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as we know it . She made herself let go of the knob.
    Rose looked up as Olivia went past her desk. "Well? How did it go? Is he really
    going to fire poor Melwood?"
    Automatically, Olivia gave her aunt a reassuring smile. "Of course not."
    "Hmm." Rose narrowed her eyes, not entirely convinced. She slanted a long
    glance at the closed door of Jasper's office.
    Olivia had great respect for her aunt's instincts when it came to this sort of
    situation. Rose had commanded her desk for nearly a decade. She was fifty-three
    years old and attractive in the typical Chantry manner, with red-brown hair and
    smoky-green eyes.
    There was a comfortable, maternal roundness about Rose. Olivia knew it often
    misled strangers. They tended to overlook her razor-sharp instinct for the rumors,
    gossip, and other forms of unofficial information that flowed through Glow. Rollie
    had called her his weathervane. She could have made a fortune working for one of
    the tabloids , he'd said.
    He had explained to Olivia that he relied on Rose to give him early warning of
    everything from impending births, divorces, and office romances to low-level
    grumbling among the staff.
    Never, ever underestimate the value of information , Rollie had added. You can
    never have too much of it .
    Rose sighed. "It's true that poor Melwood hasn't been himself lately. That brush
    with cancer, you know. He's going to be all right, but it gave him a terrible scare."
    Olivia hesitated. "What kind of cancer was it?"
    "Basal cell carcinoma. A type of skin cancer." Rose rattled off the diagnosis with
    the smooth precision of a dermatologist. "Rarely fatal if caught early. But Melwood
    was badly shaken."
    "The word cancer has that effect on people."
    "True. And Melwood is something of a hypochondriac." Rose eyed the closed
    door again with a foreboding look. "I'm afraid his problems may be only the
    beginning around here."
    "What do you mean?"
    "There's change in the wind," Rose muttered ominously. "I can feel it."
    "Don't panic," Olivia said crisply. "I'm still here, remember? And I own darn
    near half the company. I can handle Jasper Sloan."
    "I hope so," Rose said.
    "I've got to run."
    Rose's gaze sharpened. "By the way, I assume you've heard about your cousin
    Nina? Beth says it looks as if she and Sean Dane are getting very serious."
    Olivia was proud of herself. Her smile did not flicker by so much as a millimeter.
    "I heard."
    "Life is strange, isn't it?" Rose mused. "Who would have thought that Nina would
    have fallen in love with Logan Dane's brother?"
    "Go figure. See you later, Aunt Rose." Olivia fled past her and escaped into the
    relative safety of the hallway.
    What in the world was the matter with her? she wondered as she walked swiftly
    toward the elevators. It certainly wasn't the gossip concerning her cousin Nina's
    growing relationship with Sean Dane that had produced this funny hot-cold feeling.
    She had heard the rumors days ago.
    It was Jasper's invitation to dinner that shook her. She was acting as if he had
    suggested an affair instead of a working dinner.
    An affair . Now there was a concept.
    If social dinners with interesting men were rare events in her life, the number of
    affairs she'd had fell into the vanishingly small category. There had been no serious
    relationships at all since Logan had died.
    She refused to count those brief months with Crawford Lee Wilder a year and a
    half ago. That had been a mistake, she thought, but not an affair, thank God. Some
    sense of intuition had made her resist his slick, polished attempts to get her into
    bed.
    She was aware that some of her relatives, Aunt Rose, for example, feared that she
    was secretly carrying a torch for Logan Dane. Olivia knew that was not the case, but
    she also knew that she did not want to look too closely at the real truth.
    The harsh reality, she thought, was that she had lost her nerve when it came to
    love. Give her a good, convoluted, complicated business crisis any day. Business