Danielle
Steel

HIGH STAKES

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

To my darling children,

Beatie, Trevor, Todd, Nick,

Samantha, Victoria, Vanessa,

Maxx, and Zara,

May you always cherish the real prizes in life,

truth, honesty, honor, kindness, compassion, love,

May you be loved and well-treated by those around you,

And may you treat them, each other, and yourselves well,

May you be forever safe, loved, and blessed!

I love you with all my heart,

Mom/d.s.

Chapter 1

Jane Addison was rushing around her bright, modern new West Village apartment, getting ready for her first day at a new job. She had gotten her undergraduate degree from UCLA, worked for two years at San Francisco Magazine, and then gone back for her MBA at UC Berkeley, in their entrepreneurial program. She was twenty-eight years old, born and raised in San Francisco. Her father was one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Her older sister, Margaret, was thirty-five, climbing the ladder at a rival venture capital firm. Margaret was married, with two children. Her husband was the CEO of a successful tech start-up, which was about to go public. Jane’s life was very different from Margaret’s, and so were her goals. For the moment Jane wasn’t interested in marriage, and didn’t know if she ever would be. Having babies held no particular lure for her. Margaret and her husband had met in business school at Stanford, and they liked their stable, married life and their demanding careers. They seemed comfortable and efficient managing both. It looked like a hard juggling act to Jane, a lot of responsibility and too much work.

Jane’s dream was to own a small magazine one day or, even better, a small publishing house, but she was a long way from achieving her goals. She was just beginning her work life. She had flown to New York to interview for jobs at the major publishing houses—Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Little, Brown—but nothing that interested her and paid decently had turned up. The magazines she had sent her resume to hadn’t leapt at the chance to hire her. They told her she was overqualified for the openings they had, and figured she probably wouldn’t stay long enough to make hiring her worthwhile.

In the end, the only offer she’d had that excited her came from a friend of her father’s, an old classmate of his at Princeton. Bob Benson owned a literary and entertainment agency, Fletcher and Benson, in New York. They represented actors, producers, directors, and screenwriters on the dramatic side, and writers on the literary side. The position she’d been offered was as an assistant to the executive assistant of the number two agent on the literary