'I'm afraid of thunder.' 'It - it isn't thundering,' Jeff stammered. 'Hold me, Jeffie,' his stepmother whispered. Moments later he felt a soft, naked body next to his. One night when Jeff was alone in the house with his stepmother, he was awakened by the sound of his bedroom door opening.

Jeff's father had been hired as a siding salesman and was on the road three days a week. But the box was filled with a deep resentment, feeling betrayed by his father's callousness. 'It isn't natural for a man to live by himself,' his father had explained. Two months later Jeff's father married a nineteen-year-old cocktail waitress. When Jeff was fourteen, his mother died in an automobile accident.

Uncle Willie had started out as a magician at a carnival and had taken it over when it went broke. He always managed to bring the boy exciting gifts, and he taught Jeff wonderful magic tricks. He was the most cheerful man Jeff had ever known, filled with optimism and promises of a rosy tomorrow. His father's brother, Uncle Willie, owned a small traveling carnival, and whenever he was near Marion, Ohio, where the Stevenses lived, he came to visit them. It was a bitter marriage, and the young boy had resolved, I'm never going to get married. Jeff's earliest memories were of his mother and father quarreling about money and his father's extramarital affairs. Jeff's father was a charmer, darkly handsome and persuasively glib, and in the first five years of marriage he had managed to run through his wife's inheritance. Jeff's mother was the trusting heiress to a farm-equipment fortune, married to an improvident schemer filled with get-rich-quick projects that never quite worked out. It was Uncle Willie who had educated Jeff. Uncle Willie would have loved her, Jeff thought. Jeff prided himself on being the best confidence artist in the business, and she had outsmarted him. My God, Jeff thought, what would she be like if she were a professional? Tracy Whitney was without doubt the most beautiful woman Jeff Stevens had ever seen.

Conrad Morgan had told them the woman was an amateur. The manner in which Tracy Whitney had outwitted them at the airport was the most ingenius con he had ever witnessed. 'It's nothing to laugh about, either.' To Jeff, it was. 'What the hell's the matter with you?' Higgins demanded. It's nothing to cry about.' Jeff Stevens turned to him with tears streaming down his face, and Higgins, to his astonishment, saw that Jeff was convulsed with laughter. Brandon Higgins - seated next to him, looked at him in surprise.

He raised his handkerchief to his eyes, and his shoulders heaved up and down. Thomas Bowers - n�� Jeff Stevens - sat at the plane window looking out as the aircraft took off.

Jeff stevens if tomorrow comes