She took the back staircase down to

She took the back staircase down to the kitchen. As she’d hoped, Margot was there, fixing an overstuffed sandwich for Travis and a salad for herself.
Margot looked up. “Hey,” she said, smiling. “You look great. Too bad you’re wasting such a pretty skirt on Nonie Harrison.”
“Mmm, that looks delicious.” She picked up a pitted black olive from Margot’s salad and popped it into her mouth. “And the outfit won’t be wasted on Nonie. I wouldn’t get past her front door, let alone be considered for the job of decorating her guest house, if I were to show up for lunch dressed in mommy gear. Even with my hair bushed, lipstick applied, and my blouse free of baby drool, it’ll be a minor miracle if she gives me the commission.”
Margot picked up a knife and sliced the thick sandwich in half. “Why wouldn’t Nonie pick you? It’ll probably take all of ten minutes of listening to your ideas to recognize how good you are. If she doesn’t hire you, it won’t be because you can’t do the job. It’ll be because she’s jealous that you’re beautiful and talented.”
Jordan laughed. “That’s sweet of you. But we’re talking about me. Let’s remember who’s the successful model here.”
Her sister stopped crumbling goat cheese on top of the salad to glare fiercely at her. “You of all people shouldn’t buy into that hooey, Jordan. I’m not any more beautiful than you—or millions of other women. The reason I’m successful as a model has nothing to do with my being especially beautiful and far more to do with the fact that the distance between my earlobe and my jawline is just so and my eyes happen to be spaced exactly thus far apart.” She held out a cheese-coated thumb and index finger to indicate the width before picking up the crumbled mound and scattering it over the dark greens. Salad finished, she took the thick sandwich she’d made for Travis and transferred it onto a plate. “I’m paid ridiculously good money because of a lucky roll of the genetic dice and because my face happens to photograph well. Oh, and also because I haven’t let even a crumb of one of your ‘death by chocolate’ brownies pass my lips no matter how much I’ve craved a bite. Big whoop,” she said with a bored sniff.
Grabbing a bag of potato chips and dumping a small mountain of them next to Travis’s sandwich, she continued. “What I do doesn’t take any talent. I only wish I could be like you—you’ve always been able to make things beautiful. Remember when we were little? How on rainy days you’d go upstairs and rearrange all the rooms in that Victorian dollhouse Mama gave you? Remember the wallpaper and the slipcovers you made for those teeny sofas and chairs?”
“Margot, that was child’s play.”
“What you did for Travis and my bedroom certainly wasn’t. I hated what Nicole had done to that room. But you made it wonderful for us, hanging the photographs Charlie Ayer took of Travis and me with Nocturne, and choosing exactly the right colors and furniture for the room—and for us. Travis loves hanging out there.”
She raised a skeptical brow. “Somehow I think he enjoys your bedroom for an entirely different reason than my decorating taste.”
A happy smile lit Margot’s face. “Well, maybe, but you picked out the linens and the bed, too. That sleigh bed is so great. And what about the amazing job you did on the third floor?”
“I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did,” she said firmly. “It was drab and beyond sad up there before. You transformed all those rooms, turned them into these special havens for you and the kids. That ability is so much a part of you, Jordan, you don’t even realize how good you are. Other people have to pay through the nose for what you do instinctively. They may read about what antiques are all the rage and what kind of floral arrangements are must-haves for their foyers, but they still need a decorator to tell them where to put the darned things or what kind of a vase to use. It’s not just decorating you’re good at, either. Think of how you and Patrick have planned a new flower bed for the garden. It’s already looking beautiful. Or the cookies and breads you bake that have everyone running to the kitchen as soon as they come out of the oven. That’s real talent, Jordan.”
It was sweet of Margot to try and boost her ego before her first sales pitch as a decorator, but Jordan knew she was far from special. “Stop. You’re making me sound like Wonderwoman.”
“You are in my book.”
Right. Did Wonderwoman’s husband leave her for a size 36D, streaked-blond associate with an appetite for adulterous, lunch-hour couplings? She didn’t think so.
Her thoughts must have shown on her face, for Margot’s own expression tightened. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms about her, saying fiercely, “Don’t you dare let what Richard’s done make you sell yourself short.”
Jordan hugged her back. “I’ll try not to.”
“Good.”
