”

“Tell them,” Jared said, leaning toward her and kissing her lightly, “your virgin shoes worked.”