Eccentric high fashion meets buttoned-up Madison Avenue in Danielle Steel’s captivating tale of two perfect-for-each-other people from two wildly different worlds. In a fresh, funny look at what happens when a woman who has everything finally meets her match, Danielle Steel proves that, in life and love, it’s never too late for a second chance.

As editor-in-chief of New York’s leading fashion magazine, Fiona Monaghan lived a life as hectic and high-toned as the fashion world itself, jetting back and forth between her stylish Manhattan brownstone and the couture shows of Europe. With closets stuffed with Fendi, a snoring bulldog named Sir Winston sharing her bed, and a houseman who favors gold lamé and borrows her shoes, Fiona was utterly content with her life. Until the sweltering June day John Anderson strolled into her office.

After a dinner date left them both wanting more, Fiona impulsively invited John to the Paris couture shows. And in the most romantic city in the world, somewhere between the magic of the runway and the stroll along the Seine, Fiona let this man into her heart. A widower with two daughters, John Anderson was nearly Fiona’s opposite in every way. As conservative as she was freewheeling, John was both amused and appalled by Fiona’s world of high-strung designers, anorexic models, and high-heeled housemen. But within weeks of their return to New York, John was making friends with Sir Winston—and Fiona was making room in her closets.

It didn’t take long for the dominoes to start falling. First, John introduced Fiona to his daughters, their bloodthirsty Pekingese, and a snarling housekeeper straight out of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was hate at first sight. Then, after a dinner party with John’s biggest client goes disastrously awry, Fiona and John’s relationship began to unravel with alarming speed. What happens next will set Fiona on a journey filled with pain and revelation, awakening and change. For when she returns to Paris alone and takes an amazing risk, an extraordinary series of events begins to unfold. And as the snow falls on the city of light, Fiona is about to get the surprise of her life: a second act she never saw coming.

In a dazzling tale of modern misadventures and career-crossed relationships, Danielle Steel brings us into the lives of two unforgettable people as they love and laugh, struggle and survive. With unerring insight, she captures the heady magic of instant attraction, the challenges of change—and the hope that comes when we dare to do it all over again.

Chapter One


The air-conditioning had just stopped working in the offices of Chic magazine on a blisteringly hot June day in New York. It was their second brownout of the day, and Fiona Monaghan looked as if she were ready to kill someone as she strode into her office after being trapped in the elevator for twenty minutes. The same thing had happened to her the day before. Just getting out of the cab on the way back from lunch at the Four Seasons made her feel as though the air had been sucked out of her lungs. She was leaving for Paris in two weeks-if she lived that long. Days like this were enough to make anyone hate New York, but in spite of the heat and the aggravation, Fiona loved everything about living there. The people, the atmosphere, the restaurants, the theater, the avalanche of culture and excitement everywhere-even the brownstone on East Seventy-fourth Street that she had nearly bankrupted herself to buy ten years ago. She had spent every penny she had on remodeling it. It was stylish and exquisite, a symbol of everything she was and had become.

At forty-two, she had spent a lifetime becoming Fiona Monaghan, a woman men admired and women envied, and came to love when they knew her well and she was their friend. If pressed, she could be a fearsome opponent. But even those who disliked her had to admit they respected her. She was a woman of power, passion, and integrity, and she would fight to the death for a cause she believed in, or a person she had promised to support. She never broke a promise, and when she gave her word, you knew you could count on her. She looked like Katharine Hepburn with a little dash of Rita Hayworth, she was tall and lean with bright red hair and big green eyes that flashed with either delight or rage. Those who met Fiona Monaghan never forgot her, and in her fiefdom she was all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, and all caring. She loved her job above all else, and had fought hard to get it. She had never married, never wanted to, and although she loved children, she never wanted any of her own. She had enough on her plate as it was. She had been the editor-in-chief of Chic magazine for six years, and as such she was an icon in the fashion world.

She had a full personal life as well. She had had an affair with a married man, and a relationship with a man she had lived with for eight years. Before that, she had dated randomly, usually artists or writers, but she had been alone now for a year and a half. The married lover was a British architect who commuted between London, Hong Kong, and New York. And the man she had lived with was a conductor, and had left her to marry and have children, and was living in Chicago now, which Fiona considered a fate worse than death. Fiona thought New York was the hub of the civilized world. She would have lived in London or Paris, but nowhere else. She and the conductor had remained good friends. He had come before the architect, whom she had left when the affair got too complicated and he threatened to leave his wife for her. She didn't want to marry him, or anyone. She hadn't wanted to marry the conductor either, although he had asked her repeatedly. Marriage always seemed too high risk to her, she would have preferred to do a high-wire act in the circus than risk marriage, and she warned men of that. Marriage was never an option for her.

Her own childhood had been hard enough to convince her that she didn't want to risk that kind of pain for anyone. Her father had abandoned her mother when her mother was twenty-five and she was three. Her mother had attempted two more marriages to men Fiona hated, both were drunks, as her father had been. She never saw her...