Midnight Whispers

The spellbinding Cutler series began with Dawn and continued with Secrets of the Morning and Twilight's Child. Now in Midnight Whispers we return to Cutler's Cove...to a young girl growing up happy and innocent, only dimly aware of the shameful secrets that threaten her bright future....Christie Longchamp knows she is the luckiest girl in the world. She has a fine house and pretty clothes; her mother, Dawn, is as sweet and talented as she is beautiful; and Daddy Jimmy loves her more dearly than her real father ever could. Yet Christie can't help feeling as if a dark cloud hovers over her...a cloud whose origins lie in her family's troubled history, and the many questions no one, not even Dawn, will answer. But one person can always make the sun shine again: Jimmy's younger brother, Gavin, who is set to spend the whole summer working at Cutler's Cove. Then a fire sweeps through the grand old hotel, claiming the lives of Jimmy and Dawn, leaving sixteen-year-old Christie and her little brother orphans. Still reeling with grief, she discovers that her Uncle Philip loved her mother with an unbrotherly passion...and to her horror, she is now the object of his ever more urgent desire. Fleeing to New York City with her brother, she finds her real father...a pathetic has-been who cannot help her. Desperate and heartbroken, she turns to Gavin, who rushes to her side. Together, they travel to The Meadows, the plantation where Christie was born...and for a few brief days they share a magical world of laughter and romance. In Gavin's arms, in the first, tender moments of true love, Christie finds a refuge from her painful memories. But The Meadows is blighted by its own dark secrets - and all too soon Christie is torn from Gavin's embrace. Now as black storms of evil gather around her, Christie must struggle to break the cruel bonds of the past...to defy the curse that has haunted Cutler's Cove for generations....