The back door opened, and Travis came into the mudroom. He bent down and unlaced his paddock boots, leaving them next to the pair Margot had shed earlier. Ellie Banner had a thing about barn dirt in the house.
Walking over to Margot, he looped an arm about her waist and kissed her.
Jordan quickly averted her eyes, fixing them on the salad Margot had prepared. Spying two more olives buried under the crumbled cheese, she plucked them out. So what if her breath smelled like olives rather than toothpaste by the time she arrived at Nonie’s?
Their kiss finished, Travis grabbed one of the carrot sticks Margot had been slicing and bit off a piece. “Hi, Jordan.”
She swallowed the olives and returned his smile. “Hello, Travis.”
“You ready for the big lunch with Mrs. Harrison?”
“I guess. Margot’s been giving me a pep talk.”
“Not a pep talk. Just the facts. Doesn’t Jordan look beautiful?”
“She always looks beautiful. That’s a fact, too,” he grinned.
Admittedly, it was wonderful to be told you were beautiful by a man as handsome and sexy as Travis Maher, but she knew his words were generated more by kindness than anything else.
“You two are becoming regular walking encyclopedias, just bursting with nifty facts,” she said wryly. “Have you and Miriam banded together to form a PR club dedicated to me?”
“No surprise that Miriam thinks you’re amazing when she sees firsthand how you’re raising the kids. The girl’s sharp,” Travis said.
“I think Andy wants to ask her out,” Margot told them. Andy was one of the stable hands who worked for Rosewood.
“He should go for it. Miriam’s wonderful. Loads of fun. The kids simply adore her. I’m so grateful Ellie suggested she work for us part-time while she gets her degree.” Jordan checked her watch. She still had a few more minutes before she had to leave. Arriving too early would be interpreted as being overeager, which in Nonie Harrison’s world would smack of desperation. “So you’re okay with my borrowing the Rover?”
“Absolutely. We’ve got loads to do this afternoon. And since Jade drove to school, I don’t have to worry about picking her up, I only have to worry that she’ll take a detour and stop at Screaming Susie’s.” Margot had nearly fainted from shock the afternoon Jade came home with kelly green hair, the outrageous color acquired at a punk barbershop located in a strip mall on Route 50. Two weeks later Jade switched to fire-engine red and, as if that weren’t enough, allowed the “butchers”—as Margot called them—to hack her long hair into a ragged mop around her ears.
“She’ll run out of color options soon.” Travis leaned a jeans-clad hip against the counter and took a sip of the coffee he’d poured himself. “She’s gone through practically every color in the rainbow.”
“I wouldn’t put it past Jade to go toxic Day-Glo,” Margot said. “Most girls would kill to have hair like hers.”
“After what she’s been dealing with at school, with the girls still freezing her out and the guys all trailing after her with their tongues hanging to the floor, I’m surprised she’s only waging a chemical attack on her hair,” Jordan said.
Margot shuddered. “Man, I am so glad I’m not seventeen. Of course Jade has it worse than your average obstinate, know-it-all, reckless teen.”
That was sadly true. Jade possessed all the complications and contradictions of a bright, beautiful teen on the cusp of womanhood, plus a couple hundred more.
Their half-sister had been through hell in the last eighteen months, her world shattered when their father, RJ, and her mother, Nicole, died after the plane their father was piloting crashed into the Chesapeake. Merely days afterward, Jade was dealt another blow when the lawyer for the estate informed her that her parents had neglected to provide her with a guardian. Margot had immediately stepped up and offered to assume responsibility for Jade, but their relationship had been far from easy during the first few months. And Jade’s troubles certainly hadn’t ended there.
In jaw-droppingly short order, she’d intentionally gotten herself expelled from her elite boarding school in Massachusetts, forcing Margot to move back home to Rosewood with her. Jade had doubtless believed that being back at home and attending high school in Warburg would make her happier. Things didn’t quite work out that way. At Warburg High, a clique of girls turned against her and began posting on the Internet vicious stories not only about Jade but about her mother, too.
It was horrible enough to be labeled a whore and have pornographic images of oneself Photoshopped on the Web, but to have one’s dead mother called a cheating slut, to know that stories were being widely circulated about her affairs was more than anyone should bear.
Wounded, Jade struck back. Unfortunately, her method of retaliation—stealing the boyfriend of Blair Hood, the ringleader of the clique, and making out with him at a wild house party in plain sight of everybody—only landed her in more hot water when the Warburg police arrived,